Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 04

Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 04

Nobody had ever asked me to take off my clothes.

They just took what they wanted, or they didn’t want it, and both were survivable.

This was different. This was a man asking, in a kitchen full of light, with blood on his hand and his voice gone quiet as a held breath.

“Somewhere private,” I whispered. “Please.”

He took me to his study and dropped the blinds himself.

I unbuttoned the dress. Slowly. Only to the waist, only on one side, keeping the rest of me covered like a hand over a wound.

He crossed the room and looked at the four-inch gash under my ribs – the swollen edges, the yellow at the center, the heat coming off it – and Kazimir Vetrov, who had walked into an enemy’s house without a weapon, made a sound like something breaking in his chest.

“See,” I said. “It’s fine.”

“Stop saying that word.”

I reached for the buttons.

He caught my hands. “The rest.”

“No-”

He didn’t rip the dress. He waited. That was worse. I have never in my life been waited for, and I had no defense for it at all.

I let go of the fabric.

It slid off my shoulders and hit the floor.

And the most dangerous man in three states went completely, terribly silent.

I know what I look like undressed. Hip bones like door handles. Ribs you could play. Bruises in four different colors, layered like paint, and the pale ropes of older things across my back. And every single one of them lives between my collarbone and my thigh – nothing on my arms, nothing on my neck, nothing that shows in a photograph.

He walked around me once. He didn’t touch me.

“Trey,” he said.

I nodded.

“The wife.”

I nodded.

“The Ashford boy. Kyle.”

I nodded, and my throat closed, because Kyle Ashford was supposed to marry me. He proposed at seventeen and broke it off at eighteen, in the cellar, at two in the morning, and he made sure I understood the difference between being unwanted and being disposed of.

“Anyone else?”

“The house staff,” I said. “The guards. Everyone, a little. It was allowed.”

—

He crouched. He was eye level with my hip now, and I felt him go rigid.

“What is this?”

Low on my hipbone, half hidden under a bruise, there’s a mark I’ve had so long I forget it exists. A little faded tattoo the size of a thumbprint. Two birds, back to back, sharing a crown.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s always been there. Marisol said my mother let a drunk do it at a party.”

“Your mother,” he said, “did no such thing.”

“You know what it is?”

He stood up. He picked my dress off the floor and put it around my shoulders like a coat, and his hands weren’t steady.

“It’s my father’s seal,” Kazimir said. “That mark goes on three things in this world. His property, his blood, and his promises.”

The room went sideways.

“That’s not possible. I’ve never met your father.”

“No,” he agreed. “He died when I was fourteen.” He was looking at me like I was a door he’d walked past a thousand times without noticing the light under it. “Wren. When I came to your brother’s house, I came for a shipping lane. And then I saw you in that study and I couldn’t – “He stopped. Rebuilt the sentence. “I have brought three women into this house to be my wife. I never wanted one of them. I’ve wanted you since you flinched at a door.”

“Because of a tattoo?”

“Because of what the tattoo means.” He took my chin, gentle, careful, and I made myself look at those winter eyes. “Somebody promised you to my family before you could walk. Then they poisoned your parents, blamed a six-year-old, buried her in a cellar so no one would come asking – and I never heard the Calloway name until eleven days ago.” His thumb moved once across my jaw. “Malyshka. You haven’t been a servant. You’ve been hidden.”

I started shaking. Not delicately. Whole-body, teeth-rattling shaking, because something in me had been screaming this for sixteen years with no words for it and now here they were, in a stranger’s mouth.

“Then who am I?” I said.

He picked me up like I weighed nothing – because I do- and carried me out of the study.

“That’s the question that gets people killed,” he said. “Doctor first.”

At the door he stopped, and I felt the words rumble through his chest into mine.

“And Wren. The moment I know who did this to you, I’m going to burn them off the map.”