Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 02

Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 02

Don’t make a sound. Don’t make a sound.

Every person in this house has looked at me the way Kazimir Vetrov was looking at me now — like I was a thing in a jar. Sixteen years of it. You’d think I’d be used to the silence that comes after.

He crossed the room. He didn’t hurry.

A rough finger under my chin tipped my face up. Not hard. That was the terrifying part.

“You poisoned your parents.”

“I was six.” My voice came out squeaky and ruined. “I made them lemonade.”

I barely remember their faces. I remember the guilt perfectly. They installed it in me like plumbing.

His pale eyes flicked to Trey. “What was in the glass?”

“Aconite,” my brother said. “Monkshood. She picked it out of the garden.”

“No.” Vetrov let go of me. “Monkshood in a garden gives you a numb mouth and a bad afternoon. What killed your parents was distilled aconitine. Refined. Concentrated. Measured.” He picked up his whiskey again. “You can’t grow that in a flowerbed, Calloway. You buy it from a chemist. So tell me — where does a six-year-old get a chemist?”

The room went absolutely still.

I couldn’t breathe. Sixteen years. Sixteen years of you know what you did, and no one — not one single person — had ever asked that question out loud.

“You weren’t there,” Trey said through his teeth.

“No.” Vetrov set the glass down. “But I can count.”

“I didn’t invite you here to discuss my staff.”

“Your staff.” He smiled, and it was awful. “Right.”

He picked up his coat. Black jacket, plain shirt, no jewelry. The richest man in the room and he dressed like a mechanic.

“Nothing’s signed,” he said. “I have things to think about.”

He walked out.

The second the door shut, my brother’s fist went into my stomach and I folded over the champagne tray.

“What did you say to him?”

“Nothing—”

Kyle was already in my hair, hauling my head back. “She told him about the ear.”

“He asked,” I gasped. “He’s — he’s him, I had to answer—”

Trey dragged me by my hair down the corridor toward the cellar door. My heels skidded. My scalp was on fire. I begged. I hate that I begged.

He threw the cellar door open.

Kazimir Vetrov was standing on the other side of it.

Leaning against the wall in the dark, arms folded, like he’d been waiting a while and had gotten comfortable.

Trey’s hand fell out of my hair.

“I said I’d show myself out,” Vetrov said. “I found this instead. A cellar with a mattress on the floor and a lock on the outside.” He tilted his head. “Is that where your sister lives, Calloway?”

“She’s the reason my parents are in the ground.”

“Allegedly.” He pushed off the wall. “You know what interests me? No marks on her arms. None on her face, apart from tonight, and you got sloppy with that one. Nothing anyone would see across a dinner table.” He looked at Trey. “That’s not rage. That’s administration. Somebody in this house has been very careful for a very long time.”

“Get out of my—”

“New terms.”

Trey stopped.

“You want my name behind yours at the port,” Vetrov said. “You want my judges, my routes, my protection. Fine. One addition to the contract.” He looked at me. Not at my brother. At me. “She leaves with me. Tomorrow.”

The floor tilted.

“Her?” Trey laughed. “You want the girl? Take her. She’s useless.”

“Then it costs you nothing.”

They shook on it — no, Vetrov didn’t take his hand. He just looked at it until Trey dropped it.

“Paperwork in the morning,” Vetrov said. He walked past Trey and stopped in front of me and I made myself very small.

He didn’t touch me. He leaned down, close enough that I felt the words on my cheek.

“Pack whatever you own.”

“I don’t own anything,” I whispered.

“Then pack nothing.” He straightened. At the front door — which he found instantly, without asking, so he’d always known where it was — he paused.

“If any of you puts a hand on her tonight,” he said, “the contract will be the least of your problems.”

The door closed.

Trey turned to look at me, and his face was murder.

“Why?” I said out loud, to nobody, to the whole rotten house. “Why would he want me?”

I got my answer nineteen hours later, on the marble steps of a house I’d never seen, when Kazimir Vetrov handed me a pen I couldn’t use and said:

“Because in eleven days, Wren, you’re going to be my wife.”