Page 69 of Forced Virgin Bride of the Bratva
Before I can speak, he turns and motions down another row of vines.
“Come on,” he says. “There’s a cellar I want to show you.”
Just like that, the subject is gone. Locked behind his eyes again. Buried with the ghosts.
I follow, but the question doesn’t leave me. It settles deep in my bones, aching.
He never denied it. He didn’t say my father’s name, but the truth hums under every step we take, waiting.
I want to scream at him.
I want to dig my fingers into his shoulders and shake the truth out of him, demand that he remember the way the blood soaked into the grout, the sound of it being scrubbed while I stood in the corner, too small to stop it and too smart to look away. I want him to picture it like I do—like it’s still burned behind my eyelids. The rough hands. The muttered orders. My father’s voice, calm and cool, telling me it was nothing, that sometimes people disappear when they make too many promises.
I keep my mouth shut, let the scream tear through the inside of my chest instead. I press my nails into my palm until the sting gives me something to hold on to, something that isn’t the raw, rising fury. I force my face to stay blank, my steps to stay even as we walk down the slope toward the car. I feel the weight of his presence beside me, but I don’t look. I can’t.
He doesn’t know.
He doesn’t know I wasn’t tucked away in a safehouse while the Bratva and the Vargas families carved each other up.He doesn’t know that my father—my father—brought me into those rooms, that I sat at his knee while he plotted wars and wiped blood from his cuffs like it was lint. That I believed in him. That I thought his world was the only one that mattered.
Maxim thinks I’m some collateral asset, an innocent. A tool planted in his home like a puzzle piece someone else cut out. He doesn’t know I was his daughter in every way that counted—loyal, complicit, trusted. He doesn’t know what I lost when Maxim’s revenge swept the board.
Something in me must shift—something too quick or too sharp—because Maxim slows.
Then he stops.
I feel his gaze on me before I look. Heavy. Invasive. Like he’s peeling back layers with just his eyes.
“What?” I ask, trying to keep my voice level.
He doesn’t answer right away. Just studies me, like he’s reading under my skin, trying to translate whatever flashed across my face a moment ago.
“You looked…,” he says, then trails off.
“I looked what?”
He shakes his head once. “Never mind.”
I see it, the way his brow furrows. The way his mouth presses flat like he doesn’t believe himself.
He doesn’t press. He turns and keeps walking.
I follow.
The drive back is quiet. Unbearably so. The sun sinks low, spilling gold and orange across the dash, but it doesn’t warm the car. Not with this air between us—thick and crackling. I stare out the passenger window, watching the road peel away beneath us, but my mind is spinning in a hundred different directions.
He keeps glancing over at me. Small flicks of his gaze, too quick to be casual. I feel every single one of them. I don’t return them.
My jaw aches from clenching. My teeth grind behind closed lips as memories crowd in again—memories I thought I’d buried deep enough not to bleed. They’re clawing their way back now. The smell of bleach. The click of my father’s ring against his tumbler. The exact shade of red it turned when it dried on the floor. Above it all, his voice: “Some men need to be reminders.”
I don’t know if Maxim even remembers my father, murdered years ago. I don’t know if he feels any guilt, but I doubt it.
He killed my father in cold blood, and I never even got to say goodbye.
Now I sleep in his bed. I let him put his mouth on me, his hands. I let him inside me like I don’t remember every second of that night, like I’m not still chasing the ghost of my father’s voice.
I think I might be losing control.
When I planned this, it was clinical. Cold. I’d keep Maxim close, get what I needed, and make him pay the way my father should have. I didn’t plan for the way he looks at me sometimes. Or the way he touches me like he knows something in me aches to be undone. I didn’t plan for how much it would ruin me when he says my name like it tastes better on his tongue than revenge ever could.
