Page 8 of The Russian’s Forced Bride (Kamarov Bratva #2)

I slammed the lounge door behind me so hard that I was sure its hinges were damaged. My insides felt hot, boiling—an emotion I hadn’t felt in years. I was always so good at keeping my emotions in check, but here I was, getting all worked up over a woman.

Arlette Whitmore.

I underestimated her. I had always thought she was just a naive woman, but she wasn’t. She opposed me without flinching—something no one had ever dared to do. I wasn’t used to needing to threaten someone to make them comply, and it frustrated me to act otherwise.

That woman was stubborn, and I wondered if I would truly be able to tolerate her bullshit when we eventually tied the knot.

Cassandra immediately stepped into view as I made my way out of the lounge area and into the main hotel. I had booked a room prior and was glad I did, because all I needed was a quick drink to calm my head.

Cassandra’s heels clicked as she walked in line beside me, holding up her iPad and ready to tell me what was next on my schedule today.

Her gaze burned through the side of my head questionably, but my jaw stayed clenched tight as I fought to keep from asking her to stop staring at me.

I was furious, my emotions hanging in the balance.

But nonetheless, Cassandra spoke. “Sir, you have a meeting with—”

“Clear out my schedule for the evening and don’t let anyone bother me for the rest of the night,” I told Cassandra, my voice low, and I forcefully shrugged off my tie.

Cassandra stopped suddenly in surprise, and when I kept walking, she hurried after me, finally reading the room.

“Understood, sir. Anything else?”

I spared her a glance right as I approached my hotel room, which had been situated not too far from the VIP lounge room, as I gave her one last instruction.

“I don’t care if the hotel’s on fire. If anyone as much as knocks on my door, they’re dead. Got it?”

Cassandra inched back away from me with an air of quietness as she nodded in response. She wasn’t her usual teasing self, but it made sense. At the moment, I wasn’t the man she had worked with for years.

My mask was cracking, and my anger was seeping through my perfectly tailored demeanor. I hated that just one person could have this much effect on me. Not even Matvey Kamarov, who got on my nerves on a daily basis, could get me like this.

That showed just how annoying that woman was.

Upon entering the hotel room and slamming the door behind me, I headed directly to the walnut wine rack located beneath the glass-fronted bar cabinet.

I grabbed a bottle of vodka and sank into a leather armchair in the room that overlooked the lively city of Chicago, where the city lights pulsed vibrantly at midnight along with the sound of engines revving through the streets.

The hotel room was spacious and had a masculine touch of coffee brown and black throughout, but it felt empty and painfully lifeless. Usually, I would have a woman in bed moaning my name until sunrise, but that wasn’t the case anymore.

I couldn’t bring myself to sleep with another woman.

It was maddening—the effect that witch had on me—and I hated it. I despised the intensity of these feelings she was stirring up inside me, and I hated the Bratva for forcing me into a situation where I had no choice but to get married.

A thirst for blood lingered just beneath my throat, the feeling pulsing through my veins like a parasitic worm, consuming—like what Arlette Whitmore made me feel.

But it had been ages since I killed a person….

I chugged a shot of the vodka, the familiar burning sensation growing in my throat. I enjoyed the feeling it gave me. It relaxed me even more than a pack of cigarettes, whose mustiness used to soothe my nerves.

I rarely got this worked up, to the point I felt like actually spilling blood—to let loose, to feel like I had control. I mean, I could’ve dismissed that woman’s bullshit, but then I found myself pointing a gun at her head, and I’d been tempted to fire.

Part of me felt it was my path to freedom—not just from my marriage to her, but from these feelings inside me.

I wanted to tear them out and burn them. I wasn’t supposed to feel anything. I wasn’t supposed to think too hard about anything.

Fuck .

If she were gone, I wouldn’t have to think about her all day. She was stubborn as hell anyway—and crazy too. But I couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger when I saw her hands start to quiver in fear, her face turning ghostly pale as she resigned herself to her fate.

Her action was meant to make me satisfied—that she had finally given in to my will, my control.

