Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 11

Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 11

Sixteen years.

Sixteen years of scrubbing an empty tomb. Sixteen years of I’m sorry, Mom whispered into a cellar mattress. And there she was, forty feet away, alive, looking at me.

“Wren,” my mother said. Just that. Just my name in a voice like sandpaper.

“Don’t,” Kyle said, and pressed the muzzle harder.

Kaz’s hand closed on my wrist. He didn’t look at me. He was looking at Kyle with an expression of great patience, the way a man looks at a job he’s about to do properly.

“You want to talk,” he said.

“I want to trade.” Kyle smiled. He has a beautiful smile. He proposed to me with it, once. “I want the eastern lanes, I want the two men your brother’s got zip-tied in the vestry, and I want a signed release on the Calloway estate. In exchange you get to keep your wife, and she gets her mother, and everybody goes home.”

“And if I say no?”

“Then I put this woman down in front of her daughter, on her daughter’s wedding day, and you’ll still be counting your dead by Tuesday.”

Somebody moaned in the pews.

“Wren,” Kyle said, and his eyes came to me, and his voice went soft and warm and awful. “God, look at you. You’ve filled out. Twelve days of food and you’re almost a person.”

I felt Kaz’s whole body change.

“Don’t,” I murmured. “That’s what it’s for.”

“Tell your husband to be reasonable,” Kyle said. “You’re good at being told what to do. You had sixteen years of practice.”

And here is the thing about being raised in a box.

You learn every hinge in it. You learn who watches, who doesn’t, which stair creaks, which guard sleeps at four. You learn what men do with their eyes when they’re proud of themselves.

Kyle Ashford was proud of himself. He was looking at me while he talked. And a man with a gun to a hostage’s head who is looking at someone else has taken his weight off his front foot.

“Kyle,” I said, and my voice came out clear and carrying in that stone room. “Do you remember the cellar?”

His smile faltered a half inch.

“You broke it off at two in the morning,” I said. “You came down the stairs and you kicked my ribs in and you said-do

you remember what you said?”

“Wren-”

“You said, nobody is ever coming for you.”

I lifted my chin and let my eyes go past him, to the choir gallery over the door, and I let my face do the smallest thing.

Kyle Ashford, who has never in his life been able to resist checking, turned his head.

Two things happened at once.

My mother – who apparently has spent sixteen years in a locked room getting very good at waiting – dropped her

entire body weight straight down out of his grip.

And Nikolai Vetrov, who was not in the choir gallery, who was in fact lying flat behind the second pew from the back bleeding from the shoulder, shot Kyle Ashford through both knees.

He went down screaming.

I have never heard a sound so satisfying. I’m not proud of that. I’m not ashamed of it either.

The rest of them were on the floor in four seconds. Kaz was moving before I was he crossed that aisle like weather – and I was running in a wedding dress toward a small grey woman on the stone floor.

I got her zip-ties off with a cake knife. Her hands were bird bones. Her fingernails were bitten to nothing.

“You’re so tall,” my mother said, sobbing, touching my face, my hair, my ears, my shoulders. “You’re so tall.”

“Mom-”

“They said you were dead.” She was shaking her head over and over. “Every year. They said if I ever tried anything they’d and every year they told me you were already gone anyway, and I never believed it, and I never stopped

believing it, both things, every day-”

“I thought you were in a box,” I said. “I cleaned the lilies. I cleaned them every week.”

She put her forehead against mine and we just stayed there, in the middle of a ruined wedding, while men were dragged away around us.

Then she pulled back, and her hands tightened on my arms, and her eyes cleared into something hard and lucid and I saw exactly where I got it from.

“Wren. Listen to me. Are you married? Is it done? Did you sign?”

–

“No we didn’t get to the-”

“Then don’t.” Her grip hurt. “Not yet. Not until you know.”

Kaz stopped a few feet away with blood on his collar and made himself very still, the way you do at a gate with a dog

behind it.

“Mrs. Calloway,” he said. “I’m Kazimir Vetrov.”

“I know exactly who you are.” My mother stood up on legs that barely worked, and pushed me behind her – behind her, a hundred-pound woman shielding me from a Bratva king in a chapel full of his men – and lifted her chin.

“Your father made a promise about my daughter when she was five years old,” she said. “And before she signs one more piece of paper she can’t read, there is something in this world she needs to know first.”

“What?” I said.

She turned to me, and her face broke.

“Sweetheart,” she said. “The Calloways aren’t your family. Trey wasn’t your brother.”