Page 24 of Forced Virgin Bride of the Bratva (Sharov Bratva #13)

I wake wrapped in too much warmth, too much cotton.

The sheets smell like his skin. His cologne.

His sweat. My own. The room still holds the heat of what we did, like it hasn’t finished settling, like it’s waiting for a repeat.

My body aches in places I forgot could ache.

My thighs, my ribs, the soft underside of my breasts where his stubble scraped as he kissed his way down.

I press my face into the pillow and groan, low and muffled, trying to bury myself in it.

I shouldn’t feel like this.

I shouldn’t want to.

The cotton smells like him, and it makes my chest tighten.

My skin still hums with the memory of his hands, his mouth, the filthy things he whispered between gasps like prayers.

It wasn’t supposed to be like that. It was supposed to be a release, a game, a way to keep him close while I unraveled everything behind his back.

Last night felt like more. Too much. Too good.

Too intimate.

I shift onto my side, wincing at the sore pull in my hips. My legs slide together and I swear I can still feel him. Inside me. Around me. The way he looked at me after. Like I belonged there. Like I chose it. Like he believed it.

The worst part is—some part of me did.

My fingers clench in the sheets, knuckles tight against the fabric. I hate that he’s getting to me. Hate the way he’s wormed into the cracks of my resolve, not by force, but with care. With patience. With low murmurs and soft touches that feel like they shouldn’t come from a man like him.

He’s supposed to be a monster in this story. My father’s killer. The Bratva’s hammer. The one man I’m meant to destroy, not fall into. Not crave. And definitely not lie in bed thinking about while my body aches in all the places he touched.

I turn again, dragging the blanket higher, curling into myself like I can hide from it. From him. From me.

Guilt knots in my chest, sticky and choking. Desire wraps around it like barbed wire. I feel like I’ve failed already, and I haven’t even struck yet.

I should get up. Should shower. Should put distance between us before he sees what I’ve let slip through the cracks.

My pulse still stutters when I remember how he touched me like I was something to be worshipped. How he said my name like it meant something. How, for one goddamn night, I didn’t feel like a weapon.

I don’t know what to do with that.

***

The road winds higher than I expect, curling through hills that shimmer under the late afternoon sun.

I don’t ask where we’re going—don’t want to give him the satisfaction of thinking I’m curious—but when the iron gate gives way to a long gravel drive flanked by rows of green-gold vines, I can’t help the way my brow lifts in quiet surprise.

“A vineyard?” I say as he pulls the car to a smooth stop beneath a rust-streaked pergola.

Maxim doesn’t look at me as he shuts off the engine. “I own it.”

I glance at him, searching for irony, but his face is flat. “You don’t strike me as the wine-and-cheese type.”

“I’m not,” he says. “Not anymore.”

It should be a joke. It isn’t.

We step out into a strange kind of quiet. Birds rustle in the olive trees. Bees hum lazily over the vines. The breeze is soft, touched with the warmth of old soil and ripening fruit. The whole place smells sweet, sun-drunk, untouched by anything sharp or brutal. It doesn’t match him.

We walk without speaking. No guards. No rush.

Just the crunch of gravel underfoot and the occasional creak of a fence leaning too far into its old age.

For the first time in weeks, I don’t feel the pull of eyes on my back.

No watching staff. No cold mansion walls.

Just me and him, alone in a place that feels suspended from everything we know.

He stays quiet for a long time. I do too.

Then, as we pass under a rusted archway where the vines have begun to grow wild again, I ask, “Why keep a place like this if you never come?”

He pauses mid-step. Turns his head slightly, like the question reached someplace too far back to ignore.

“I used to,” he says.

The breeze stirs the hem of his shirt. His eyes track the slope of the hill like it still means something to him.

“Before everything changed,” he adds.

I don’t push.

We keep walking, the air thick with birdsong and silence, until the neat rows of vines stretch out endlessly around us. It’s easy to forget who we are here. Easier to pretend we’re not each other’s undoing.

He stops near a low wooden bench, arms folded, mouth tight. I stop beside him.

“Where did you go?” I ask. Quiet. Careful.

He doesn’t answer right away. Then: “South.”

I wait.

“I was supposed to die. Your father made sure of that.”

My chest pulls tight, but I keep still.

“They shot me and dumped me overboard, but someone found me. I don’t know who. I barely remember the first weeks. There was a hole in my memory for months—maybe years. I didn’t know my name. Didn’t know anything.”

He doesn’t look at me as he says it. His eyes stay on the distant trees, like he’s still stuck back there in the ruin.

“What brought it back?” I ask.

His jaw works. “I saw a man beaten half to death in an alley. I heard him beg in Russian. Something about that—it snapped something loose. I dragged him to his feet, called him ‘brat,’ and realized I hadn’t said that word in years.”

He exhales hard through his nose.

“After that, it came back in pieces. Not all of it, but enough to find my way back.”

