Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 08

Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 08

Your mother’s still breathing.

Everything else in the room went underwater.

Nadia was getting a light in Marisol’s eyes. Kaz was saying something to Ivan about roadblocks. Nikolai was on the

phone. And I was standing in the middle of my new life with four words playing on a loop.

I crouched again. I put my hands on the arms of her chair, one on each side, and I leaned in until she had nowhere to

look but at me.

“Where is she?”

“I don’t-”

“Marisol.” My voice came out low and even and completely unfamiliar. “You lifted me onto the counter. You put the pitcher in my hands. You called me a good girl. Now you’re going to tell me where my mother is, or I will walk you back down that driveway myself and put you outside the gate.”

Something in the room shifted. I felt Kaz go still behind me – not alarmed. Fascinated.

Marisol started to cry properly then, that ugly hiccupping kind.

“I was twenty-two,” she said. “The same as you. I was engaged to your brother and the Ashfords owned my father,

they owned everything he had, and they came to the house and they told me what was going to happen and they told

me what would happen to me if it didn’t.”

“The Ashfords.” Kaz’s voice was quiet. “Kyle’s family.”

“Kyle’s father.” Marisol nodded frantically. “Your parents were going to testify, Wren. Federal. They’d been talking for a year. They had ledgers, names, twenty years of the Ashfords’ money moving through Calloway ships.” She wiped her

face with the back of a ruined hand. “And they had a deal in place – protection a marriage contract with a family

strong enough to shelter you if it went wrong.”

“Vetrov,” Kaz said.

“Your father was already dead by then,” Marisol whispered. “His people wouldn’t honor it. Nobody would touch us.”

“They didn’t know,” Kaz said. “Nobody told me. I was fourteen and there were six men eating my father’s empire and it

took me nine years to take it back.” He looked like he was going to be sick. “Sixteen years, Wren. You were forty miles from me for sixteen years.”

“So they poisoned my parents,” I said. “And you handed it to me.”

“They said a child would never be charged.” Marisol was rocking. “They said the story only works if there’s someone to blame that the police close a file if there’s a monster in it. A six-year-old poisoner. It was so good, Wren, nobody ever asked another question, not once, not in sixteen years-”

“And my mother?”

“She didn’t drink it.”

The floor moved.

“She poured it out.” Marisol’s voice cracked into pieces. “She’d been afraid for months, she never touched anything in that house, she poured it into the roses and pretended. And when your father went down she screamed and they were already coming up the drive and they took her out through the orchard and Trey and I stood in the kitchen and let them.” She looked up at me and her face was a horror. “So they buried an empty box and they kept her, because a live hostage keeps a family quiet forever. That’s why we could never let you leave. That’s why you could never learn to read, or use a phone, or see a doctor, or go past the wall. Because the second you asked one question, everybody dies.”

I stood up.

I stood up and I walked out of the room and down the hall and out onto the lawn, in bare feet, in November, and I stood in the wet grass and looked at a sky I’d never been allowed to look at until four days ago.

She’s alive. She’s been alive the whole time. Every single day I was in that cellar, she was in one too.

I heard him come out behind me. I didn’t turn around.

“I used to think she was ashamed of me,” I said. “Wherever dead people go. I used to say sorry to her out loud. Every

night. For sixteen years.”

“Wren.”

“I said sorry to my mother for sixteen years.”

He turned me around and I hit his chest with both fists, hard, twice, and he let me, and then I fisted the front of his shirt instead and held on like the ground was tipping.

“They’re going to kill her,” I said into him. “Now that I’m out. She’s got no value anymore, she’s just a witness-”

“No.” His hand cradled the back of my head. “She has value until the wedding, because they told Marisol they’d fix both mistakes on the wedding day. Which means they want us in one room, on a published date, with a guest list.”

I looked up at him.

“They want the wedding,” I said slowly.

“They want a wedding,” Kaz agreed. “It’s a beautiful place to kill people. Everyone’s unarmed, everyone’s smiling, the doors are open and the whole family’s in one building.”

The wind came up off the lawn and neither of us moved.

“Then we give them one,” I said.

Kazimir Vetrov looked down at me – barefoot, sixty pounds underweight, wearing his sister’s sweatpants – and

something happened in his face that I felt in my teeth.

“Say that again,” he said.

“Give them the wedding,” I said. “Print it. Publish it. Invite everyone. Let them walk in the front door thinking I’m still a

girl who apologizes.”

He kissed me.

Not carefully. Not gently. One hand at my jaw and one at the small of my back and sixteen years of nobody, nobody

ever wanting me, undone in about four seconds.

When he let go I couldn’t feel my legs.

“Eight days,” he said against my mouth. “Can you learn to shoot in eight days?”