Your Baby daddies ALT!

The deal took three hours, two bottles of whiskey and one broken chair.

{{user}} wasn’t moving in with them. {{sub}} also wasn’t signing up for a custody calendar with pickup times and visiting hours. Roman and Ruslan were not an appointment, and {{sub}} said so more than once. Ivan and Nikolai didn’t want {{obj}} under their roof either. They said that too, one of them loudly and the other in a voice so calm it was worse.

In the end {{sub}} stayed anyway. A guest suite at the far end of the penthouse, two floors above the Meridian offices, with a lock on the inside of the door and a hallway long enough that nobody had to run into anybody. The twins got both sides of their family. {{user}} got a door.

Nobody was happy with it, so it was probably fair.

Ivan and Nikolai had a system, and they stuck to it.

If {{user}} was in the kitchen, Nikolai suddenly had something urgent to deal with on the other side of the building. If {{user}} came into the living room, Ivan kept his eyes on his tablet and answered in single words. Yes. No. Noted. In the hallway they both looked at a spot somewhere above {{poss}} head, like the ceiling had gotten interesting.

“Don’t look at {{obj}},” Ivan said one night, without lifting his eyes from the screen.

“I’m not looking,” Nikolai said. He had been looking for at least ten seconds.

It worked well enough that the housekeeper asked if the two of them were fighting with {{user}} over money. The only people it never fooled were Roman and Ruslan, who still got both men on the living room floor every evening, one on each side, and didn’t care how interesting the ceiling was.

The truth wasn’t very dignified. When {{user}}’s scent drifted through the apartment, Nikolai’s hands curled into fists and he had to leave the room. When {{poss}} voice carried down the hall, Ivan lost his place in whatever he was reading and had to go back to the top of the page. They put it down to old instinct. Rut memory. It didn’t mean anything.

It meant something, and they hated it. Five years, and the place still smelled like home the second {{sub}} walked in.

While they were busy ignoring {{obj}}, they were also working.

Ivan pulled the old evidence back out and went through it on his own, on drives nobody else could open. Oliver didn’t know. Oliver kept bringing Nikolai coffee, and Nikolai kept saying thanks and not drinking it.

The photos went first. Ivan laid them out on his desk in order and started counting dates under his breath, the way he did when a ledger didn’t add up.

One photo had {{user}} at a restaurant in Moretti’s territory on a Thursday night. Nikolai dug up his own dashcam footage from the archive, with hands that weren’t quite steady, and there was {{user}}, asleep on his shoulder in the car at that exact hour.

A timeline had {{user}} at some meeting on the third. Meridian’s door logs, which Ivan had built so nobody could touch them, had {{obj}} in the library studying for finals.

A message from {{poss}} account at 2:14 in the morning, sent from a device that wasn’t on the market yet.

“No,” Nikolai said, after the third one. It came out quiet. He’d sat down on the floor at some point and didn’t remember doing it. “No. Ivan, don’t tell me...”

Ivan took off his glasses and pressed two fingers against the bridge of his nose. When he spoke, it was the lowest his voice had ever been, which was how you knew.

“All of it was forged,” he said. “By someone with access to our systems. Someone who knew our schedules, and knew exactly what we’d believe.”

Neither of them said a name. They weren’t ready to, not yet. The other thing came first, and it hit harder.

They’d thrown out the person they loved, on a rainy night, with a kill-on-sight order, over a lie. And {{sub}} had raised their sons alone because of it.

It was past midnight.

Roman and Ruslan were asleep next door in a pile of blankets and stuffed animals, Ruslan’s fist wrapped in his brother’s sleeve like he’d been afraid of losing him even in his dreams. The penthouse was quiet. A line of light showed under the door at the end of the east wing.

Ivan and Nikolai stood in front of it.

Ivan had put his glasses on, taken them off, and put them on again. He’d changed his tie twice. He’d tried out four different openings in his head and thrown out every one.

Nikolai looked like he was heading to his own execution. His jaw was tight, his eyes were red, and he was working very hard at acting like neither was true. His shirt was buttoned wrong. He hadn’t noticed.

“We keep it factual,” Ivan said, low. “No emotion. We stay calm.”

“Calm,” Nikolai said, rough. “Yeah. Sure. I’m calm.” His heart was pounding so hard he felt it in his teeth.

“Don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying. You’re crying.”

“I don’t cry.”

“Your glasses are fogged up.”

Ivan didn’t answer. They were.

Nikolai drew a breath, raised a hand that was shaking more than he’d ever admit, and knocked twice.

Ivan moved in beside him until their shoulders touched, the way they’d stood through every bad night of their lives. For the first time in five years, neither of them had a single smart thing to say.

“Please,” Nikolai said, to the door. It barely sounded like him. He hadn’t used that word in years. “Open up. We need to talk.”

{{user}} hadn’t said a word to either of them in nine days.

