Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 06

Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 06

I have been accused of murder since I was six years old. You’d think I’d be good at being accused.

I wasn’t. Not by him..

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Empty.” He came into the room. “Beds unmade. Food on the table. Your brother’s dogs still in the kennel with water in

the bowls.”

“I don’t know-”

“Nobody moves a hundred and forty people in three hours unless they’ve rehearsed it.”

“I NEVER LEFT THE HOUSE!”

The words tore out of me so loud they hurt my own throat, and then I clapped both hands over my mouth, because I

have been beaten unconscious for less than that.

I closed my eyes. Braced. Counted.

Nothing came.

“Open your eyes,” Kazimir said, and his voice had gone rough. “Wren. Open them.”

I opened them. He was crouched in front of me with his hands loose and visible, palms up, the way you show a stray dog you’re not holding a stick.

“I have never left the property,” I said, shaking. “Not once. Not for a doctor, not for a school, not for a funeral. I don’t have a passport. I don’t have a birth certificate. I’ve never had a phone in my hand.” I laughed and it came out horrible. “Who exactly do you think I’ve been calling?”

He put his forehead down against my knee.

I stopped breathing.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s a sentence I’ve said four times in my life and two of them were lies.”

“You thought I was a plant.”

“I thought I was a fool, which is worse.” He looked up. “Three hours after we drove out, they ran. Which means they didn’t run from me.” His jaw worked. “They ran from you leaving that house alive.”

Nadia made a small sound at the sink.

“Something else,” Kazimir said. He took out his phone, tapped it, and turned it toward me. “Nikolai went to the family cemetery on the north edge of the estate. Your parents’ mausoleum.”

I looked at the photograph.

Two marble slabs. Both open. Both pulled back, dust and cobwebs, a crowbar left lying on the floor like someone hadn’t even bothered to hide it.

One held a coffin.

The other held nothing at all.

“That’s my mother’s side,” I said. My voice sounded like it came from another room. “The lilies are her side. I used to Marisol used to make me clean the lilies.”

“There’s no coffin in it,” Kazimir said. “There never was. The slab was mortared over an empty chamber sixteen years ago.”

The world made a high thin sound.

“Wren, breathe.”

“She’s alive?”

“I don’t know.”

“She’s alive?”

“I don’t know,” he said again, and he took both my hands in his, and his were so warm. “But somebody buried a lie in stone and made a child scrub the flowers on top of it, and that is the cruelest thing I have ever heard in a life full of

cruel things.”

I don’t remember standing up. I remember being outside, on grass, on my knees, making a sound I’ve never made before – sixteen years of held-in noise coming out at once, ugly and endless – and I remember two arms going around me from behind and a chest at my back and a voice in my working ear saying I have you, I have you, malyshka,

I have you.

I cried until I threw up. Then I cried more.

He carried me upstairs and sat me on the edge of the bathtub and washed my face with a cloth like I was five, and

Nadia brought soup, and I ate all of it, and then I slept for fourteen hours.

When I woke up he was in the chair by the window, awake, watching the door.

“You didn’t sleep,” I said.

“I don’t, much.”

I sat up. The light was pink. Somewhere down the hall someone was laughing.

“Kazimir.”

“Kaz.”

“Kaz.” I made myself say it. “The three days you’ve known me, has anyone tried to kill me?”

He didn’t answer.

“That’s a yes.”

“That’s a not yet,” he said. “The wedding’s in eight days. It’ll be published – my name next to yours. The second that hits, every person who spent sixteen years pretending you were a servant is going to understand you’re a witness.”

“A witness to what? I don’t remember anything!”

“They don’t know that.”

He stood and crossed to the bed and put something in my lap. A notebook. A pencil.

“What’s this?”

“Nadia says you learn fast.” He sat down on the edge of the mattress, and the whole bed dipped toward him. “So we

start with your name. If somebody’s going to sign a marriage contract in this house, they’re going to read it first.”

I looked down at the blank page. I looked up at the most feared man on the eastern seaboard, patiently turning a pencil around so the point faced me.

“Why are you being kind to me?”

“I’m not kind,” he said. “Ask anyone.”

At eight o’clock that night, a courier left a white box at the gate with my name on the card.

Nadia opened it in the kitchen and dropped it.

Purple flowers. Dozens of them. Hooded, beautiful, dark as bruises.

Monkshood.

And a card, in block capitals, which Nadia read out loud in a voice that had gone completely flat:

“YOU SHOULD HAVE FINISHED YOUR GLASS, LITTLE BIRD.”