Page 30 of Forced Virgin Bride of the Bratva (Sharov Bratva #13)

The engine hums low beneath me as we cut through the city, but I don’t hear it.

Not really. I’m curled against the far side of the SUV, my cheek resting against the cool window, watching New York disappear in a trail of glittering lights and quiet ghosts.

The skyline shrinks with every mile we put between us.

I tell myself it should bring relief. It doesn’t.

Tiago is ahead. Mateo behind. The drivers don’t speak.

Hired hands—temporary shadows. Every detail of this escape has been executed with surgical precision: multiple routes, burner phones, cash in small bundles, matching luggage.

No paper trail. No trace. It’s the kind of operation Tiago was born for.

Still, the closer we get to the airport, the tighter my chest pulls.

It’s subtle at first. A quiet unease curling at the base of my spine. I stare out into the dark, forcing my thoughts to stay cold, practical, forward-moving. Brazil will be safe. S?o Paulo is a fortress. That’s what he said. We’ll regroup. We’ll rebuild.

The moment the terminal lights come into view, something sharp lodges itself in my lungs.

I can’t breathe.

The SUV slows to a halt near the drop-off. We’re told to move quickly, efficiently. Our bags are already in hand. Mateo walks ahead, scanning our surroundings with the kind of military sharpness he never sheds. Tiago exits another car, nodding once, the signal to go.

I step out, but my feet feel wrong against the pavement. Too light. Too detached. The wind cuts across my skin, soft and chilled, and yet it hits me like a slap. I should be running. I should be inside that terminal, fading into a new name, a new life. But I can’t move.

My chest twists. My lungs forget how to pull in air.

Mateo turns, notices the way I’ve stopped. He’s at my side in seconds, his hand curling gently around mine. “Kiera,” he says, low but firm. “We have to go.”

I want to answer him. I want to explain the way the air has thickened, how my legs don’t seem to want to work, how my heart has started to beat a strange, broken rhythm.

But nothing comes out. No words. Just that ache.

That impossible ache. I shake my head slowly, as if that might make it make sense.

He squeezes my hand harder. “What is it, are you in pain?”

Yes, but not in the way he thinks.

I stare at the glass doors, at the steel and fluorescence beyond them. Everything in me recoils from it. S?o Paulo isn’t safety. It’s erasure. It’s stepping away from everything I’ve seen, everything I’ve touched. From him.

Maxim.

His name slips through my thoughts like a blade. And God help me, it doesn’t hurt the way it should. It calls.

I remember the way his hand gripped my jaw. The heat of his breath against my skin when he threatened to kill me and somehow made it feel like a promise. I remember the pain in his eyes when he realized I’d lied.

Most of all, I remember that kiss. That awful, beautiful kiss. The one I should’ve pulled away from but didn’t. Couldn’t.

My feet start moving before I know what I’m doing.

Mateo’s voice rises behind me. “Kiera—wait!”

I hear him, and still I run.

My legs burn, but I don’t stop. I shove past a woman with a rolling suitcase. I hear Tiago’s shout—sharp, commanding—but I don’t turn around. The wind bites harder now, but it wakes something in me. Something I thought I buried. This isn’t escape. It’s resurrection.

There’s no plan. No backup. No guarantee, but I know one thing—down to the marrow of me.

I can’t get on that plane.

Not because I’m afraid. Not because I’ve changed sides, but because running doesn’t feel like winning anymore.

It feels like disappearing, and I’ve spent my whole life being invisible to someone.

My mother. My father. The people who used me, trained me, sent me into a marriage like it was a suicide mission.

Maxim saw me. He hated me, yes. Hurt me. Dominated me.

Maybe I’m already ruined.

I break out into the street, crossing past rows of taxis, ducking between parked shuttles. No one follows, but they will. I don’t care. The wind roars in my ears, but I can hear my heart louder than anything else. It’s screaming one word over and over again— Go!

I run until I can’t feel my toes. Until the terminal is nothing but a faint glow behind me. I have no idea where I’m going. I have no phone. No money. I’ve stripped myself of every contingency.

I don’t stop, because going back to him isn’t surrender. It’s survival of a different kind.

Time warps.

The city falls away, block by block, until there’s nothing left but the ghost of a memory and the sharp sting of winter air against my cheeks.

I don’t remember the full journey— only fragments.

A cab ride. The scrape of my heels on uneven pavement.

The distant noise of traffic swallowed by the silence of his street.

Now I stand before his mansion, every light off but one. It glows faintly from the second floor, casting a sliver of gold against stone. Like a beacon. Or a warning.

My hand hesitates on the gate. This is madness, but I’m already here.

The back entrance is where I go—through the garden gate, around the hedge, to the service corridor I discovered weeks ago while wandering the estate at night, pretending I belonged here. Pretending I wasn’t lying to everyone, including myself.

The door gives beneath my fingers. Quiet. Unlocked.

It feels like fate is making room for me.

Inside, everything is familiar in a way that guts me.

The cool marble under my feet. The scent of wood polish and whatever cologne he wears that clings to the air like smoke.

My hands tremble as I walk, soft steps down corridors I could now navigate blind.

Every creak of the floorboards is a ghost. Every shadow holds his shape.

And then—he’s there at the end of the hall, like he’s been waiting. Shirtless. Jaw tight. Eyes locked on mine like a trigger pulled.

I stop breathing.

He walks toward me like a storm in human form. The kind of violence that doesn’t need thunder to be felt. His expression is unreadable, carved from something colder than stone. Those eyes—those damn eyes—they hold fire.

He doesn’t ask why I’m here.

