Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 03

Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 03

I didn’t sleep.

I sat on the cellar mattress with my arms around my knees and turned that word over until it wore smooth. Wife. People like me don’t become wives. People like me become warnings.

At dawn I packed. It took ninety seconds. Two T-shirts, one dress that wasn’t a uniform, a hairbrush with half its bristles, and a photograph of two people whose voices I can’t remember, in a grocery bag.

The convoy came at nine. Three black cars and one that was longer than our kitchen.

Vetrov didn’t wait for the door to open. He put his shoulder into it and walked in, and Kyle actually stumbled backward.

“Wren.” He found me instantly, tucked behind the staircase where I’ve hidden since I was seven. “Are you ready?”

“If you’d like to speak with the Alpha—” Kyle started.

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

I have never seen Kyle Ashford’s face do that before. Jaw open. Eyes wide. Nobody tells him anything.

I came out. Vetrov looked at my grocery bag.

“Where’s the rest?”

“That’s all of it,” Trey said from the landing. He sounded amused.

“That’s everything she owns.” It wasn’t a question. Vetrov’s voice went very flat, and two men behind him — one huge and grey-templed, one younger with a troublemaker’s grin — stopped smiling at exactly the same moment.

Heels on marble. Marisol came down the stairs with one hand trailing the banister, blonde and gorgeous and radiating that specific perfume that makes my stomach clench like a fist.

“Take her,” she sang. “She’s a decent enough maid, if you don’t mind repeating yourself. Look at her. The little rat’s going to faint.”

“You don’t get to speak about her,” Vetrov said. “Ever again. Starting now.”

“Excuse me—”

“Contract,” he said, and the grey-templed man — Ivan, I learned later — put a document on the table thicker than a Bible.

Trey didn’t read it. He flipped to the last page, signed, and shoved it back like it insulted him.

“He didn’t read it,” the younger one murmured, delighted. “Kaz. He didn’t read it.”

“I noticed,” Vetrov said.

He held out his hand to me. I looked at it. Nobody had ever offered me a hand in that house except to take something.

I took it.

I didn’t look back. Not once. That was the last thing I did in the Calloway house, and it’s my favorite thing I’ve ever done.

I made it as far as the front steps.

The car was so long. The sky was so wide. I had never — not once in sixteen years — been past the garden wall, and my body understood that before my brain did. My hands found the door frame. My knuckles went white. The gravel drive tilted up to meet me.

“I’ve got you.”

I came back to myself in a moving car with my cheek on his chest, and I snapped upright so fast my vision went spotty, and folded myself into the corner of the seat.

He let me. He didn’t reach for me again. He talked to his men about shipping routes for forty minutes and every so often his eyes came back to check on me, and every time, my heart did something complicated.

His house wasn’t a house. It was a hotel that had eaten a cathedral. Glass and stone and green, green lawns.

“Kitchen first,” he said, walking me through a dining room with a table for twenty. There was a whiteboard on the kitchen wall.

“You need something, you write it there. It gets ordered.”

I said nothing.

He picked up the marker. “So. What do you need?”

“Nothing.”

He wrote anyway. Underwear. Jeans. Coat. Boots. Dresses. Pajamas. Then he put the cap in his teeth and stepped behind me and put his hands around my waist to guess the size.

His thumbs met over my spine. His fingers overlapped at my navel.

He went still.

“Wren.” The marker came out of his mouth. “Turn around.”

I turned around.

He was looking at his own hand. There was blood on it. Fresh, dark, soaking through the grey uniform dress at my side where he’d pressed.

“It’s nothing,” I said quickly. “It’s an old cut. I knock it and it opens. I forget it’s there.”

Forget. His face did something I’d never seen a person’s face do.

“Take off the dress, Wren.”

“Please—”

“Now.”