Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 09

Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 09

Turns out you can learn a lot in eight days when you’ve spent sixteen years with nothing to do but memorize a house.

Day one: I ate five thousand calories and threw up twice and Nadia said good, again.

Day two: I wrote my whole name without help. Wren Elise Calloway. Kaz put it in his wallet.

Day three: Nikolai put a pistol in my hands and I burst into tears, and he waited, and then I did it anyway. My hands

were steadier than anybody expected. “That’s the malnutrition,” Nadia said. “No caffeine, no sugar, no nerves left.

Congratulations, you’re an assassin.”

Day four: the invitations went out. Two hundred of them, embossed, hand-delivered. Kazimir Andreyevich Vetrov and

Wren Elise Calloway. Every crooked family on the coast. Including a heavy cream envelope addressed to a house on

the north shore.

Ashford.

Day five: they RSVP’d yes.

Day six is the one I need to tell you about..

I couldn’t sleep. Kaz was gone until three in the morning most nights, doing whatever it is men like him do when their

wedding is a trap. I went down to the kitchen at 2 a.m. for the milk Nadia made me drink, and the light in the study was

I nearly turned around. Old habits: don’t be seen, don’t be heard, don’t exist in a room a man is using.

Instead I pushed the door.

Ivan was at the desk.

Not Kaz’s desk chair. The visitor’s side, leaning over, with a phone in his hand, photographing pages of the shipping

manifest.

He looked up.

We stared at each other for maybe two seconds.

“Wren,” he said warmly. “Couldn’t sleep?”

And I smiled, and I said, “Sorry – I’m not supposed to be down here, please don’t tell him,” in the small flat voice I’d

used for sixteen years, and I backed out with my head down like a servant.

I got all the way to the hall before my knees started shaking.

Because I know that face. I grew up surrounded by men who were about to hurt somebody and needed a moment to

decide whether it was worth the mess. I have a doctorate in that face.

I didn’t run to Kaz. Kaz wasn’t in the house.

I went to Nadia’s room and shook her awake and told her, and she went white and reached for the lamp and said, “Say

it again. Every detail. Which pages?”

“The blue folder. The one with the tabs. He photographed nine pages and then he put the folder back at an angle.”

“You counted?”

“I counted.”

“Wren.” She grabbed my wrist. “Ivan has been with my brother since Kaz was fifteen years old. He carried our

mother’s coffin.”

“I know what I saw.”

“If you’re wrong-”

“Then he’ll forgive me,” I said. “And if I’m right and I say nothing, he’ll die at his own wedding.”

Nadia stared at me. Then she laughed, once, half a sob.

“God, you’re not a mouse at all, are you,” she said. “You’re just a wolf who was raised in a box.”

We didn’t tell Kaz that night. Nadia had a better idea, and I’ve thought about it since – how fast the two of us became something dangerous together, in a dark bedroom, at three in the morning.

We told him the next day, and then we fed Ivan a lie.

A small one. Beautiful. In front of him, at the kitchen table, Kaz said to Nikolai – casually, half his attention on his

coffee – that the bride would be brought in through the west chapel door at four o’clock, and that the tunnel from the

house would be sealed, and that his men would be positioned in the east gallery.

All four of those things were false.

Ivan sipped his coffee and asked nothing.

That evening he took his phone into the rose garden and stood by the wall for eleven minutes.

Nikolai photographed him from a window.

Kaz watched the pictures come up on the screen, one by one, and I watched him – the man who kissed me on a lawn, the man who carried me up two flights of stairs turn into something with no temperature at all.

“Since I was fifteen,” he said.

“Kaz-”

“He taught me to drive.” He set the phone down very gently, which was worse than throwing it. “Ashford paid a man to walk into my house every morning for twenty years and say good morning to me.”

I put my hand on his arm.

He looked at it. Then he covered it with his own.

“Don’t touch him,” I said. “Not yet. He’s our door.”

Kaz turned his head slowly and looked at me.

“Say that again.”

“He’s our door,” I said. “Right now the Ashfords think they know exactly where I’ll be standing on Saturday and exactly

which door I’ll come through. That’s worth more than his life.”

Nikolai whistled low.

“Kaz,” he said, “your bride is terrifying.”

But here’s the part I didn’t say out loud, the part I lay awake with that night, staring at the ceiling with Kaz’s arm heavy

over my ribs.

If Ivan had been in that house for twenty years, feeding Ashford everything –

then Ashford had known about the empty grave.

And Ashford had known about a girl in a cellar forty miles away.

And Ivan had watched Kazimir Vetrov look for a wife for six years, and never once said her name.

Which meant on Saturday, they weren’t coming to kill a bride.

–

They were coming to finish a job they’d started sixteen years ago and they’d been waiting for someone to finally

take me out of that house so they could.