Page 28 of Forced Virgin Bride of the Bratva (Sharov Bratva #13)

The car ride back to the Ortega estate is a blur of streetlights and pounding blood.

My whole body aches—deep bruises blooming beneath my skin, raw cuts along my arms and ribs—but it isn’t the pain I can’t stop thinking about.

It’s the failure. That hollow, jagged kind of shame that chews at your chest and leaves nothing soft behind.

I’d had my shot. My moment, and I didn’t take it.

Maxim’s face haunts me even now—bloody, furious, that glint in his eye that said he saw through everything. Not just the betrayal, but me. Every twisted emotion I’ve tried to smother beneath rage and revenge.

Worse—he let me go.

He could’ve killed me. Should’ve, probably, but he didn’t. He let me run.

Somehow, that makes this hurt more.

When I stumble through the estate doors, my legs barely hold. The night air clings to my skin like sweat, and the moment the lock clicks behind me, I sag against the wall, exhaling slow. The adrenaline’s gone. All that’s left now is trembling.

Tiago’s waiting for me in the hallway, already pacing, a storm building beneath his skin. When he sees me, he stops cold. His eyes sweep over the blood on my shirt, the bruises on my jaw, the split in my lip. The anger hits fast—sharp and immediate.

“What happened?” His voice cuts like a blade. No concern, no softness. Just fury held on a leash.

I lift my head slowly, jaw aching as I force the words out. “He knows.”

Tiago steps closer, close enough that I feel the heat rolling off him. “What do you mean, he knows?”

“I mean he caught me. In the study.” I breathe in through my nose, slow and steady, trying to keep the tremor out of my voice. “He found the burner. The files. I tried to fight—”

“You fought him?” His eyes go wide. “Are you insane?”

“I didn’t have a choice,” I snap. “He was going to kill me!”

He turns away with a curse and slams his fist into the wall hard enough that plaster cracks. The sound makes me flinch despite myself.

“Goddamn it, Kiera!” he roars. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

I stare at him, throat tightening. “I did what you asked. What we planned. It just didn’t go the way we thought.”

“You were supposed to dismantle him,” he hisses, voice low and venomous now. “Slow. Quiet. That was the deal. That was the entire fucking point.”

“I tried.” My voice breaks. I hate that it does. “I got close, too close, but Maxim isn’t like the others. He doesn’t break the way you think he will.”

“Everyone breaks.” Tiago’s eyes are wild. “Everyone has a weak point.”

“Maybe,” I whisper. “But he saw mine first.”

Tiago goes quiet for a beat, then shakes his head like he can’t stand the sight of me. “So now it’s war.”

The words fall heavy in the room, final and cruel. He paces again, dragging both hands through his hair.

“There’s no walking this back,” he mutters. “He’ll retaliate. We won’t get another window.”

I lean back against the door, trying to catch my breath. “Then we hit first.”

He stops moving. Looks at me like he’s seeing something different for the first time.

“You think you can still be useful?”

I lift my chin. “I know everything about him now. His habits. His fears. The layout of the estate, his alliances, the files. I know how he thinks.”

“Do you?” Tiago says sharply. “From where I’m standing, it looks like you got caught up in your own fantasy.”

“That’s not fair,” I say through gritted teeth. “I stayed in that house for weeks. I slept in his bed. I bled for this.”

“And you still failed,” he spits back.

That lands hard, but I don’t let it show.

He exhales again, long and bitter. “We don’t have time for emotions anymore. It’s a full assault now. We hit him where it hurts. Burn his contacts. Shatter his name.”

“If that doesn’t work?” I ask, voice thin.

Tiago doesn’t answer right away. When he does, his voice is colder than I’ve ever heard it. “Then we kill him. We do what your father never could.”

A beat of silence stretches between us. That name—my father—hangs there like a ghost.

He still doesn’t know. About me. About how close I was to the man we’re trying to avenge.

