Page 4 of Watched and Bred by the Bratva (Bred by the Bratva #7)

I wake in heat and silence.

Sheets whisper against my skin. Too smooth to be mine. The light is pale—soft as mist—slanting across a room big enough to swallow my apartment whole. My throat scrapes when I breathe.

Not my bed. Not my ceiling.

Him.

I sit up too fast and the world tilts. Blanket clutched to my chest, I scan what I can't make sense of—high windows, pale stone, a tray on a low table with a steaming cup. A chair in the corner.

And him in it.

Nikolai leans forward, elbows on his knees, like he's been carved there. Hazel eyes fixed on me. Hair uncombed, a crooked healing nick on his chin that shouldn't look good and somehow does. That stare pins me to the headboard I want to use as a shield. I want to hide beneath it.

"What did you do to me?" The words scrape out before I can soften them. "Where am I?"

He doesn't flinch. "My home." His voice is lower than I expect, quiet enough that I have to lean a fraction to catch it. "You're safe."

The blanket clamps tighter around my ribs. "Safe would mean I was asleep in the apartment you promised to take me to before you drugged me."

He doesn't respond to my accusation. His face is beautiful granite, unyielding and unreadable. I discreetly slide my thighs against each other, and his brow arches. He knows what I'm doing, but I don't care. I need to know what he's done to me, but I'm fine. He hasn't defiled me... yet.

He nods at the tray. "Drink."

"You're out of your mind if you think I'm drinking anything you give me ever again—"

"Zara." One word. Not loud. Final anyway. "I won't tell you anything until you drink. Hydration. Then answers. That's the order."

Steam rolls off the cup. Chamomile and honey. My mouth aches with dryness and suspicion at the same time. His gaze doesn't waver. I pick it up with both hands so he can see me and sip. Warmth slides down my throat. The ache eases.

He exhales slowly, like he's been holding breath with me.

"Ground rules," he says. "One rule, really."

I set the cup down, palms tight around the porcelain. "Of course there are rules."

"Honesty. I don't lie." He's three feet away and somehow close enough to touch. "You don't either. Say what's true, even if it cuts."

My laugh sounds more like a cough. "You don't lie? You drug a woman—"

"You offered to take me home—"

He waves his arm around the bedroom. "And I did. So, no lie."

"Fine." I lift my chin until my neck stretches and hurts a little. "I choose not to correct the obvious. You go first. Why am I here?"

"Because you wanted to be here." His voice strips down to bone. "Because what you want most doesn't fit in a gift bag." A beat. "Children, safety, and security. I'm giving you all of it."

I'm shaking my head before he finishes. "Most women want the same. You don't get to decide when or how I get it."

"I already did." That not-smile touches his mouth. Not cruel. Certain.He pauses. "You completed your last step at New Beginnings." My stomach drops to my knees. "During the interview, you told the doctor what you want."

My chest cinches tight. "How, when— You do not—"

"I own it." A single, impossible sentence.

Silence thunders. The room is too pretty for it—the pale floors, the big windows, the soft rug under my toes. He looks like sin parked in a cathedral. Calm even while he sets fire to my rules.

"Why?" I ask, but his only answer is that infuriating stone face. "You bought a clinic because of me?" My voice is soft and ugly at once.

"Yes." No apology. "Because of you."

The porcelain taps the tray when I set the cup down. Tiny clink, huge in this quiet. "You can't just— Even if you're the owner, HIPAA laws exist for a reason," I whisper. "Privacy laws. You can't just—"

"I can." He doesn't blink. "I did."

The floor shifts. The room lists like a deck in a storm. I grip the blanket, knuckles whitening. "Have you been watching me?"

"Yes." He doesn't blink. "I have."

The floor shifts. The room lists like a deck in a storm. I grip the blanket, knuckles whitening. "This is sick."

"Yes." His eyes warm instead of dim. "It is."

"Do you hear yourself?" I want to laugh. I want to cry. I want to throw the cup at the wall to see if he flinches. "You're a nightmare."

"Maybe." He rises with that huge, contained grace that steals air. Not crowding—two steps closer, then still. "But I'm your nightmare."

My pulse trips. "You don't get to call yourself mine."

His jaw flexes. Something flickers behind his eyes—danger held on a leash so tight it squeaks. He tips his head, studies me like I'm a problem he enjoys solving. "Answer me, little one. Truth only. What do you want most?"

