Page 9 of Forced Virgin Bride of the Bratva (Sharov Bratva #13)

The house is full when I arrive. Voices buzz low, just under the music, too calculated to be casual. Men crowd into corners with crystal glasses in hand, their suits wrinkled from long hours and ambition.

The scent of cigars hangs thick in the air, layered over aged leather and the sharp sting of expensive cologne, as if everyone’s tried too hard to smell like power.

This is tradition.

A gathering of old families and older grudges. Where alliances are reinforced with handshakes that mean something, and betrayals are toasted with vintage scotch before knives come out months later. Everything tonight will be recorded in memory, filed away for use when needed.

I step through the threshold and feel the shift almost immediately. Heads turn.

The weight of attention finds me without fanfare. My name doesn’t need to be spoken. I carry it in my presence—Sharov, youngest of the remaining line, soon to be bound in blood to a family we once bled.

The upcoming marriage is tonight’s currency.

Men nod, smile with teeth. They greet me with hard claps on the shoulder, sly remarks about legacy and empire. Someone raises a glass. “To the groom,” he says, grinning like we’re brothers.

I give them what they expect.

A nod here. A quiet, measured spasibo there. My smiles are brief, my words carefully chosen. Nothing real. Nothing they can pull apart later and use. I learned young that silence is more valuable than charm.

I move through the room like I belong in it, because I do. This is the world I was raised to rule.

My thoughts are elsewhere—on Kiera.

I haven’t seen her since the club. One last night to do as she pleased, and it was soured because of some idiot, and my own jealousy.

Oh, well. I’m sure she’ll forgive me in time. If not, I’ll hardly lose sleep over it.

This isn’t her world—yet. She wouldn’t last long in a room like this, where every smile hides calculation, every toast hides a blade. They’d smell her discomfort. Use it. Feed on it.

If I could have her by my side twenty-four seven, I would. That’s impossible, of course. Still, her absence pulls at me more than it should.

I pour a drink from the sideboard: something dark, aged, chosen more for show than taste. I don’t sip it. I hold the glass like armor, something to occupy my hands while the rest of me feigns interest in the noise around me.

I pretend not to care. It’s almost convincing.

The door swings open. A gust of cold air slides through the room, brushing against necks, tugging at cigarette smoke. Voices falter. Glasses lower. All at once, the conversation quiets.

Then silence.

Darya Sharov stands in the doorway.

Tall, still, framed in shadow and soft gold light.

Her silver hair is pinned back in an immaculate twist, each strand secured with militant precision.

She wears black—not mourning, not modesty, but power made fabric.

Her coat hangs open at the collar, the lining silk, the heels understated but lethal.

There’s no announcement. No warning.

Whispers had her in Zurich. Some clinic. Some specialist. Treatment, recovery, rest. Words people say when they’re too afraid to speak the truth: that the iron-willed matriarch of the Sharov line had been fading, but here she is.

Moving on her own. Pale, yes, but upright. Eyes sharp. Purpose stitched into every step.

The men part instinctively. Men who kill for power, who rule cities and smuggle blood by the crate—these same men step aside without being told.

Darya doesn’t pause or glance about. She walks straight through the gathering like it’s a hallway in her own home, because in many ways, it is.

She stops in front of me. Her eyes flick over me, hard and assessing. “Is it true?” she asks. Her voice hasn’t changed. Cold and precise, honed over decades. A blade in human form. “You’re marrying her?”

I straighten. My fingers tense around the untouched glass. “I planned to tell you in person,” I say.

It sounds rehearsed. Weak, even to me.

Darya raises a hand. “Don’t insult me.”

She doesn’t raise her voice. Her palm lowers slowly, fingers curling back to her side.

Around us, no one moves. Even the staff keep still. The room is frozen in that moment between command and consequence.

“I didn’t make it to seventy years old to be informed of my son’s political alliance through gossip,” she says, quieter now, but each word lands with precision. “Or to find out about it after it’s already in motion.”

“It’s not finalized,” I reply.

“But it’s happening.” It isn’t a question.

I don’t answer. That, too, says enough.

Darya’s mouth presses into a thin line. Her gaze sharpens. Then she steps in closer, just enough that only I can hear what comes next.

“If you’re marrying her to keep your seat at this table, you better be certain she won’t cost you the throne.

She’s Matías Ortega’s daughter!” Darya’s voice cracks across the room, sharp enough to slice through smoke and silence.

It breaks against the marble floors and polished glass, rattling the steadiness of every man present.

My lip curls. “I know. It’s hardly as if I have a choice.”

That seems to crack something inside of her. Darya’s eyes narrow, and her hands tremble. Her fingers shake with a fury too long suppressed, her posture rigid as she fights to maintain dignity.

“You dare to speak to me that way?”

I straighten. There’s no apology on my lips, but I duck my head, force down a scowl. “It’s the truth. I—”

“The man who tried to have you killed,” she spits. Her breath catches. “The man who left you bleeding, who sent men to carve your name from this family’s ledger.”

She spins to face the room. Her voice splinters. “I buried my son in my heart for ten years. I mourned him. Lit candles for him.”

A hush falls across the gathering. No one lifts a glass. No one blinks.

“I thought he was dead .”

Emotion claws up her throat and out, raw and unrefined. Grief pours from her in a wave, years of control undone in seconds. Her shoulders heave once, like her body remembers the weight of waiting for a call that never came, the horror of preparing to grieve a closed casket.

Andrei looks down. His mouth is tight. He can’t meet her eyes.

I stand rooted in place, the muscle in my jaw clenched so tightly it aches. Her pain is real. I don’t deny it. I feel it—because it mirrors mine in ways I don’t speak aloud. But pride anchors me, holds me steady while guilt gnaws under my ribs.

“You think you can rebuild our name with the blood of the same family who destroyed it?” she demands, turning her fire back on me.

“Now you marry into that bloodline?” she chokes. “You bring her into this house? Into our name? I would have been willing to forgive it, but now you embarrass me by saying you have no choice? ”

The words hang like smoke in the air, thick with disbelief.

I meet her eyes. “She’s not him,” I say.

Three words. All I offer.

Her face twists. Something ugly rises behind her eyes. Not sadness. Not even rage. Something fouler.

“You can’t trust those bloody Mexicans.”

The room goes dead.

It isn’t shock that spreads through the men; it’s something heavier. Men shift in place. A few look away. Others stare down into their glasses, their silence an answer in itself.

Her mask has slipped, and what’s beneath is raw.

The grief, the loyalty, the fear—it’s all real, but so is the hate. The quiet, long-buried bile passed through whispered warnings and tightened smiles. It drips now from the mouth of a woman who once ruled this empire with a gaze alone.

No one moves.

I watch her, my throat tight. Darya is unraveling, and the room knows it.

I say nothing, because if I speak again, I won’t be able to keep the heat from my voice, the blade from my tone.

I can’t bury two parents in one lifetime.

My jaw is locked tight, pulse steady despite the heat building in my chest. I watch her unravel, standing there like a relic of another age—iron-bound, war-hardened, utterly undone by the choices I’ve made.

I don’t speak yet. I want to. I want to tell her she’s wrong, that she’s seeing ghosts where there aren’t any.

Part of me understands.

She thought I was gone. Ten years, she buried a coffin with no body. Ten years, she lived with the memory of blood on her hands, the silence of not knowing if I’d died alone, if I’d suffered. And when I came back, she didn’t cry. She didn’t crumble. She stood taller, harder, colder.

Until now.