Page 49 of Innocent Plus-Size Bride of the Bratva
It shatters, sharp and final. The sound echoes, ringing louder than my own heart.
“You used me,” I say, the words tearing out of me. I want to sound strong, but my voice breaks somewhere in the middle. “You let me believe—”
Adrian doesn’t flinch. He just looks at me, eyes hard, jaw tight. “So did you,” he says, and the words cut deeper than any lie.
It’s true. I came here to destroy him. I came here to make him pay for what he did to Eli, for what he’s done to everyone he’s ever hurt. I thought I could keep myself clean, above it, safe.
I lost myself instead.
We stare at each other, trapped in a silence thick with everything we cannot say. The air between us is dangerous: electric with want, with anger, with something neither of us is willing to name.
After that, everything changes. We don’t eat together. We don’t sleep in the same room. The house becomes a maze of locked doors, polite nods, and the space between us that feels impossible to cross. I keep to myself, drifting from one cold room to another, jumping every time I hear footsteps behind me.
At night, when the house is quiet and his footsteps echo down the hall, my body still responds. I hate it. I hate him.
I want him. Not just the man, but the monster—the heat, the pain, the power. I tell myself it’s trauma, or chemistry, or just lust tangled up in everything I’ve lost.
I know better. The worst part is knowing that he still wants me too—and that he refuses to come to me. He leaves me in the silence, and that silence is worse than any fight, any violence, any betrayal.
I try to distract myself. I start writing again in a notebook I hide under the mattress, the one place in this house that still feels like mine. I scrawl headlines in the margins: not aboutBratva corruption or criminal empires, but about a girl who got in too deep. About a woman who stopped believing in black and white. About a man who might be both the villain and the only person who ever really saw her.
The words spill out, messy and urgent, a confession I can’t give to anyone but the empty page.
I write until my hand cramps. Until the ink smears with tears I refuse to admit I’m crying.
Sometimes, I let myself imagine what it would be like if things were different. If I had never lost Eli, or never needed revenge. If I could be the kind of woman who walked away and never looked back.
I’m not. I’m the woman who stayed. I’m the woman who still aches for his touch even as I plot how to make him pay.
Days blur. I overhear his men talking in low voices about threats, about changes, about me. I know they’re watching me. I know they’re waiting for me to make a mistake. Sometimes I think Adrian is waiting for the same thing.
At night, in the dark, when the house is asleep and only the memory of his hands is real, I let myself remember what it felt like to be wanted. To be ruined and remade by the same man. To belong to someone who was never safe.
I can’t forgive him. Not yet. Maybe not ever. I can’t let him go either. That’s the worst part of all.
In the quiet hours before dawn, I press my palm to the window, watching for the first hint of light. I think of Eli, of everything I still owe him. I think of Adrian, of the way he looked at me the night he finally let himself fall apart. I think of the truth, and how it broke me. I wonder if it broke him too.
***
That night, I hover outside Adrian’s bedroom door, feet bare on the cold runner, heart pounding so loud I wonder if he hears it too.
The hall is silent but for the faint crackle of the fire somewhere downstairs.
I stare at the dark line where the door meets the floor, willing myself to raise a fist, to knock, to say something—anything—that would bridge the gap between us. I think of the words burning on my tongue: accusation, apology, the raw confession that I still want him.
My hand never lifts. I stand there far too long, haunted by the memory of his touch and the echo of his silence.
In the end, I walk away. My chest aches with the weight of all the things we never said. About Eli, about truth, about what we are to each other now. I’m not sure which part hurts more—that Adrian let me walk away, or that deep down I wanted him to come after me and didn’t even realize it until the moment passed.
The corridor is empty, echoing my footsteps as I try to outrun my own regret. Of course, that’s when I run straight into Miroslav. He always appears when I least want to see him, as if he’s been waiting in the shadows for a moment of weakness.
He doesn’t bother with a greeting. His arms are folded, eyes flat and unsmiling. “If you keep wandering the halls at night, people are going to talk,” he says, voice low and sharp.
I brush past him, but he steps into my path, blocking the way. “Not now, Miroslav.”
He gives a sigh that’s more irritation than sympathy. “I don’t care what time it is. I’m sick of watching you and Adrian circle each other like wounded animals.”
I stop, too tired for a fight. “Is this where you warn me again? Or tell me to leave?”