I stare at the sheet pooled in my lap like it might form an answer. The lie is right there—license, job, classroom bulletin boards and supply lists—but it shatters on my tongue before it can leave.

"My degree," I say. "A classroom. Students who—"

"Try again."

Heat stings my cheeks. "Financial security. A job that matters—"

"Zara."

The third lie dies before it forms. I swallow, and the truth tastes like copper. "To feel safe."

His jaw flexes. Something flickers behind his eyes—danger held on a leash so tight it squeaks. "You will." The two words settle like a Promise. Capital P. "Not here. Not ever again."

Heat stings behind my eyes. No. Not that. Not tears. Not with him watching. I swallow them down, and they burn all the way.

"What happens next?" I ask. "Do you lock me in? Do I get any choices at all?"

"You get to choose everything that matters," he says. "You'll tell me what you need. I'll listen. I'll give it." A beat. "I'll take care of the rest."

"You mean control it."

"Keep you safe." He doesn't back away from the word. "Call it whatever helps you sleep."

I should tell him off. I should call Amani. Dimitri. The police. Except there's no version of that where anyone can pry me out of a house he owns with a word.

I inhale. Breathing helps. I take another deep breath, and it doesn't scrape as hard. He moves to the window, and the light shines and buffs his high cheekbones and dark, glossy hair. He's composed, contained, and a little too still. We watch each other across a distance neither of us traverses.

The silence breaks as last night comes into focus. "Wissam," the name wings out. "What did you say to him?"

"I told him what was true." His voice drops a notch lower. "What he needed to hear."

"What truth?"

"That you're not for him."

Ire climbs my throat. My reaction is typical. Why am I prepared to go to war for my friends and never for myself? "I told you our relationship was purely platonic."

"I know." The faintest shrug. "He knows now, too."

My voice hardens because if I let it soften, I'll lose ground. "You didn't need to threaten him."

"Trust me. Men understand lines better when they're drawn in ink, not pencil. And it wasn't a threat. I have taken men apart for far less."

"You sound proud of that."

"No." Something tightens at the corner of his mouth. "I sound like what I am."

"What are you?"

His gaze holds. "A man who doesn't allow other men too close to his woman, but also a man who won't let a single hair on your head be put at risk. Ever again."

I press my lips together so I don't say the wrong thing. Or the truest thing. Or the one that would give him too much.

He studies me another beat and then—because apparently he has a knife for every kind of resistance—he drops the sharpest one on the table between us.

"You fascinated me from the first moment I saw you," he says, voice stripping down to something raw.

"You were too young, too innocent. I planned to stay away—tried and failed.

So I contented myself with brief interactions.

Random fixes when I couldn't resist any longer.

Watching you from afar and lying to myself that it was for your protection.

After all, if Dimitri hadn't been watching out for Amani, he wouldn't have been able to help her.

But then you called my name and I knew we wanted the same thing. "

"You—" I can't find a word that isn't a scream. "You were watching me?"

"I watched the video." No preamble. No buildup. It knocks the air out of me. "Your bed. Last week. You touching yourself and saying my name. I sat fucking frozen. Paralyzed by you and came so fast, I couldn't even get my pants down."

Heat explodes across my face. The room tilts again. I feel it everywhere—the mortification, the ache that wants to be anger and turns into something hotter instead. A hundred ugly answers race through me. None make it to my mouth. The one that does isn't the one I expect.

"But I can't…" It tastes like defeat. "I don't… finish. Why would you want someone who can't enjoy—"

His body stills. Every line knits down tight. Not rage. Focus.

"You told the doctor you could."

"I lied." It slices to say it. "I've never—no matter what I try—" The room blurs and I blink hard until it sharpens back into edges. "So if this is about giving me a baby the 'natural way,' and you think I'll suddenly turn into someone who can—" I gesture uselessly at my own body. "I won't."

Something in him eases. Not because he's pleased. Because he's decided. The sensation of it fills the room like weather rolling in.

"Then we'll stop pretending you're alone in that," he says, so even I almost miss the steel in it. "You're not broken. You're untouched."

My mouth opens and no sound comes out. I hate him for using the word I buried in the dark where even I couldn't trip over it. I hate that it lands like mercy.

His gaze drops to my hands strangling the blanket. His voice hardens. "Come here."

"No."

"Zara." Harder now. "Come here."

My legs swing off the bed before my pride can yank them back.

I stand barefoot on a rug that's too soft and walk toward a man I should run from.

