“Rat bastard,” she whispered before tucking her head beneath my chin.
“He was. The biggest,” I confirmed as I carried her with one arm and reached out my other to Jude. “Elena’s going to love you for teaching her that,” I said to Jude jokingly.
“Oh God,” Jude said in all seriousness. I pulled his hand to my mouth for a kiss to show him I’d been kidding. He let out a sigh of relief.
I would need to remember that Jude didn’t understand how families worked.
But if I had anything to say about it, he would soon enough.
Epilogue
Nikolai
One Year Later
I never lost focus.
Never.
That wasn’t to say there hadn’t been a couple of close calls, though, and they all involved one person.
Jude.
The guys at the office had done everything in their power to prove I wasn’t immune to distraction and once they’d learned about my relationship with Jude, he’d become their primary weapon. Fortunately, my man was too smart to take the bait and he hadn’t played into their hands. But Jude had become so paranoid about inadvertently distracting me that whenever he came to meet me at the office, he snuck up to visit with Dannie until he knew I was done with whatever training session I was running.
It never mattered, though, because I was always aware of Jude’s presence. I couldn’t explain it. It was like something inside of me loosened just a little bit when he was around. I didn’t even need to see him to know he was there. Our connection was just that strong.
And thank God it was, because the last year hadn’t been easy.
Not that there’d been anything wrong between Jude and me. No, it had been stressors outside of our control that had made our first year together a roller coaster of emotion. Maks’s illness and treatment had taken a toll on every single member of our family. Dr. Riggs had told us it would be a rocky road for a while and she hadn’t been lying.
There was nothing more difficult than watching someone you loved suffer through something you couldn’t fix. While our family had banded together to care for Maks, the fear that everything we were doing still wouldn’t be enough had always been in the back of our minds and the emotion that had gone along with it had needed an outlet.
Jude had been forced to handle the brunt of the sheer helplessness I’d felt, especially after long days of watching my nephew suffer through treatments that left him weak and sick. As my family’s protector, I’d become an expert at holding on to all that shit, but I hadn’t been able to hide the effect it had been having on me from Jude.
Because just as I knew Jude better than he knew himself, the same was true for him. He knew me like no one else did. And he took whatever shit I threw at him. Rage, terror, despair… it didn’t matter. Jude was there for it all. My family always called me the glue that kept them together, but the reality was that it was Jude who’d made it possible for us to get through the past year.
Jude had used every connection he’d had to get Maks the best care possible. Since Dr. Riggs was based in Pittsburgh, it had meant a lot of traveling back and forth between the cities. Rather than put that kind of strain on not only Maks but the rest of my family, Jude had rented an apartment near the hospital where most of Maks’s treatments had taken place. I’d initially fought Jude on the idea of him spending his own money to pay for things my family and I had no way of being able to afford, but Jude had managed to shut me up with one question.
Am I a part of this family, Nikolai?
After that, I’d stopped trying to do it all and had let Jude carry some of the burden. It wasn’t just his money that had gotten us through. He’d taken it upon himself to help with everything from covering for Elena at the bakery if she was sitting with a sickly Maks to helping my exhausted father go through the bakery’s books to keep them caught up. When my family’s needs had become even greater, Jude had taken a leave of absence from TDS and had focused solely on caring for the rest of us. And when Dr. Riggs had declared Maks cured, Jude had made arrangements for the entire family to go on a Disney cruise just as soon as it had been safe for Maks to travel.
While our first year together had been anything but normal, we’d made it work. Through all the ups and downs, we’d never gone to bed angry, even when Jude and I had been in different cities. Jude never held my outbursts against me, and I never got frustrated with the few setbacks Jude had experienced when it came to his own mental health.