I swallow hard, and nod. “Then tell me what to do.”

Tiago studies me for a long moment, then gives a single sharp nod. “You’ll lay low here. I’ll move some pieces into position. Kiera—if you’re still playing both sides, if I find out you hesitated because you feel something—”

“I don’t,” I say quickly. “Not anymore.”

It’s not true. I don’t know what it is I feel, but it’s not nothing.

Tiago nods again, this time slower, still unconvinced. “We make the next move in forty-eight hours. Get cleaned up.”

I slide down the wall slowly until I’m sitting on the cold tile, arms wrapped around my knees. My whole body still hurts, but it’s my chest that aches the most. Like something inside me cracked during the fight and never healed right.

Maxim’s face rises in my mind again—bloodied, smiling, dangerous—and my stomach twists.

“We will be prepared,” I say, quieter than I mean to, but my voice doesn’t shake. That’s something. Tiago doesn’t look at me right away, just nods once, already halfway down the hall. He’s not angry anymore—he’s focused, cold, calculating. That’s what we need now. What I need to be too.

As soon as he’s out of sight, the words I spoke settle like stones in my chest. I stand and have to brace a hand against the wall to stay upright.

Prepared.

The word tastes bitter. War has always been inevitable—this game was never going to end in whispers or exile. We were always going to bleed our way out of it. Now that it’s here, now that it’s real, my body won’t stop trembling with a dread I can’t name.

I take a deep breath. Straighten. Fix my face into something flat. That little girl who flinched when doors slammed and cried in corners after funerals—she’s long gone. I buried her in New York, in the Sharov estate, somewhere between the first time Maxim kissed me and the last time I lied to him.

There’s no space left for weakness.

When I walk into the war room—Tiago’s study, really, but everyone calls it that now—he’s already drawing lines on a map. Thick black ink cuts through Manhattan like a wound. He barely glances up.

“New York’s over,” he says, final and brutal. “We pull everything tonight. Contacts, equipment, accounts. Anyone left behind is on their own.”

I nod once. “S?o Paulo?”

“It’s the only place we can regroup. We’re strongest there, and it’s already fortified. We move at dawn. I want you packed and ready in four hours.”

“I’ll be ready,” I say.

Tiago tosses a folder across the table. It lands open, revealing grainy photographs—satellite images, timestamps, messages. “Sharov won’t stay quiet for long. He’ll come looking. We’ll be gone before he gets a scent.”

“If he finds us anyway?”

Tiago meets my eyes. “Then we finish it.”

I close the folder slowly, careful not to let my fingers tremble. I’ve spent weeks threading a needle through the eye of this man’s world. I know how deep Maxim’s influence runs. How tight he holds his empire. If he comes for us in Brazil, he won’t come half armed. He’ll come with fire.

I nod again. “Understood.”

I walk out before Tiago can look too long at me. He’s sharp, and he’s starting to read beneath the surface. He’s watching for cracks now, and I can’t afford to show them. Not with what’s coming.

***

Back in my room, I throw everything into a bag—clothes, money, IDs. I reach for the burner phone out of habit, then stop myself. It’s too hot now. Burned through and compromised. I toss it into the sink, pour water over it until the screen goes dark.

That part of the game is over.

I change into something simple, practical. Black jeans. Flat boots. My hands keep moving, but my mind won’t stop. Every step forward pulls me farther from New York—and from him.

Maxim. Even now, even with everything ruined, part of me aches at the thought of him.

I tell myself it doesn’t matter. That S?o Paulo is the next phase. That we regroup, rebuild, retaliate.

But my reflection in the mirror doesn’t look convinced.

We will be prepared, but I don’t know if I’m ready.

The ceiling above me is cast in faint amber, the only light coming from the hallway under the door. I haven’t moved in hours, but sleep won’t come. My body aches—bruised ribs, a pulled shoulder, muscles sore from the fight. It’s not the pain keeping me awake.