But I felt…bad. It was disgusting to even think I could feel pity or shame toward my own actions.

I gazed at the crescent moon that shone through the clouds, and it seemed to remind me of a past I had wiped from my memory—a past that shaped who I am today. A pitiful past where I lived and thrived on childish emotions until those emotions were extinguished.

I was fourteen when it all started. It wasn’t that I was unaware of the Bratva or that I had a family rooted in bloodshed and violence.

I knew. But part of me then believed I could live outside of the Bratva.

Become something different. I hoped to be a doctor—anything that didn’t involve taking a life.

That was until that stormy night when Father forced me into the basement, claiming it was time I was properly initiated into the Bratva. Mom tried to plead with him, saying I wasn’t like the others. As a child, I hated seeing others in pain. I couldn’t even stand the sight of blood.

But Dad wouldn’t let me go. He couldn’t stand to see a son of his be weak, so he made me pull the trigger.

It was either that, or I would never see the light of day. And anytime I refused him, he would lock me in a room full of bodies of rotting men who had been killed underneath the marbled floors of our home.

The repulsive stench of dead bodies and the grotesque sight of corpses seemed to dehumanize me more each time I was locked up—until I broke and pulled the trigger that day when Father had forced me to, watching as I blew the Italian man’s head off, his blood sputtering onto the walls and all over me.

His blood on me had been warm and smelled metallic.

I threw up right then and there, holding back the tears I desperately needed to spill but couldn’t.

Father hated tears. And he hated that I was weak.

After that day, Father left all the killings of men he wasn’t interested in interrogating anymore to me. It was hard at first. I even got sick many times. But as the years passed, I got used to it.

Craved it, even.

It then became a maddening obsession for me—a way to unleash my anger—until my feelings started to change into something else. Until I couldn’t understand what it truly felt like to be emotional anymore. And I would’ve kept going down that path if not for Uncle Oskar.

He had observed me over the years and somehow noticed that I could see things and cracks others couldn’t. He attempted to convince Father that I could be more than just a killing machine. At first, Father disagreed—until Uncle Oskar insisted.

I was then assigned a mission to track down a member of the Volchya Staya who had killed one of our own. All I had was a picture. That was when I learned how to move silently. I spent months hunting my target, but I finally found him—a man who had become a ghost and couldn’t be located for months.

That was when Father realized I had more potential beyond bloodshed. Just as I was forced into violence, I was pulled out and made to work on the sidelines until I eventually became the head of the Bratva’s cashflow empire.

I suppose Oskar must’ve felt I wasn’t suited for killing, or maybe he saw what it was doing to me. It was turning me into a bloodthirsty, obsessed man—one who laughed when they saw the crimson red dripping off their victim’s vital spots.

Maybe Oskar thought he was helping me in some way.

But that did nothing for me. It only intensified the anger and hatred that had been simmering inside me for years. It took me years to learn how to hide what I truly felt. It took me a while to carefully craft my mask.

And now it was crashing down hard—all because of one woman.

I kept drinking the vodka in my hands, savoring its bitterness and heat. It was only a matter of time before my mask finally slipped, and a stupid part of me didn’t want that woman to see who I truly was. I didn’t want her to see all the emotions I had carefully kept locked up over the years.

***

The days after my meeting with Arlette blurred by until it was finally time to check out one of the many estates Matvey had suggested, claiming Arlette would be safe there without worrying about Joaquin or his men finding her.

The sky was a perfect oceanic blue—the ideal weather for a peaceful walk and the perfect setting for a couple madly in love to house hunt—but this was anything but that. Since our encounter at the lounge, I noticed a clear change in Arlette’s behavior toward me.

An air of fear surrounded her—along with a resigned sense of fate—but beneath that, I could still see that the fire in her eyes hadn’t been completely extinguished, which I figured wasn’t too bad as long as she didn’t cross the line.

She walked silently beside me, her ginger hair gathered into a messy bun, with tendrils of hair brushing against her slightly freckled face as the wind whipped around us. She was dressed quite elegantly in a brown leather trench coat, matching the one I wore in jet black.