Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 01

Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 01

The slap landed before the question did.

I didn’t flinch. I didn’t cry. I never do.

Twelve years of being the Calloway family’s ghost teaches you that.

Tonight, a monster was coming to dinner.

By midnight, he owned me.

“Where the hell is she?”

Kyle’s voice ripped down the east hallway, and I was already moving, cleaning bucket banging against my knee. I got three steps into the foyer before his hand caught the side of my face.

My teeth clicked. My eyes watered. I kept my mouth shut, because opening it costs more.

“The study isn’t cleaned,” he said. “Kazimir Vetrov walks through that door in twenty minutes and the study isn’t cleaned.”

I nodded. My fingers tightened on the bucket handle. There’s a fantasy I keep folded up small, where I swing it and it connects with his temple and he goes down like a dropped coat.

I didn’t swing it. Last time I mouthed off I spent nine days in the cellar with a bottle of tap water.

“Do you understand what this deal means?” Kyle grabbed my shoulder, nails digging in. “Vetrov owns half the port. He owns judges. Your brother needs him.”

I didn’t answer. Answering is a trap. He wants a reason.

He shoved me toward the study and I went, head down, counting the floor tiles the way I’ve counted them since I was six years old.

The study was already spotless. It always is. I clean it every morning at five, when the house is asleep and the only thing awake in it is me.

I shut the door and leaned back against it and let my knees go.

I was supposed to be free at eighteen. That was the story I told myself, the little candle I kept lit. I’m twenty-two now. Still here. Still the maid in a house with my last name on the gates. Still washing the sheets of my own brother, Trey Calloway, and his wife, and the man who was supposed to marry me before he decided he’d rather break my ribs.

Somebody cleared his throat.

I don’t hear well out of my left ear — a gift from Marisol and a hairbrush when I was nine — so I hadn’t heard him at all.

He was sitting in the wingback chair by the window. Ankle on his knee. A glass of my brother’s whiskey in one hand, like he’d poured it himself and dared the room to argue.

Big. Dark hair, cut brutally short. A scar through one eyebrow. Eyes the color of a February sky, so pale they looked lit from behind.

No tattoos. Not one, not on his hands, not on his throat. Somehow that scared me more.

I threw myself back against the door hard enough to rattle it.

“Is this how you greet all your guests?” His voice was low and unhurried and had an accent worn soft around the edges.

“I’m sorry. I thought I was alone.”

“Come here.”

Trey was going to kill me. Actually kill me this time.

I came. I stopped six feet away and looked at his shoes.

“Look up.”

I looked up. Just for a second. It was like putting my hand on a live wire.

“Why do you flinch before anyone moves?” he asked.

Nobody had ever asked me that. Nobody had ever asked me anything.

“I don’t.”

“You did. Twice, since I sat down.” He set the glass on the table beside him, very carefully, like it might explode. “And you didn’t hear me breathing in a quiet room. Why?”

“My ear,” I whispered. “It doesn’t work.”

Something moved in his jaw.

The door banged open behind me.

“Wren!” Trey’s voice cracked like a whip. “What the hell are you doing in my study?” Then, smoothly, oil over water: “Mr. Vetrov. I apologize. My sister forgets herself.”

He raised his hand.

I closed my eyes.

The slap never came. When I peeked, Kazimir Vetrov was standing — God, he was tall — with my brother’s wrist folded in his fist.

“Wren was showing me to your study,” he said pleasantly, “since you failed to meet me at your own front door. Lucky someone in this house understands what tonight is worth.”

He let go. Trey’s smile was a knife swallowed sideways.

Later, when I brought the champagne, Vetrov didn’t take the glass I poured. He watched me instead.

“Your sister,” he said. “You keep her in a uniform.”

“She earns it.”

“How?”

Trey looked at me the way you look at something on the bottom of your shoe.

“She murdered our parents. She was six years old and she poisoned them both.”