It’s the noise in my head.

Everything’s changing. No, not changing—crumbling.

I can feel it, the tremors of collapse under my skin.

This whole operation was built on precision: quiet infiltration, silent manipulation, a marriage crafted to bleed the Bratva dry from the inside out.

And I was doing it. I was inside his walls, inside his bed. Closer than anyone.

Until it all came undone.

The war Tiago spoke of is real now. Not abstract. Not theoretical. It’s here. It has a name, a face. Maxim. The man who should have been the easiest to hate—who should have been nothing more than a target.

My hand curls over my stomach as if it might settle something inside me, but the ache is deeper than that.

He’s in my blood. The memory of him is in my bones.

I can still feel his breath on my neck, the scrape of his beard along my skin, the weight of his gaze—how it made me feel seen, known, owned.

I want to scream at myself.

How did I let it get this far?

At first, it was easy. A game. Seduction turned power play. I knew how to touch him, how to look at him just long enough without giving too much away. I knew what kind of silence made him curious. I was playing the role I’d been trained for my whole life.

Something shifted. Somewhere between his bruised knuckles brushing my cheek and the way he murmured my name when he thought I was asleep—I started to want it. Not the mission. Not the end goal.

Him.

The first time I kissed him like I meant it, I told myself it was a tactic. A necessary escalation, but I remember how my lips lingered. I remember the way he stilled, like it caught him off guard. Like no one had touched him that way in a long, long time.

I remember how badly I wanted to do it again.

Now, lying here, surrounded by stone walls that aren’t mine, wrapped in a blanket that smells like dust instead of leather and spice—I let myself admit it.

I miss him.

I miss the version of myself I was when I was with him. Not the weapon. Not the spy. The girl who laughed at his dry jokes, who whispered in his ear in the dark, who almost believed she could belong to someone.

That girl is dead now. I killed her the moment I pulled the dagger on him. The moment I ran.

It had to be done but God, it burns.

I turn over and press my face into the pillow, swallowing a groan. The pain blooms fresh behind my ribs, sharp and insistent. I almost prefer it. It gives me something else to focus on. Anything but the memory of his hands on me. The way he said my name like it meant something.

I know what comes next. Tiago’s already planning for it. Relocation. Retaliation. Blood. The game is no longer cloak-and-dagger—it’s knives-out. No more quiet positioning. No more careful whispers. This will be loud. Public. And irreversible.

Maxim won’t stop. Not after this. He’ll hunt me. Not because of what I stole—but because of what I was. What we were, because he looked at me like a future once, and now I’ve burned that vision to the ground.

The worst part is, he won’t even need to kill me.

All he has to do is look at me again, like he did in the study. Like I’m filth. Like I was never anything more than a threat he was too stupid to see coming.

That look gutted me more than the fight did. I squeeze my eyes shut. No tears. Not now. Not for him.

I left that version of myself behind in New York, along with my wedding ring and every lie I ever told him.

There’s no place for softness in what comes next.

There’s no place for him, but my body betrays me still—muscle memory, instinct, longing. I crave the warmth of him, the safety he gave without knowing. I crave the silence that felt like peace when we lay tangled in bed, not strategy. Not calculation.

The war has started, and still I want him.

It makes me sick.

Tomorrow we leave for S?o Paulo. That’s what Tiago said. Our base. Our fortress. The last line. I’ll wake up and put on the armor again. I’ll reload the gun. I’ll memorize names and schedules and routes. I’ll be the woman he trained me to be.

Tonight—tonight I mourn. I mourn the version of me that let herself believe in something other than revenge. I mourn the touch of a man I now have to kill.

I let the ache settle in my chest. Let it remind me that this was never going to end clean. That this was always going to cost me something.

I also promise myself something else.

Maxim Sharov may have seen through my lies. He may have caught me. Hurt me. Branded me with that gaze of his, but he will never break me.

I won’t let him.