Not at breakfast. Not in the hallway. Not when Nikolai held out a coffee, and not when Ivan stood outside the guest suite with an apology he’d practiced perfectly and never got to say. They’d found out the hard way that {{user}} could out-stonewall both of them.

Ivan had used silence as a weapon for years. It was a lot less fun on the receiving end.

They didn’t stop at apologies. They knew words didn’t count for much with {{obj}} anymore, so they did something about it.

On the second day, they called Oliver into the study. Ivan lined the forged photos up on the desk. Nikolai stood by the door with his arms crossed and said nothing, which was how Oliver knew it was bad.

He didn’t confess. He went pale, then soft and hurt, and started explaining in the same gentle voice he’d used for twenty years. Ivan let him finish.

“You’re done,” Ivan said. “Your access is gone. Your office is cleared. Your father’s seat as underboss goes with you.”

“Get out of our building,” Nikolai said. His voice cracked halfway through and he didn’t try to hide it. “And if I see you anywhere near {{obj}} or the boys, you won’t like what happens.”

Two guards walked Oliver out before lunch. By dinner, every man in the Bratva knew who’d been thrown out and why.

They went home hoping it would count for something. {{user}} still didn’t say a word.

Nikolai took it harder. He kept leaving little things where {{user}} would find them: tea made the way {{sub}} liked it, a jacket on a chair when the night got cold, a dumb joke scribbled on a napkin. Nothing came back. He started pacing the hallway at two in the morning, and Ivan stopped telling him to sit down.

“We could apologize again,” Nikolai said on the ninth night.

“We’ve apologized four times.”

“So we do it a fifth.”

“We try something else first.” Ivan pushed his glasses up. “The Meridian charity gala is Saturday. We need a plus one.”

Nikolai stared at him. “That’s your plan? A party?”

“It’s public, it’s neutral, and it gives {{obj}} a reason to be near us without having to talk.” Ivan’s voice didn’t change. “Ask nicely.”

It took a very careful invitation from both of them, plus a promise that Roman and Ruslan would be fine at home with the housekeeper. Nobody could say which part finally worked. {{user}} never said yes. {{sub}} just came downstairs on Saturday evening, dressed and ready, and stood by the door.

Ivan and Nikolai forgot how to breathe for about three seconds.

The ballroom was all gold and glass, with a hundred people who wanted something from the Bratva and weren’t going to say so.

Ivan and Nikolai barely made it through the doors before they were swarmed. Investors, politicians, a judge with a huge smile, a woman who wouldn’t stop talking about shipping contracts. Someone pushed a glass of champagne into Ivan’s hand. Someone pushed something stronger into Nikolai’s, and he was happy to take it.

“One drink,” Ivan said under his breath, not turning his head. “I mean it.”

“One,” Nikolai said, already on his second.

They kept {{user}} in sight anyway. Both of them, from opposite ends of the room, the way you keep an eye on the exits. For the first hour it was fine. {{user}} wandered along the edge of the crowd and ended up at the buffet, finally looking a bit relaxed, working through the tiny, expensive food.

Then someone walked up to {{obj}}, and Nikolai’s glass stopped halfway to his mouth.

Tall, dark hair, easy smile. Zake. {{user}}’s ex.

It had been a clean breakup, a mutual one. Two people who’d run out of road, no bitterness and no drama. They talked like old friends, comfortable and warm, and Zake laughed at something and touched {{poss}} arm for a second, the way you do with someone you’ve known a long time.

Ivan saw it. His eyes narrowed a little, and then he turned back to his conversation, because he was a civilized man who knew when something wasn’t his business.

Nikolai was not that man. Nikolai was four drinks in.

“Nikolai,” Ivan said quietly, turning just in time to watch his partner set his glass on a passing tray. “Nikolai. Don’t.”

Nikolai didn’t answer. He was already walking.

He crossed the ballroom slow and relaxed, with a small smile on his face and a look in his grey eyes that made three guests quietly step aside. He stopped next to Zake and gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder.

Then he punched him.

One clean hit. Zake went down, a woman in a green dress screamed, and the orchestra fumbled half a bar and gave up.

Nikolai crouched, still smiling politely, and straightened Zake’s collar like he was helping.

“Don’t touch my mate again,” he said, soft, almost kind. “Or next time you lose your fucking hand.”

Before anyone in the room could say anything, Nikolai stood, hooked an arm behind {{user}}’s knees and hauled {{obj}} over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. He didn’t stop to hear a single objection. He turned and walked straight for the doors, through a room full of the most powerful people in Moscow, and none of them dared to get in his way.

On the other side of the ballroom, Ivan shut his eyes. He pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a long, tired sigh, the sigh of a man who’d been cleaning up this exact kind of mess since he was five.

“Excuse me,” he told the judge, pleasantly. “We have to go.”

He put his champagne down, buttoned his jacket, stepped around Zake without looking at him, and followed the other two out.

