Page 17 of Owned & Bred by the BRATVA

I’m not afraid he won’t come back.

I’m afraid of how badly I want him to.

Maksim

The moment I step through the front door, I know she’s here.

Not just in the house, her presence is always in the house now, but inmy space.Her scent clings to the air like a whisper I wasn’t supposed to hear. Faint and feminine, like jasmine and heat and skin. It curls around me as I pass through the entryway, soaking into the cracks of the marble and wood, sinking beneath my skin.

Roman’s already peeled off in the opposite direction, wise enough to keep his distance. My brothers, whatever shadows they leave behind, are irrelevant now. Business is done. The noise of the world is fading again. All that’s left is her.

The staff clear the corridor before I even enter it, retreating down the hall with soft footsteps and dropped gazes. They know better than to linger in the west wing when I return from a meeting. Especially one that involved Raymond Donahue and the restraint I barely managed to hold. I should feel satisfaction at how I handled it. I don’t. I only feel restless. Tight. Ready to come apart in a different way entirely.

When I reach the study, I pause. The door is open. Just slightly.

That door is never open.

I push it wider, and I see it instantly. The shift. The difference. The air feels unsettled, warmer. The subtle displacement ofsomething out of place, not in disarray but simplytouched. My eyes move across the room, slow and deliberate, and I see the faint marks on the desk. Four small fingerprints across the edge where her hand must have rested.

My heart slams once against my ribs. A slow, deep pulse.

She was here.

She walked into the room no one else enters. The room where I’ve negotiated power and signed the orders that changed lives. The room where blood has been cleaned off a floor more than once. I can see her in my minds eye as she stepped through that door, barefoot, likely only wearing the shirt I left crumpled on the floor, and she didn’t flinch. She stood among these walls, breathed in the weight of what I do and didn’t turn around and run.

I cross to the desk and rest my hand where hers must have been. It’s a ridiculous thing to do, but I do it anyway. Her palm is smaller. Her fingers thinner. Her prints wouldn’t last long. But I feel them anyway.

She isn’t just mine physically. She isn’t just my obsession, my little bride, my aching hunger. She’s starting to want to know who I am. Not just what I make her feel. But what Iam.

And that is so much more dangerous.

I ease into the chair behind the desk and lean back, letting my fingers drum slowly against the armrest. The tension in my shoulders hasn’t eased since I left her this morning. If anything, it’s sharpened. Not because I’m worried she’s planning to leave. I know she isn’t. She’s not ready to run. Not anymore. I’ve tasted the part of her that used to flinch, and now it opens for me. Craves me. Welcomes the pain and the pleasure like it was starved for it.

No, the tension comes from what we have not being enough.

Not anymore.

Keeping her locked away behind gates like something precious and forbidden, that’s not enough. Filling her until she leaks with my seed, over and over, isn’t enough. Whispering things into her skin while she trembles in my arms,you’re mine, I’ll protect you, no one touches what I own, that still doesn’t make it real.

I need her name. I need her name on my documents. On my tongue. In every room I enter.

I don’t want to hide her. I want to crown her.

The idea strikes hard and fast. Not like a thought. Like a decision already made.

Marriage.

Not the kind she was told about. Not the ghost of a girl promised to a man to settle a debt. But a real one. A public one. One that tells every man in my world exactly what she is.

She’ll wear the ring. Sign the documents. Take my name. Walk into every room at my side, not as a shadow, but as my queen. I want the fucking courts to acknowledge it. I want her signature beside mine on legal pages. Her face beside mine in the digital archives. Her bloodline tangled with mine so tightly no one could ever untie it.

She thinks she’s already mine.

But she doesn’t understand yet what itmeansto be Maksim Vasiliev’s wife.

I take out my phone and scroll to the encrypted contact list, finding the name I’ve only used a handful of times, my private registrar. No press. No trace. But official. Binding. Absolute.

Only this time, I won’t hide it. I want records. I want witnesses. I want the world to know that I took something soft and sweet and breakable, and instead of destroying her, Imadeher.

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