Page 22 of Forcibly Sold to the Bratva (Zolotov Bratva #14)

We drive back home in silence. The world around me sounds muffled, like I’m not really in it. Ilariy tries to say something, but I barely register a word he says.

I’m staring out of the window. I feel a softness around my hand. Ilariy’s against mine. He caresses my wrist, softly brushes my fingers.

I turn to him and see him look at me with such pity, such sadness, that I have to look away.

I stare out of the window, still wondering who those people I overheard are. They certainly can’t be my brothers. I ran a stop sign once, when I’d just started driving, and I remember how furious Tikhon had been.

I thought my brothers were upstanding citizens. And now, it’s like I’m in a horror movie and they’re the starring characters.

I feel sick to my stomach when I remember how they bragged about slitting an old man’s throat. These can’t be the same brothers who taught me to ride a bike.

What the hell happened to those restaurants they run? What more is there, lurking beneath, that I don’t know? My body is so numb that it protects me from falling apart. But my mind is still reeling, still grappling, still feeding questions into my heart.

I know Ilariy is worried. I can feel it in the way he keeps looking over at me to see if I’m okay, how he asks, every few minutes, if I am. I can’t bring myself to speak.

When we get home, I push open the car door before the driver can even reach my side.

I begin to move toward the house to head inside, ignoring the guard who opens the door to the foyer.

I don’t want to be outside, around his men.

They’ll only smile at me and ask how my day is going, and I don’t have a word of politeness or kindness left in me to give.

Ilariy follows me in, his quick footsteps catching up behind me. I stop at the bottom of the stairs, looking up, thinking I should just climb into bed, curl up with oblivion, and pretend today never happened.

But I can’t get myself to move. The idea of pretending sickens me, makes me feel weak. For months, I believed what I wanted to , and not the truth Ilariy laid bare.

Look what that got me.

I turn to face him, needing all the answers.

“What did you mean back there?” I meet his gaze and stand taller. “When you mentioned Nikandr and Lilibeth and said they were nearly destroyed—what did my brothers do to your family?”

Ilariy suddenly turns pale and shakes his head. “Arina, you’ve had enough shocks for one day.”

“Don’t patronize me!” My voice is shrill, and I see Ilariy wince. “I want to know everything. Tell me what they did!”

Ilariy looks torn, and I take a step toward him, clutching his hands between my fists, and meet his warm, caramel eyes with mine. “ Please ,” I beg.

Ilariy clenches his jaw, like telling me this is hurting him somehow, but he wraps an arm around my shoulders and pulls me away from the staircase.

“Not here,” he tells me. “Let’s get you someplace private.” He leads me to the drawing room.

He closes the door behind us and walks to the bar, pouring two glasses. I stand by the couches, watching him for answers, and when he comes back, he hands me a neat whiskey and motions at the sofa.

“If you want me to sit, I’ll sit,” I snap, my patience wearing thin.

He sits beside me and reaches out to take my hand, watching me with wary eyes.

“Will you please tell me already?” I say angrily. “If I’m going to lose my entire family in one day, I at least deserve to know why.”

“Fine.” He takes a sip of his whiskey, like he’s trying to buy time.

“Just tell me!” I narrow my eyes at him.

Ilariy’s eyes darken. “Your brothers, along with your cousin Viktor, targeted Nikandr a few years ago. He was the softest of us and very impressionable. They brought him into their circle. At first, it just seemed like they were being nice.”

“And then?” I prompt when he pauses.

“Then they introduced him to drugs. Not just recreational stuff—hard stuff. Heroin, crack cocaine, drugs we’ve never heard of. They deliberately got him hooked, Arina. They needed someone with access to money and power, and once they had him addicted, they used that to control him.”

My stomach lurches with disgust. “They couldn’t!”

“It is.” His voice is flat. “They had him running errands for them, stealing information, moving product. He was so far gone he couldn’t see what they were doing.

By the time we figured it out, he was a shell of himself.