They told me he was a monster; I knew that and came anyway.

My throat tightens as he stops in front of me. We’re a breath apart. I look up at him, my eyes burning. My hands curl into fists at my sides to keep from reaching for him.

“I had a plane waiting,” I whisper. “I could’ve been halfway to Brazil by now.”

He doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink.

“I ran,” I say. “Because I couldn’t do it.”

His brow lifts, fractionally. “Do what?”

“Leave you.”

Silence falls, thick enough to drown in.

“I don’t believe you,” he says. His voice is low, dangerous. “You think you can come back here, after everything—after what you did—and spin some story about love? You’re a liar, Kiera.”

I nod, tears rising. “I know.”

His eyes narrow. “So what is this, some final game? Trying to get close again? You think I won’t kill you?”

“I think you might,” I say, quietly. “I came anyway. I have no plan,” I say. “No one’s waiting in a car outside. No weapons. No leverage. My family left me behind, Maxim. I let them.”

He says nothing.

The tears spill over. I don’t wipe them away. “I’m here because I love you,” I say.

The silence cracks.

He turns, a sharp movement like he’s trying to walk away—but his body betrays him. He stops after two steps, head bowed. A muscle jumps in his jaw.

“I told myself I could hate you,” I continue, voice shaking. “That it would be easier. That it would make sense, but every time you touched me, every time you looked at me like I was something worth holding on to—I forgot.”

He turns around. The fury on his face is raw, but it’s not the same as before. It’s grief. It’s disbelief.

“You betrayed me.”

“I know.”

“I nearly killed you.”

“I know.”

His eyes burn into mine. “Why would you come back here? You think this is some fucking fairy tale where I forget everything you did?”

“No,” I say. “I think it might be where I die.”

His breath catches. It’s a tiny sound. The kind you could miss if you weren’t holding your breath too.

“I don’t expect forgiveness,” I say. “I don’t even expect you to want me anymore, but if I have to die—if this ends like I always knew it would—then let it be here. Let it be with you.”

He walks toward me again, slower this time. Steps measured. The anger isn’t gone, but something else threads through it now. Curiosity. Pain.

Hope.

“I could snap your neck,” he says, hands twitching at his sides. “Right now. You know that.”

I nod.

He reaches for me—grabs my chin, tilts it up. His touch is rough but not cruel. “You’d let me?”

I nod again. “Yes.”

The moment stretches. His grip loosens. Then his thumb brushes my cheek, smearing a tear across skin that feels too raw to be real.

“Why?” he whispers. “Why me?”

“Because I never had a choice,” I say.

He stares at me like I’m the answer to a question he never wanted to ask.

I close my eyes and let my body fall forward into him, chest to chest, cheek to his shoulder.

Maybe I deserve this—his anger, his fury, the bruises already blooming from what came before.

Maybe this is justice for everything I’ve done, every lie I’ve spun with a smile.

I don’t beg for mercy. I don’t ask for softness.

Instead of pain, he kisses me. Rough. Desperate. Consuming.

It steals the air from my lungs.

His mouth claims mine like he’s starving for it, and I let him.

I open to him without hesitation, my fingers clawing at his bare back, anchoring myself to the man I came here to die for.

There’s nothing gentle about the way he holds me, the way his tongue pushes past my lips, the way his hand knots in my hair like he’s afraid I’ll vanish again if he lets go.

My knees buckle.

He catches me without thought, pressing me against the wall so hard I gasp into his mouth, but even that doesn’t break the kiss. We’re past that now. Past fear, past words. He devours me like I’m oxygen and he’s been choking without me. Like he’s waited too long and can’t hold back anymore.

When he pulls back, his eyes are wild.

“You’re never leaving me again.”

The words scrape from his throat, raw and violent and broken. He says it like a curse, like a vow carved into stone.

My voice trembles when I answer. “I will never.”

It’s all I can manage. All that’s left in me, and it’s the truth.

His hands stay on me. One wrapped tight around my waist, the other cupping the back of my neck. He could snap me in two and I would still lean in. I’m trembling now, but not from fear. From the storm still rising between us. From the way he’s looking at me.

He doesn’t say he loves me.

He doesn’t need to.

I see it in the way his eyes flicker between mine, how he watches my mouth like it’s sacred.

I feel it in the way his thumb brushes the corner of my lips like he’s memorizing every line.

It’s in the way he holds me like he doesn’t trust the world not to rip me away again. And maybe he’s right not to.

If anyone comes for me now, I don’t think he’ll let them walk away breathing.

He presses his forehead to mine, breathing hard. We stay like that for a moment, suspended in the space between devastation and salvation. His heartbeat pounds against mine.

His breath is still ragged against my skin, hot and unsteady. One of his hands fists in the back of my shirt, the other slides up, curling around the side of my throat—not to threaten. To feel me. Like proof that I’m still here. Still his.

I tilt my face up, eyes half lidded, watching the storm in his expression. He looks at me like he wants to curse, like he wants to worship. His mouth hovers over mine again, but he doesn’t move. Just watches me. My chest aches with the weight of it.

His jaw ticks. Something shifts behind his eyes—rage giving way to something softer. Not gentleness. Something needier. More dangerous.

He kisses me again, slower this time, but no less intense. I melt into it, the fight leaving my limbs. When he finally pulls back, his voice is quiet but steel-edged.

“If you ever run again,” he says, “I’ll burn the world down finding you.”

I don’t doubt it, and I don’t promise I won’t. I only lean in, resting my forehead against his, and whisper the truth.

“I don’t want to run anymore.”