Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 13

Sold to the Bratva King Chapter 13

We married nine days later, in the kitchen, at seven in the morning.

Nine people. No dress. No flowers, obviously – I never want to see a flower arrangement again as long as I live.

Nadia held the license. Nikolai cried and blamed the painkillers. My mother stood at my left shoulder in a sweater two

sizes too big and never once let go of my sleeve.

I said my vows out loud without a piece of paper.

I said: I spent sixteen years being told I was nothing. You looked at me for four minutes and asked why I flinch. I don’t know what love is supposed to feel like. I know that I’d walk out of that gate for you and I’d walk back in for you, and

I’ve never wanted to walk toward anything before in my life.

Kaz’s said: I looked for a wife for six years to hold a room. I found you in a study holding a bucket. I will never make

you smaller. Everything I have is yours, and everything you have is yours.

Then he took my hand and put the pen in it.

I signed my name.

Wren Elise Vitale-Vetrov. Nineteen letters. It took me forty seconds and my hand was cramping by the end and it was the single proudest moment of my entire life, and when I finished, every person in that kitchen applauded, and I put my face in my husband’s chest and howled.

That night, he carried me up the stairs.

I want to say I was brave about it. I wasn’t. I stood at the foot of that bed with my hands over my ribs, over the bruises fading yellow, over the whip-lines on my back that will never fade at all, and I said, “You should turn the light off.”

“No.”

“Kaz-”

“Wren.” He was already at the lamp, and he turned it up. “Every mark on you is proof that they couldn’t finish the job. I’m not going to make love to you in the dark like there’s something to hide.”

He undressed me the way he does everything: slowly, deliberately, giving me a hundred chances to say stop.

I didn’t say stop.

He kissed the four-inch scar under my ribs. He kissed each one of the white lines on my back, one at a time, unhurried, while I shook and gripped the sheets and cried in a way that had nothing to do with pain. He said my name against my skin so many times that I stopped hearing it as a name and started hearing it as a fact.

Nobody had ever touched me on purpose to be kind.

Afterward I lay in the dark with my ear against his chest – my good ear, the working one, listening to a heartbeat that

was in no hurry at all.

“Kaz.”

“Mm.”

“Ivan,” I said.

His hand stopped moving in my hair.

“There’s a thing I keep thinking about,” I said. “He fed Ashford everything for twenty years. He knew where I was. He

knew about the empty grave. He knew who I was before you did.”

“Yes.”

“So why did Ashford wait sixteen years?”

Silence.

“Trey was running the port fine,” I said. “They had the money. They had the girl in the cellar. It was working perfectly.

So what changed? What made them decide, this year, that the arrangement wasn’t good enough anymore?”

Kaz sat up.

I felt him go from warm husband to something else entirely in about a second and a half, and I sat up too, holding the

sheet.

–

“Trey came to me,” he said slowly. “Two months ago. Out of nowhere. A pack a family – I’d never heard of, forty

miles from my door, requesting a partnership he didn’t need.”

“You said it yourself. Something scared him.”

“Something scared him enough to walk into the one house where somebody might recognize that tattoo.” He was

already reaching for his phone. “He was buying protection, Wren. From his own partners.”

“From the Ashfords.”

“He was trying to get out.” Kaz’s face in the phone light was terrible. “And they knew. And that’s why he was shot in the

road.”

I pulled my knees up.

“Then Marisol’s still lying,” I said. “She told us everything about sixteen years ago and nothing about two months ago. She never once said why they ran the night I left.”

Kaz stopped.

“She’s downstairs,” he said.

We found her room empty, the bed made, the window open, and no one at the north gate because the north gate had

been Ivan’s post for twenty years and we hadn’t replaced him yet.

On the pillow was a single sheet of paper.

Block capitals. Big ones. Deliberately, insultingly simple – because she knew exactly how much I could read, because

she was the one who’d made sure of it.

It took me almost a minute to sound it out, and I said it aloud, one word at a time, in an empty room, with my husband

going still beside me:

“THERE IS ONE MORE BODY IN THAT GRAVE. GO LOOK.-M”