It took us years to get him clean, and Agafon was beside himself, sending him from rehab to rehab to rehab, until there came a point when Nikandr stopped speaking to us.

Every day, we worried he might be dead in a ditch somewhere.

And even now...” He trails off, his expression haunted, before he looks back at me.

“He’s not the same. He’s clean, but that spark he had when he was younger, that fight in him, we can’t seem to find it. ”

I think of how humorous Nikandr has been every time I’ve met him, but now I realize I’ve never seen him drink.

Now, I understand that harrowed look in his eyes, even when he laughs, one that makes him seem older than his years.

I remember how kindly he treated me despite who I was, and I’m filled with shame. I gulp back the scotch, needing to take the edge off, and set down the glass before turning to Ilariy.

“And Lilibeth?” I ask, petrified of hearing more, but needing to.

Ilariy’s jaw tightens. “That was about four months ago. They were already married, but your brothers and Viktor kidnapped her from Agafon’s cabin.”

“No.” I feel like I can’t believe it, but I know it’s true. The coldness in Ardalion’s eyes when he met me at Faddey’s party suddenly makes terrible sense.

“Viktor tortured her.” Ilariy’s eyes turn cold. “When we finally found her, she was barely conscious. It took weeks for her physical wounds to heal. The psychological ones...” He shakes his head. “She still has nightmares.”

“No!” I cry out, feeling like the wind has been knocked out of me. I keep shaking my head. “No. No. No…”

My hands give out entirely, trembling with no control, and I sink back into the couch.

“Why?” I choke out. “Why would they do that?”

“Viktor wanted to weaken our family and rise within the hierarchy of power,” Ilariy looks at me sadly. “He couldn’t have done it without your brothers’ help.”

I think of Lilibeth at dinner two weeks ago, over at our house. Ilariy’s sisters introduced me to her, included her in our plans, and she never, not once , offered me anything other than friendship.

After what my brothers did to her, how did she find it in her to be so kind, so gentle, so warm?

She never said a word. She never once let on that she knew how evil my family was, never mentioned what they’d done to her.

“Oh God,” I gasp in humiliation. “Everyone knows, don’t they?

That’s why her brothers could barely bring themselves to speak to me at Faddey’s party.

I asked Tatiana why they were acting so cold around me, and she chalked it up to them being in a mood.

But… they were angry for what happened to their sister. ”

“Yes,” Ilariy admits quietly.

I sit up and meet his eyes. “Did your sisters know too? When they were taking me to pottery class, having coffee with me—did they know what my brothers did the whole time?”

He doesn’t answer, and that’s enough.

“Everyone knew.” My voice rises. “Everyone knew who my brothers were, what they’d done, and no one told me. I’ve been hanging out with Lilibeth, for Christ’s sake! After what my family did to her!”

A hysterical laugh escapes me. “No wonder people were whispering. I thought I was being paranoid, but they were all talking about the idiot Sokolov girl who doesn’t have an ounce of compassion in her soul.”

I stumble to my feet, rage, shame, and grief colliding inside me. “You humiliated me.”

“Arina—”

“No!” I scream, hovering over him where he sits on the couch. “You let me walk around like a fool. You let me sit at dinner tables with people whose lives my brothers destroyed. You let me build friendships with women whose sister-in-law was tortured by my family!”

His face turns soft. “I know how much this hurts, Arina. I’m so sorry about…everything. “

Tears burn in my eyes, and my chin trembles with rage. “My brothers are monsters. And you knew. You knew the whole time.”

“Yes,” he says quietly. “I knew.”

“And you never told me,” I begin to sob.

“That’s not fair,” he says softly, but he doesn’t explain why because he doesn’t need to. I’m just so angry that it’s easier to pretend he hadn’t told me my brothers were members of the Bratva.

It’s easier to pretend that I’m here by my own choice because I refused to listen when I could and continued living in a fairy tale.

A fairy tale I could have still been a part of, if Ilariy hadn’t dragged me into this world.

