Page 89 of Forced By the Obsessed Bratva

The door banged open, and the night swallowed him whole.

For a breath, none of us moved.

I’d sensed it before, and now, the feeling was a lot stronger. Whatever it was that held us bound together had snapped.

And I doubted that it would ever be repaired.

Chapter 26 – Matvey

I walked into the dungeon and stood outside the damn cell way longer than I should have.

I’d never really noticed how thick the air was down here before until now. It was cold, stale, and smelled like dried blood and something rotten.

As disturbing as it was, it didn’t have my attention.

Rurik did.

He didn’t look up, even though he knew I was close by. Just sat there on a bench inside the cell, shoulders hunched, hands tangled in his hair as if they could somehow hide the guilt gnawing at his bones.

And for a second, the man I saw wasn’t the one who’d committed a grave crime.

It was my brother.

The kid who used to steal apples with me from the market and run like hell down the streets, laughing like we were unstoppable. When the world hadn’t scarred us yet.

I saw the boy who stood by me and took a blade for me when we were fifteen and swore he’d die before breaking his word.

But that boy had been dead a long time, hadn’t he?

The man who sat here was not the Rurik I knew. My brother wouldn’t kill his wife to protect his greed and selfish interests.

And yet, that was what he was guilty of.

Maybe that was what broke me the most. Not the betrayal, but rather the loss of who we used to be.

Of whoheused to be.

I wanted to hate him clean, mostly because I knew what this revelation did to my wife. I knew how much this truth would hurt her.

And hurting her…mademeuncomfortable.

If I didn’t restrain myself, I would walk in, put a bullet between his eyes, and walk out without flinching. That would’ve been easier. That would’ve been mercy, in a way. But I didn’t feel clean. I felt carved open.

Somehow, as crazy as it was, it felt like a part of me was rotting right there in that cell with him.

Rurik finally looked up. Jaw clenched and eyes bloodshot, but not from crying. Rurik didn’t cry. Neither did I. Not when we buried our first body.

Not when our father died.

Not even when we knew that countless times it was us against the world.

But something in me—those crazy sturdy walls we’d spent years building—cracked seeing him like that.

And all I could think was loyalty wasn’t loyalty if it only lasted in times of comfort.

Loyalty was what you bled for. What you killed for. And the fool broke it.

I heard a quiet shuffle of sandaled feet at the entrance and picked up her scent before I looked over my shoulder.