He doesn't move. He lets me come to him and hates it, and that strange double feeling—restraint and want, hunger and patience—buzzes across my skin until I'm standing right there, within reach.

Close, he smells like clean skin and dark coffee and something sharper I can't name. Something like cold metal warmed in a fist. "Give me your hands," he murmurs.

I should say no. Instead, I lift them. He threads my fingers through his hair.

My breath catches. I did this last week with a man who was in the room, stealing my fantasies.

Holding the real thing undoes me. Warm scalp.

Thick, wavy strands that cling a little to my fingers.

A tremor rides through his body that he kills in a heartbeat, and the effort it costs him is the most intimate thing anyone's ever shown me.

"Teach me," he says, echoing the words I whispered into the dark. "Tell me what you need. Tell me how to make you feel good."

"I don't know." It slices me again. "I've never…"

"I know." His hands cradle my wrists, not to pin, just to feel the shake that gives me away. "I'll learn you. All of you. We have time." A beat. The lightest brush of his thumb at the base of my throat, a ghost of a touch that somehow sears. "We have time."

The ticking ovulation bomb waits to go off in a week.

I know to the exact minute when I'll be at my most fertile.

Do I push him for my release? I don't believe he'd physically hurt me.

.. Which means I'm as crazy as he obviously is.

But if he had wanted to assault me, he had the chance.

He could have taken me at any point since we met.

Instead, he waited until my words gave him consent.

Stolen consent, but yes, I'd pleaded for him to take me.

"Why me?" It flies out before I can catch it. "You could have anyone."

"No." The answer is simple and insane. "Only you."

I want to laugh so he can't see the way it lands. I want to slam a door between us and breathe for a year. I want—

"Don't overthink it," he murmurs, and if he knew me less, the words would irritate. He knows me enough that they soothe. "Don't talk yourself out of the truth."

"What truth?"

He bows the smallest fraction. I feel his breath more than I hear his voice. "You want me to kiss you."

Heat slams through me so fast I sway. He doesn't take the moment. He lets it tremble there between us like a tightrope.

"Say yes, and I will." A whisper. A command. A request. All three. "Or say no and I won't."

My heart climbs into my throat and beats there, frantic and stupid.

"Yes."

His inhale is ragged enough to make my stomach drop and lurch. Then his mouth is on mine.

It's not ruthless.

It's not soft.

It's slow—like he's learning the shape of the word with his mouth, a careful press that becomes a promise.

The first brush is nothing more than heat and restraint.

The second opens me. The third steals my balance.

I clutch his shirt without meaning to. He makes a sound deep in his chest that I feel under my hand, a threat turned worship.

He tastes like mint and something darker.

He kisses like he listens—patience edged in hunger.

When his tongue teases the seam of my lips, I open.

When it slides against mine, a sound breaks loose from me that isn't pretty or polite.

His hand finds the small of my back. Not dragging.

Not forcing. Anchoring. My body tips into him without asking my brain for permission.

Every bad script I ever wrote about myself—that I'm ice, that I'm wrong, that my on switch doesn't exist—burns at the edges.

He pulls back an inch, breathing hard, forehead resting against mine like he doesn't trust his legs. "Tell me it meant nothing," he murmurs.

I can't.

I won't.

"I can't," I whisper.

His laugh is shattered and soft. He doesn't press for more. He doesn't take victory and turn it into conquest. He just stays there, holding my wrists like they're delicate, breathing with me like he's willing to teach my lungs how to work if that's what it takes.

"Good girl," he says against my mouth, the words a graze that makes my knees threaten treason.

I'm shaking when I step back. Not from fear.

From wanting more.

"I need…" Air. Space. A door I can close between kisses so I don't beg for more.

He reads my face. "Bathroom's through there." A tilt of his head toward an archway. "Shower. Take what you want. Take your time."

I turn, and my pulse trips when I see the neat stack of clothes on the chair—my size, my style, items I'd pick if I could splurge.

Shit. I've been so consumed with him, I've barely acknowledged that I'm wearing his shirt.

The long shirt hangs to my knees, and his scent clings to the fabric wrapped around me.

I say nothing about my state of undress; at least he left my underwear when he took my dignity. I gather the clothes he's laid out, breath still unsteady, mouth still tingling, and walk toward the doorway on trembling legs.

Behind me, he doesn't follow. He lets me go. Forcing me to question my disappointment.