Page 10 of Watched and Bred by the Bratva (Bred by the Bratva #7)

G raham is almost unrecognizable now. His face is a swollen, bloodied mask. Eyes puffed shut, lips split wide enough to show broken teeth. He wheezes wetly when Maxim slams a fist into his ribs again. The sound is sharp in the concrete quiet of the guest house.

“Wake up,” Maxim taunts, shaking out his blood-slicked hand and grinning like a devil.

His knuckles are already split and raw, but he doesn’t care.

My cousin never does. If anything, the pain sharpens him.

He steps back just long enough to pace. Restless energy comes off him like sparks.

“Come on, Graham. Don’t pass out yet. You’ll ruin the fun. ”

Maxim doesn’t have mercy in him. He was born without it. And it alarms me sometimes how much he enjoys this—how his blood runs hotter the more another man cries. I used to be the same, I wonder grimly. Before Zara. Before her light bled into my edges and taught me restraint.

I crouch near Graham’s sagging head, tilting it up so he has no choice but to breathe against me. His stench is rot and blood. “Confess,” I mutter darkly. “Admit to what you’ve done. You know even if Zara wasn’t the first girl, she wouldn’t have been the last. So speak it.”

He just shakes, lips bleeding, throat rattling. His silence condemns him, but to me it isn’t enough.

“Why the fuck does it matter?” Maxim snaps, grabbing Graham by the hair and slamming him back against the concrete wall. His tone is amused, impatient. “He touched your woman. That’s all I need. He dies. End of story. Who cares about anyone else this piece of shit ruined?”

“Zara will,” I answer tightly. My jaw is hard. “If she ever finds out. If she ever sees the blood. I’ll have to prove to her that it was justified. That’s the difference.”

Maxim barks a laugh, low and jagged. “If it were my woman? She wouldn’t get explanations. She’d accept it. Or she wouldn’t. Either way, I wouldn’t give a fuck. Mercy isn’t in my blood, cousin.”

“You’ll feel differently when you have a woman worth losing,” I tell him, measured. “Ask Dimitri.”

Maxim sneers, shoving Graham’s limp body sideways with a boot. “You two are insane. Both of you. We’re Ismailovs. Since when do we care what a woman thinks? If she belongs to me, that’s it. Happy or unhappy, alive or dead—it doesn’t matter.” His grin flashes feral. “She stays.”

I exhale heavily, the kind of weary sigh that doesn’t leave your bones. Maxim isn’t ready yet. Maybe he never will be. Something dark swirls in him that no woman’s touch has gentled.

“Just keep working on him when he wakes again,” I order coldly, standing. “Don’t let him die until I have those names. Those girls deserve justice, too.”

Maxim chuckles, cracking his knuckles as he turns back to the half-conscious man chained on the wall. “Not a problem.”

His laughter follows me out of the guest house, but his words cling like poison inside my head. I’m still tasting them, hearing them, when I step back across the lawn toward the mansion. I walk upstairs, leaving the darkness of brutality and entering the darkness of silence.

The quiet between us tonight is the wrong kind of quiet.

Zara moves softly around me, but every gesture shouts distance. When I reach for her wrist at dinner, she pretends she didn’t notice. When I pass behind her in the kitchen, she drifts out of arm’s reach as though it’s coincidence. Her laughter never comes.

By the time the house grows dark and still, the unease is eating through my skin.

I track her through the hall, every step light and uncertain, as though the floorboards might splinter beneath her feet.

I tell myself it’s nothing. She is nearing ovulation.

I’ve read enough in the quiet hours of the night to know her moods shift like storm clouds during these days.

Hormones, I tell myself. Sadness. Restless tears.

I almost believe it. Until I see her come into our bedroom in pajamas.

Soft gray cotton clings awkwardly to her flushed skin—but fabric is fabric. It is a wall between the body that belongs to me and the man who owns it. Zara has never worn armor into our bed. She slides in bare, offering, trusting. Always naked. Always mine. Until now.

“Zoya,” I growl, low and warning. “What the hell is this?”

Her eyes widen. “What?”

“What the fuck is going on?” My temper breaks its leash. I sit forward, muscles tight, the dark rolling off me.

“Nothing,” she says too quickly. “I’m fine.”

I slam my hand down against the nightstand. The sharp crack of wood is an echo of the fury already in me. She jerks as if the sound lashes her spine. My chest seizes. “One rule,” I snarl. “One fucking rule between us. Don’t lie to me.”

Her lips tremble. Her voice is a whisper, unsteady as glass. “Then don’t lie to me either.”

My blood stills in my veins.

Her next words strike like a blade sliding against bone. “You didn’t tell me it was my mother’s boyfriend in the guest house.”

The air goes thin.

For the space of ten seconds, we do nothing but stare across the dark. The lamp glow paints her face golden, small and defiant on the far side of the bed. Every part of me burns to cross the gap. But I stay where I am because her words… they are knives.

So she found him.

She stepped through the door I forbade her. She saw the broken shell of a man I’ve kept alive only to hurt.