I don’t speak. Don’t move.

He finally glances at me, his face shadowed beneath the tilt of the sun. “You want to ask what happened next.”

My pulse jumps. “Did you go after him?”

He looks away. “No.”

Not right away. There’s a lie in that pause.

Then he shakes his head, like he’s brushing the weight off his shoulders. “I rebuilt. Quietly. Patiently. Until I wasn’t just a man coming back from the dead. I was someone who could end things permanently.”

My throat tightens. My fingers curl into my palm.

I want to ask the rest. Did you kill him? Did you put a bullet in my father’s skull and walk away without a backward glance?

Before I can speak, he turns and motions down another row of vines.

“Come on,” he says. “There’s a cellar I want to show you.”

Just like that, the subject is gone. Locked behind his eyes again. Buried with the ghosts.

I follow, but the question doesn’t leave me. It settles deep in my bones, aching.

He never denied it. He didn’t say my father’s name, but the truth hums under every step we take, waiting.

I want to scream at him.

I want to dig my fingers into his shoulders and shake the truth out of him, demand that he remember the way the blood soaked into the grout, the sound of it being scrubbed while I stood in the corner, too small to stop it and too smart to look away.

I want him to picture it like I do—like it’s still burned behind my eyelids.

The rough hands. The muttered orders. My father’s voice, calm and cool, telling me it was nothing, that sometimes people disappear when they make too many promises.

I keep my mouth shut, let the scream tear through the inside of my chest instead.

I press my nails into my palm until the sting gives me something to hold on to, something that isn’t the raw, rising fury.

I force my face to stay blank, my steps to stay even as we walk down the slope toward the car.

I feel the weight of his presence beside me, but I don’t look. I can’t.

He doesn’t know.

He doesn’t know I wasn’t tucked away in a safehouse while the Bratva and the Vargas families carved each other up.

He doesn’t know that my father—my father—brought me into those rooms, that I sat at his knee while he plotted wars and wiped blood from his cuffs like it was lint.

That I believed in him. That I thought his world was the only one that mattered.

Maxim thinks I’m some collateral asset, an innocent. A tool planted in his home like a puzzle piece someone else cut out. He doesn’t know I was his daughter in every way that counted—loyal, complicit, trusted. He doesn’t know what I lost when Maxim’s revenge swept the board.

Something in me must shift—something too quick or too sharp—because Maxim slows.

Then he stops.

I feel his gaze on me before I look. Heavy. Invasive. Like he’s peeling back layers with just his eyes.

“What?” I ask, trying to keep my voice level.

He doesn’t answer right away. Just studies me, like he’s reading under my skin, trying to translate whatever flashed across my face a moment ago.

“You looked…,” he says, then trails off.

“I looked what?”

He shakes his head once. “Never mind.”

I see it, the way his brow furrows. The way his mouth presses flat like he doesn’t believe himself.

He doesn’t press. He turns and keeps walking.

I follow.

The drive back is quiet. Unbearably so. The sun sinks low, spilling gold and orange across the dash, but it doesn’t warm the car.

Not with this air between us—thick and crackling.

I stare out the passenger window, watching the road peel away beneath us, but my mind is spinning in a hundred different directions.

He keeps glancing over at me. Small flicks of his gaze, too quick to be casual. I feel every single one of them. I don’t return them.

My jaw aches from clenching. My teeth grind behind closed lips as memories crowd in again—memories I thought I’d buried deep enough not to bleed.

They’re clawing their way back now. The smell of bleach.

The click of my father’s ring against his tumbler.

The exact shade of red it turned when it dried on the floor.

Above it all, his voice: “Some men need to be reminders.”

I don’t know if Maxim even remembers my father, murdered years ago. I don’t know if he feels any guilt, but I doubt it.

He killed my father in cold blood, and I never even got to say goodbye.

Now I sleep in his bed. I let him put his mouth on me, his hands. I let him inside me like I don’t remember every second of that night, like I’m not still chasing the ghost of my father’s voice.

I think I might be losing control.

When I planned this, it was clinical. Cold.

I’d keep Maxim close, get what I needed, and make him pay the way my father should have.

I didn’t plan for the way he looks at me sometimes.

Or the way he touches me like he knows something in me aches to be undone.

I didn’t plan for how much it would ruin me when he says my name like it tastes better on his tongue than revenge ever could.

Now I’m unraveling. One thread at a time.

I shift in my seat, arms crossed tight, nails biting into my skin again.

Maxim exhales through his nose. I can feel the way he wants to say something—how he keeps starting to breathe like words are coming—but then stopping.

By the time we reach the estate, the sky has turned violet and low, and the gates pull open like they’ve been waiting for us. I stare straight ahead as we roll up the drive, pretending I’m not made of brittle glass.

He parks, but neither of us moves. We sit in that silence, shoulder to shoulder, hearts still caged.