“And you married me anyway. To hurt them.” My voice breaks. “Just like they hurt your family.”

“Oh, Arina.” He rises to his feet and tries to reach for my hand, but I pull away.

“Don’t touch me,” I hiss.

“Arina, listen to me,” he pleads. “I took you to see if I could find out where your brothers were. But things changed. You must know that.”

“Why?” I spit. “Because we fucked? Because you felt sorry for me? Poor innocent Arina, too stupid to know what her family really is.”

“Because I care about you!” he roars, and the raw honesty in his voice stops me short. “Because somewhere along the way, revenge stopped mattering.”

“Why?” I ask fiercely. “It’s all our fault. We did this to Nikandr and Lilibeth.” The guilt dances in me with an ugliness that makes thinking hard.

“It’s NOT your fault,” he says ferociously, stepping just a little toward me, his hand cupping my cheek. “You hear me?”

“How can you say that? I could have stopped them…I could have shown them otherwise.” The tears just don’t stop.

“You didn’t know,” he whispers, trailing a finger and thumb to my chin, forcing me to look up. “How were you going to stop anything?”

“I didn’t know because I was a blind fool who wanted to live in her own little fantasy world. I was stupid. I was an idiot,” I say with such ferocious anger, keeping my eyes on his.

He looks livid, angry. “No!” his hands now wipe away my tears. “I will not have you talk about yourself like that, you hear me?”

I shake my head.

“Arina. I mean it,” he growls, cupping my cheeks with both hands, his face an inch away from mine. He dips lower, grazes his nose against mine, and whispers against my lips. “You’re the kindest person I know. The sweetest. Please, don’t do this to yourself…”

Something in me cracks at his words. I lashed out at him, said the meanest things, blamed him somehow for me living in the dark, and even then, all he has is kindness toward me. Around Ilariy, it’s easy to just forget.

We’re standing so close that I feel his breath on my lips. I think of those lips, the things he can do to me, the way he makes me forget the world when we’re together, and I lunge forward, grabbing his face between my hands, crushing my lips against his.

He freezes for a second before responding, his arms wrapping around me so tightly I can barely breathe.

The kiss is brutal, angry, and desperate. My teeth clash against his, and I dig my fingers into his shoulders. I push him backward until his legs hit the couch, and he falls back. I follow, straddling him, grinding against him as I continue to kiss him like I’m trying to devour him whole.

I need this—need to feel something other than this sick betrayal churning in my gut. I need to drown the voice in my head that keeps replaying Tikhon’s words about slitting an old man’s throat, and I need him to help me forget.

“Arina,” Ilariy gasps as I tear at his shirt, buttons popping. “Arina, wait—”

I silence him with another kiss, my hands moving to his belt. His body responds, and I can feel him hardening beneath me, but then his hands catch my wrists and bring me to stillness.

“Stop,” he says firmly, pulling back to look at me. “Not like this.”

I try to jerk my hands free. “Why not? Isn’t this what you want?”

“Not when you’re using it to run from what you’re feeling.” His eyes are gentle, concerned.

Something in me shatters. I wrench myself off his lap and stand, humiliation burning through me, and walk out of the room.

“Or maybe you just don’t want me anymore,” I say coldly. “Now that you’ve gotten what you wanted and proved to my brothers you took me, you’ve won, right? You caused them pain. Mission accomplished, right?”

“That’s not true and you know it,” he says, rising to his feet.

“Do I?” I laugh bitterly. “I don’t know anything anymore. My brothers are murderers. My husband married me for revenge. And now he doesn’t even want me.”

“Arina—”

“Don’t.” I hold up a hand. “Just... don’t.”

I turn and walk away, my body numb, my heart a broken, jagged thing in my chest. Behind me, I hear Ilariy call my name again, but I keep moving and head straight to my room, where I collapse on my bed.

The tears finally come, hot and unrelenting, soaking into the pillow as I curl into myself. I’ve never felt so alone.

I hate this world that kept me blind my whole life.