Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 05

Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 05

The pack doctor was a woman with black hair in a knot and a stethoscope she used like a threat.

“Nadia,” Kazimir said. “This is Wren.”

“Wren.” She looked at me over her glasses. “You smell like industrial bleach and infection, which is a combination I’ve never professionally encountered. Shirt up.”

I lifted my shirt. She looked. She went very quiet, and then she laid a hand flat on the exam table and pressed until her knuckles whitened.

“Kaz. Out.”

“No.”

“Out, or I stitch you next.”

He went. Through the glass I watched him take out his phone and start walking in tight, furious circles like a dog on a chain.

“A week,” Nadia said, cleaning the wound with something that felt like acid and kindness. “Minimum. Who wrapped it?”

“I did. With a dish towel.”

Her hands stopped. Then kept going.

“Okay,” she said. “New rules. Cream three times a day, antibiotics twice, and you eat six times a day whether you’re hungry or not, because your body has forgotten how to ask.” She wrote on a bottle and held it out. “Instructions are right here.”

I took the bottle and stared at the label and my face went hot.

Nadia’s eyes narrowed. “Wren.”

“I can’t read,” I said. “I never went to school. I was six when they I never went back.”

I waited for the laugh.

–

“Right,” she said briskly. “Then I’ll say it out loud twice and you’ll remember it, because you clearly have a memory like a bear trap or you’d have died three years ago.” She snapped off her gloves. “You want the truth about my brother, or would you prefer the version where I’m polite?”

“The truth.”

“You’re the fourth.” She hopped up on the counter. “Three brides before you, all contracts, all political. The first one lasted six weeks and went home. The second one was selling his routes to the Ashfords and she’s under the rose garden, and before you look at me like that she had a nine-year-old boy killed to cover it. The third ran on her second night and he let her go. Didn’t even send anyone.”

“He let her go?”

“He walked to the gate and told the guards to open it.” Nadia shrugged. “That’s the part nobody tells you about Kazimir. He’s not what people say. He’s worse in some ways and much, much better in others.”

“He said he never wanted them.”

“He never touched them. Not one. Never took one upstairs, Never put one in his bed.” She looked at me steadily. “He put you in his bed in three hours.”

“Nothing happened-”

“Wren. In this house? That’s what happened.”

Something warm and dangerous unfolded behind my ribs, and I didn’t like it, because hope has always cost me more than beatings.

“There’s something else,” I said. “The mark on my hip. He said it’s your father’s seal.”

Nadia’s face changed.

It’s a specific change. I know it well. It’s the face people make in my old house right before a door closes and a lock.

turns.

“Show me,” she said.

I showed her.

She looked at it for a long time. Then she pulled my waistband up and stepped back and folded her arms as though

she was cold.

“Nadia.”

“Our father made two of those promises in his life,” she said. “Both were betrothals. Both were sealed in ink because paper burns. Her voice had dropped so low I had to lean in with my good ear. “The first was for me. The second was made the year I turned twelve, to a family nobody would name out loud, because they were about to testify against half the eastern seaboard and everybody knew they’d be dead before spring.”

The room hummed.

“Wren. Do you know what your parents did for a living?”

“They – “I stopped. “Nobody ever told me. Trey said they ran the shipping company.”

“Your brother,” Nadia said, “runs a shipping company. That’s not the same sentence.”

She jumped down off the counter and put both hands on my shoulders, and her fingers were shaking.

“Listen to me. Don’t show that tattoo to anyone in this house. Not the staff, not Ivan, not the men, not my brother

Nikolai – nobody but Kaz and me. Do you understand?”

“You’re scaring me.”

“Good.” Her eyes were wet, which frightened me more than anything else that had happened all day. “Because there are only two reasons somebody hides a girl in a cellar for sixteen years instead of killing her. One is cruelty.”

“And the other?”

The door banged open behind us before she could answer.

Kazimir stood in the frame with his phone still in his hand and his face carved out of stone.

“The Calloway house is empty,” he said. “All of it. Every room, every car, every guard. Six hundred acres and not one

living soul.”

He looked at me, and for the first time since I’d met him, his eyes weren’t warm at all.

“They left three hours after we did. So I’m going to ask you once, Wren. What are they running from – or who are you

running to?”