I force my voice steady. “We don’t discuss Bratva business. That’s the agreement.”

Her chin tilts up—frightened, yes, but not bending. “That wasn’t Bratva business. That was mine.”

The world narrows to the two of us alone, tearing.

“No. It isn’t yours anymore,” I bite out. “It became mine the moment you screamed and he touched you. It has been mine for years. My justice. My vengeance. My hands.”

Her breath hitches. Her voice breaks, but she pushes anyway. “Then it isn’t about me. Is it? You’re not doing this for me. You’re doing it for yourself.”

Terrible silence.

The truth is complicated, tangled, too vast to untie.

But the fury bursts from me anyway. “I told you before—I would do it again. And again. Because this is who I am, Zoya. Don’t think you get to split me into halves.

You don’t get to choose the parts of me to love and the parts you wish didn’t exist.”

Her eyes fill suddenly, painfully. “Then maybe I can’t do this. I thought I could, but—what if I can’t?” Her voice breaks, a knife driven into my chest. “Maybe I should leave.”

Leave.

The word guts me. A thousand times shot, stabbed, betrayed—never has pain cut like this. She cannot leave. The thought of this bed empty of her, of her laugh taken from these walls, of her scent gone from my skin— My chest claws for air.

“No.” The word rips from me. I’m on her before she can move, crushing her small body into the mattress. My voice is hoarse, violent. “You won’t. Absolutely not. You gave me that choice once before. You don’t get it again.”

She gasps as I seize her mouth, savage with desperation. My hands tear the barrier of her pajamas. Cotton rips beneath my grip until her bare skin is under me where it belongs.

I take her mouth with teeth and tongue, swallowing her protests, shoving her wrists above her head and pinning them into the pillows. My roar vibrates in her ribs. She thrashes, cries out, but the sound melts into a moan when I drive into her heat in a single thrust.

She is wet, trembling, clutching at me. Rage and terror and devotion carve through me as I pound her into the bed. Each stroke a demand. Each growl a brand.

“Say it,” I snarl into her mouth.

Her cry is half-sob. “Yours.”

I release her wrists only long enough to fist her hair. I drag her gaze to mine and slam harder, deeper. “Again.”

“Yours!”

Her voice breaks on the word, raw and true, and I take it as my salvation.

I don’t stop. I rut into her like a man trying to anchor his soul.

I keep her hips lifted high, locked tight beneath my body, my cock buried so deep it feels like we share one heartbeat.

I don’t allow her to drag me from her. I don’t allow my seed to spill anywhere but inside her.

Over and over, I flood her. Filling her until there is no mistaking it—she is mine.

And if her body allows it, she will carry my child.

By the time her sobs collapse into broken cries of ecstasy, I am spilling again. Forcing myself deep, pelvis locked, keeping her tilted with my hands clamped around her thighs to trap every drop inside her where it belongs.

I collapse against her. But even as she trembles beneath me, her whisper cuts through: “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to give me a baby to keep me.”

Her words are destruction and release all at once. I bury my forehead against her temple. My voice is hoarse. “Yes.”

Silence stretches. For the first time, I let the truth pierce the air.

“My father raised me in iron and fire,” I rasp. “Every lesson had blood on it. He beat me into obedience. And when I finally resisted, he made me kill. A child—forced to prove loyalty with death. It hollowed me. Stripped me. I grew into ice because there was no other way to survive.”

Her breath hitches, tears streaking wet across her temple where my cheek rests.

“I would have died in that frozen place one day. Walked into an ambush and let it happen. I was already dead inside. But then you, Zoya. You lit a fire in me where there had only been ash. You warmed me. And now… I can’t let you go.

I’m not keeping you because it’s best for you.

This is the sin that damns me more than all my killings: I’m keeping you because it’s best for me. ”

Her hands tremble against my chest. “What kind of life is that? What kind of life will this be for our children?”

“They’ll be safe,” I vow. My hand cups her throat, thumb stroking where her pulse races. “Our sons will be strong. Strong enough to guard you, their sisters, this family. And our daughters will know nothing but being cherished. No fear. No doubt. No one will touch them the way you were touched.”

Fresh tears burn my eyes. I blink them away.

“I wanted him near so I could punish him myself. But I didn’t want to leave you even for that.

I swear—violence will never come so close to our home again.

And I will never force my sons to kill before they’ve lived.

They will never know what was done to me.

They’ll know love. They’ll know…” My voice falters. “They’ll know us.”

I lift her chin in shaking fingers until her gaze meets mine. She sees the fear in me, though I never show fear to anyone else.

“Because I love you,” I choke. “I love you so much it destroys me.”

Her lips tremble, breaking into a sob that shatters into relief. “I love you, too.”

I kiss her then. Softly. Reverently. As though we aren’t made of jagged parts.

My hands cradle her. My heart bared to her alone.

And for the first time since I was a boy, I want to believe in heaven—because if I can come this close to possessing her love on earth, then maybe salvation is not so far after all.