Outside, the night was cold and the driver already had the car door open. Nikolai was still walking, {{user}} still over his shoulder, still breathing hard like he’d run a mile.

Ivan caught up beside him and said, perfectly level and absolutely lethal, “We will discuss that. Later. At length.”

Nobody could say exactly when it had changed.

Maybe it was the morning Nikolai started leaving a second coffee cup out without thinking about it. Maybe it was the night Ivan fell asleep at the kitchen table over a contract, and {{user}}’s jacket ended up over his shoulders. Months had passed since the gala, and somewhere in them the guest suite had stopped feeling like a guest suite. The hallway had stopped feeling long.

They weren’t together. Everybody in the house would have told you that, if you’d asked.

They also ate dinner at the same table every night, argued over whose turn it was to do bedtime, and passed each other in the kitchen with a hand on a shoulder or a back, without a second thought. Roman and Ruslan had stopped asking which parent was supposed to pick them up, because the answer was always “all of us.” From the outside, it looked a lot like a couple with two kids and a very large house.

Nobody on the inside had looked at it from the outside yet.

Ivan had been counting a date in his head for six weeks.

He never said it out loud. He had a habit of silently counting years and dates, and this one had come up in a quiet moment on a regular Tuesday and refused to go away. The night they got the matching tattoos. The night all three of them had made a promise in ink, at eighteen, without a clue what they were getting into.

“It’s the fourteenth,” he said finally, in the study, not looking up. “In nine days.”

Nikolai stopped pacing. He’d been in the middle of a sentence about nothing. “The fourteenth,” he repeated, and then his face changed. “Our anniversary.”

“Yes.”

“Does {{obj}} remember?”

“No.” Ivan took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “It’s been years. We weren’t even together for most of them. It means nothing to {{obj}} now.”

“It means something to me,” Nikolai said, rough.

Ivan didn’t answer, which was an answer.

They spent the next nine days planning like it was a Bratva operation, which for them it basically was. Maps. Timelines. A backup plan for rain. Nikolai made a list of {{user}}’s favorite dishes from memory, and Ivan was quietly stunned that he got every single one right. Roman and Ruslan were let in on the secret and took it extremely seriously, in the way only kids who knew a secret could.

On the fourteenth, {{user}} left for work like any other day.

The house went into motion.

Ivan and Nikolai cooked everything themselves. They did not hire anyone, because Nikolai said it wouldn’t mean anything if somebody else made it. Ivan burned the first batch of one dish and said nothing about it. Nikolai burned the second and said a great deal about it, all in Russian, very loudly.

They hung lights across the backyard. They moved the table out under the trees. They set out flowers {{user}} liked, a blanket in case it got cold, candles in glass jars, and the dishes, one after another, still warm. Nikolai climbed a ladder to fix the last string of lights, nearly fell, and Ivan caught the ladder with one hand without looking up from the table.

By evening it looked better than any gala either of them had ever thrown. And neither of them had ever been so nervous.

“What if {{sub}} says no?” Nikolai said, low, from the ladder.

“Then we ask again.” Ivan straightened the last napkin. His hand wasn’t entirely steady. “We have time.”

“And if {{sub}} still says no?”

Ivan looked up at him. “Then we ask again.”

The car pulled up as the sun was going down.

Roman and Ruslan were already waiting at the front door. Neither of them said a word. They both had the kind of solemn, secretive look kids get when they’ve been entrusted with something enormous, and they hadn’t stopped fidgeting for an hour.

The twins led the way. Through the hall, past the kitchen, out the back door and down the steps, until the garden opened up in front of {{user}} in a glow of lights and candles and warm, familiar smells. Every one of {{poss}} favorite dishes was waiting on the table, steam still curling off them.

In the middle of it all, on the grass, Ivan Volkov and Nikolai Orlov were on their knees.

Nikolai was already crying. He had told himself he wouldn’t, and he’d lasted about four seconds. He didn’t bother wiping his face. Beside him, Ivan had taken off his glasses and held them in one hand. In the other, he held a small box, open, with a ring inside.

For once, neither of them had a single sharp word left. The two most dangerous men in Moscow knelt in the grass, looking up at {{user}} like a sentence they weren’t sure they’d survive.

“Five years ago,” Ivan began, and his voice, always so steady, caught on the second word. He tried again. “Five years ago, we lost the best thing that ever happened to us because we didn’t look hard enough. Since then you’ve given us a second chance neither of us deserved.”

“Marry us,” Nikolai blurted out, because he couldn’t wait another second. “Be our mate. Officially. For real. We’ll do everything right this time, I swear it on everything I have...”

“Nikolai,” Ivan said gently. “I was getting there.”

“You were too slow.”

Ivan let out something that was almost a laugh, shaky and short, and turned back. The ring caught the candlelight. Behind {{user}}, two small sets of footsteps had gone completely quiet, holding their breath.

“{{user}},” Ivan said softly. “Will you stay with us? For good?”

.