Page 89 of Forced Virgin Bride of the Bratva
He doesn’t say he loves me.
He doesn’t need to.
I see it in the way his eyes flicker between mine, how he watches my mouth like it’s sacred. I feel it in the way his thumb brushes the corner of my lips like he’s memorizing every line. It’s in the way he holds me like he doesn’t trust the world not to rip me away again. And maybe he’s right not to.
If anyone comes for me now, I don’t think he’ll let them walk away breathing.
He presses his forehead to mine, breathing hard. We stay like that for a moment, suspended in the space between devastation and salvation. His heartbeat pounds against mine.
His breath is still ragged against my skin, hot and unsteady. One of his hands fists in the back of my shirt, the other slides up, curling around the side of my throat—not to threaten. To feel me. Like proof that I’m still here. Still his.
I tilt my face up, eyes half lidded, watching the storm in his expression. He looks at me like he wants to curse, like he wants to worship. His mouth hovers over mine again, but he doesn’t move. Just watches me. My chest aches with the weight of it.
His jaw ticks. Something shifts behind his eyes—rage giving way to something softer. Not gentleness. Something needier. More dangerous.
He kisses me again, slower this time, but no less intense. I melt into it, the fight leaving my limbs. When he finally pulls back, his voice is quiet but steel-edged.
“If you ever run again,” he says, “I’ll burn the world down finding you.”
I don’t doubt it, and I don’t promise I won’t. I only lean in, resting my forehead against his, and whisper the truth.
“I don’t want to run anymore.”
Epilogue - Maxim
It’s strange, this stillness. Months have passed since the blood dried on the floorboards, since secrets split us open and nearly left us both in pieces. I stand on the balcony, hands resting on the iron railing, watching her move through the garden below. My estate—once built to hold men like me, hard and cold and fortified—is no longer a place I recognize. It breathes now. There are flowers where concrete used to crack. Light where shadows used to live.
Because of her.
Kiera walks barefoot through the grass, her laugh rising toward me like music I don’t know the words to yet. Her hair’s down, catching the breeze, sunlight painting her in gold. Darya is with her, of all people. The same Darya who once looked at her like she was the poison in my veins. Now they sit side by side on the old stone bench, eating pastries and bickering softly, like old friends.
Darya comes every week now. Brings sweets, gossips too loudly, pretends she isn’t watching us both with those sharp, knowing eyes. I haven’t asked what changed. I don’t think either of them would give me a real answer.
I suppose some wars end not with peace treaties, but with coffee and cake.
There’s still a gun tucked beneath my jacket. Some habits don’t break, but I haven’t needed it in a while. Not since Kiera came back to me, bruised and breathless, heart in her hands like an offering. She didn’t beg. She didn’t explain. She said she loved me, and for once, I believed someone.
It wasn’t easy after that. Love doesn’t erase betrayal. It doesn’t stitch up bullet wounds or smooth over the kind ofrage I used to live in, but she stayed. That was the miracle. When I broke things—glasses, doors, myself—she stayed. When I screamed, she didn’t flinch. When I went quiet, she climbed into my lap and held my face until I remembered how to breathe.
I didn’t know how to be soft. She never asked me to be. She just waited.
That first month, we barely spoke without fighting. I didn’t trust her. She didn’t forgive me. Not then. Not completely, but I caught her watching me in the mornings, eyes raw from sleep, and I started cooking breakfast for her, even though I can’t cook for shit. She stopped flinching when I came too close. I stopped expecting her to run. One night, when the nightmares clawed their way through her chest, she reached for me instead of locking the bathroom door.
That was the moment I knew we were going to survive.
Now, she gardens. Of all things. She curses at the weeds like they’ve personally offended her, dirt streaked across her cheeks, nails broken. And I sit up here like a man who doesn’t quite know what to do with peace. I still expect the phone to ring with bad news. I still check the locks twice. But the world is quieter. Not gentle—but steady. Like we’ve both learned how to breathe again, slower this time, without blood in our mouths.
There are days I still wake up ready to kill something. I think she knows. She never tries to fix it. She just pulls me back into bed and lays her head on my chest until the anger leaks out through the cracks.
She mourned her father quietly. Didn’t cry in front of me. Didn’t demand I explain how I could still sleep at night after what I did. She didn’t need to. Her silence said enough. I don’t regret what I did, but I regret the pain it left in her. Some nights she whispers his name in her sleep. I never wake her. I let her dream of him in peace. That’s the best I can give her.
Me… I mourn the man I used to be. The one who didn’t feel anything. Who saw affection as a weapon and warmth as a weakness. He’s gone. Sometimes I miss him. Most days, I don’t.
She changed me. Not with pleading or threats. She simply refused to break under my worst. When I started to soften, she didn’t mock me for it. She kissed the broken pieces like they were sacred.
I look down again and catch her staring up at me. Her mouth curves, slow and knowing. That smile used to gut me. It still does. She waves Darya off and makes her way toward the house, slow steps through the grass, sun catching on her skin.
My chest tightens.
