Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 07

Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 07

Kaz didn’t shout.

I’d braced for shouting. Instead the kitchen just got very cold and very quiet, and men started arriving – six, then

twelve- and nobody spoke above a murmur, and I understood that this was what it looked like when a war started.

“Gate cameras,” he said.

“Running,” said Ivan, the big grey-templed one.

“Nikolai.”

“On the road,” said the younger brother, already pulling on a jacket, all his laziness gone. “I’ll find the courier.”

“Nadia. Take her upstairs.”

“No,” I said.

Every head in the room turned.

I had never said the word no out loud in my entire life. It tasted like copper and freedom.

“It’s addressed to me,” I said. “It’s my glass. I get to stay in the room.”

Kaz looked at me for a long moment. Something moved behind his eyes.

“She stays,” he said, and turned back to the table, and nobody argued.

Here’s what they found.

The courier company had no record of the pickup. The gate camera caught a van with plates registered to a body shop that burned down in 2019. And the flowers were fresh cut-grown, not bought, from a greenhouse with heat

lamps, in November.

“Who grows monkshood in a greenhouse in November?” Nikolai said.

“Somebody who’s been growing it for sixteen years,” I said.

They all looked at me again.

“The east greenhouse,” I said slowly, because it was coming back to me the way things come back-sideways, in pieces, smelling of things. “At home. Marisol’s greenhouse. Nobody was allowed in. Not even Trey. She kept the key on a chain around her neck.” I pressed my palms into my eyes. “When I was little I used to think it was where she kept the

presents.”

“Presents,” Kaz repeated.

“She was nice to me. Before.” God, I hadn’t thought about that in years. “She used to bring me dolls. She’d braid my

hair. She was she was the nicest one, and then my parents died and she…” I stopped.

“Wren,” Nadia said gently. “The day it happened. Tell us what you actually remember. Not what they told you. What

you see.”

“I made lemonade.”

“Where?”

–

“In the “I stopped again. “In the kitchen. But I couldn’t reach the sugar.”

The room was so silent I could hear the refrigerator.

“I couldn’t reach the counter,” I said. “I was six. I couldn’t reach the tap, I couldn’t lift the pitcher, I couldn’t” my hands were shaking so hard the table was shaking – “somebody lifted me up. Somebody put the pitcher in my hands and walked me into the garden and said take it to Mommy and Daddy, take it, sweetheart, carry it carefully, aren’t you a

good girl.”

I looked up.

“She was wearing that perfume,” I said. “The one that makes me sick. I’ve smelled it every day for sixteen years and I

never knew why it made me sick.”

Kaz’s chair went over backwards.

“Ivan,” he said. “Find Marisol Calloway.”

They didn’t have to.

Two days later – two days of locked gates, of armed men on the lawn, of me tracing letters at the kitchen table until

my hand cramped because it was the only thing that stopped me screaming – the intercom went off at 4 a.m.

I got to the monitor before anyone stopped me.

There was a woman at the gate.

She was on her knees in the floodlights, in a coat over a nightgown, no shoes. Her hair was matted dark on one side.

She was holding her own arm against her body like something inside it was broken.

Marisol.

She looked straight up into the camera, and I swear to God she was looking at me, and she screamed one word so

loud the speaker distorted.

“WREN!”

Kaz came down the stairs behind me pulling a shirt over his head, saw the screen, and stopped dead.

“Don’t open it,” Ivan said. “That’s how they get inside-”

“Open it,” I said.

“Wren-”

“Open the gate.” My voice didn’t shake at all, and I heard Nadia inhale behind me. “She’s the only person alive who

knows what happened in that garden. And she came here. To the one house on earth she should be running away

from.”

Kaz looked at me. Really looked. And then he did something no man has ever done in my presence.

He nodded and said, “Do it. She’s right.”

They brought Marisol into the front hall and put her in a chair, and she wouldn’t let go of my hand. Her fingernails

were torn off. Two of them, just gone.

“They took him,” she sobbed. “They took Trey out of the car and they shot him in the road and left him and made me

watch and they said – they said-”

“Marisol.” I crouched in front of the woman who broke my ear and starved me for sixteen years, and I made my voice

as level as a countertop. “What did they say?”

Her mouth worked. Blood on her teeth.

“That you were supposed to die at six,” she whispered. “That we had one job. That your mother’s still breathing and it’s

your fault, and they’re going to fix both mistakes on your wedding day.”