Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 12

Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 12

The chapel was cleared in forty minutes. Two hundred guests, gone into the snow. Nine bodies. Three prisoners in the vestry, one of them screaming about his knees.

We had the conversation in the house, in the study, with the blinds down. Me. Kaz. Nadia. Nikolai with his shoulder packed and taped. And my mother, wrapped in a blanket, holding a mug of tea in both hands like she’d forgotten how

heat worked.

“Say it again,” I said. “Slowly.”

“Your father was Daniel Vitale,” my mother said. “Not Robert Calloway.”

“But-”

“Robert Calloway was my second husband. He raised you from the time you were eighteen months old. He loved you.” Her mouth wobbled. “That’s why they killed him. Because when he found out what his own son was moving

through Vitale ships for the Ashfords, he chose you.”

“Vitale,” Kaz said. He’d gone very still. “Daniel Vitale.”

“You know the name,” my mother said.

“Everyone my father’s age knows that name.” He looked at me, and there was something like awe in it. “Wren. Daniel Vitale owned the entire northern port authority. Nine terminals, four unions, three cities. When he died they carved it up. – everybody assumed there was no heir.”

“There was an heir,” my mother said. “She was eighteen months old and I remarried a decent man with a legitimate shipping company to hide her inside, because Vitale’s enemies would have taken her out of her crib.” She set the tea down. Her hands were steady now. “And Kazimir’s father knew. He was the only one who knew. That’s why he sealed a betrothal in ink instead of paper – so that if we were ever killed, someone in this world would still be able to prove

which child she was.”

The room went silent.

I put my hand on my hip, over silk, over a thumbprint of ink I’d had since before I could talk.

“So the tattoo isn’t a promise,” I said. “It’s a deed.”

“It’s both,” Kaz said quietly.

“That’s why they didn’t kill me.” My voice sounded far away. “That’s why a six-year-old got a story instead of a bullet. If I die, the port goes to probate and the courts and forty years of Vitale paperwork. But if I’m alive and buried in a cellar with no birth certificate, no school records, no signature, no literacy-”

“You’re a signature machine that can’t sign,” Nikolai said.

“-then whoever holds me holds everything,” I finished. “Trey ran it for sixteen years as a Calloway. And the Ashfords

ran Trey.”

Nadia put both hands over her mouth.

“They didn’t hide you because they were cruel,” my mother whispered. “They were cruel because they had to keep you hidden. Every day they had to make sure you never, ever asked why.”

I stood up.

I walked to the window and pulled up the blind and looked out at the snow coming down over six hundred acres of somebody else’s land.

Sixteen years. The cellar. The dish towel. The stolen bread. The hairbrush that took my hearing. The two a.m.

rejection, the ribs, the lock, the lilies.

All of it, every single hour, so that a family of thieves could keep signing my name.

Something went through me that wasn’t grief. It was cleaner than grief.

“Kaz,” I said, without turning around. “How many of Ashford’s people were in that chapel today?”

“Eleven.”

“How many are left in the world?”

There was a pause behind me.

“Ashford senior,” he said. “A lawyer named Bell who’s held the Calloway signature authority since 2009. And whatever’s left of Trey’s men – a hundred and forty people who ran out of that house the night I took you.”

“Then here’s what we’re going to do,” I said, and I turned around, and everyone in that room looked at me the way you

look at weather coming.

“I’m going to learn to sign my name – my real name – in six days. Then I’m going to walk into the northern port authority with my mother, who is a federal witness with sixteen years of testimony in her head, and a Vetrov lawyer, and I am going to take back every dock, every crane, every union hall, every dollar. Legally. In daylight. With my face on

the news.”

Nikolai started laughing and immediately regretted it.

“They’ll fight it,” Kaz said.

“Let them fight a dead man’s daughter on television,” I said. “I’ve been a monster for sixteen years, Kaz. I’ve been the six-year-old who poisoned her parents. Let’s see how the Ashfords enjoy being the story instead.”

Kazimir Vetrov crossed the room.

He got down on one knee in front of me, in his ruined suit, in front of his brother and his sister and my mother, and he

took my hand.

“Then marry me for real,” he said. “Not the contract. Burn the contract. No terms, no clauses, nothing you can’t read.

Just this.”

“I can’t read the vows.”

“Then say your own.”

I looked down at him. The most feared man on the eastern seaboard, kneeling in blood on his own carpet.

“Okay,” I said.