Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 10

Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 10

The morning of my wedding, I stood in front of a mirror for the first time in my adult life.

Not a bathroom mirror. A real one, floor to ceiling, in a room full of light.

The dress was long-sleeved and high-necked and heavy ivory silk, because every mark on my body is between my collarbone and my thigh, and because there was a Kevlar panel sewn into the bodice by a tailor Nikolai had flown in from Milan and threatened personally.

Nadia pinned my hair up. Marisol – pale, thin, wearing borrowed clothes, twelve days sober from her own life – sat in the corner and cried silently, and I let her stay, because I wanted her to see what she failed to break.

“There,” Nadia said.

I looked.

And I did not recognize the woman in the glass. Twelve days of food had put color in my face. My shoulders were down instead of up. My chin was level. My eyes were somebody’s eyes, not a servant’s floor-scanning flicker.

I looked like my mother.

I know that because Kaz had found a photograph an old federal witness file, unsealed with money and menace – and I’d looked at my mother’s face at twenty-eight and my own at twenty-two and understood a thing about genetics and grief all at once.

“Wren,” Nadia said. “Whatever happens today-”

“He’ll be fine,” I said. “He’s very hard to kill.”

“I meant you.”

“So am I,” I said. “Apparently. It’s been sixteen years of trying.”

Here’s what the guests saw:

Two hundred people in a stone chapel on a hill. Candles. Snow starting. The most feared man on the eastern seaboard standing at the altar in a black suit, with his brother beside him and no visible weapon on either of them.

Here’s what the guests didn’t see:

Forty of Kaz’s men in the woods since Thursday, Nikolai’s people on the roof. Every catering van searched twice and the drivers replaced. The west chapel door, where I was supposedly entering at four o’clock, standing wide open and unguarded and rigged with a camera.

And Ivan, in the front row, in his good grey suit, checking his watch every ninety seconds.

At 3:58, four men in catering whites came through the west door with a serving trolley.

At 3:59, the trolley opened.

At 4:00, they discovered the bride was not coming through the west door, because the bride was already at the altar, and had been for ten minutes, having walked in from the tunnel that was supposed to be sealed.

Everything after that took ninety seconds and lasted my entire life.

–

I remember the first shot as a physical blow to my bad ear nothing, just pressure and a whine. I remember Kaz’s hand fisting in the back of my dress and putting me on the floor behind the stone altar with his body over me and the sound of him breathing, calm, so calm.

I remember two hundred wedding guests screaming.

I remember Nikolai laughing somewhere, which I later learned is a thing he does when he’s shot.

And I remember Ivan standing up in the front pew, taking a pistol out of a floral arrangement, and turning toward us with his mouth already open to say something – an explanation, an apology, twenty years of good mornings – and I remember Kazimir shooting him through the throat without looking away from me.

Then it was quiet.

Not silent. Quiet the way a room is when the noise stops but everyone’s still making sounds.

Kaz lifted his head. Blood on his sleeve. Not his.

“Are you hit?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” I was shaking so hard my teeth clicked. “Kyle. Was Kyle in the-”

“Nikolai’s got two alive,” he said, standing, hauling me up. “Neither is Ashford.”

And then the door at the back of the chapel opened.

Not the west door. The main door. Both leaves, slowly, the way you open a door when you know nobody in the room will shoot yet.

Kyle Ashford stood there in a suit better than my husband’s, with snow on his shoulders and his hands empty and

raised.

“Kaz,” he called out pleasantly. “Before anybody does anything permanent.”

He stepped aside.

Two of his men brought a woman up the aisle.

She was small. She was thin in a way I recognized instantly, in my bones, because I’ve worn that exact thinness. Her hair was grey and badly cut. Her wrists were zip-tied and her feet were bare on the cold stone and her eyes went across that whole chapel, past the bodies and the candles and the screaming, and landed on me.

She made a sound I will hear until the day I die.

“That’s close enough,” Kyle said, and put a gun to the back of my mother’s head. “Now. Let’s talk about what my family’s owed.”