Page 54 of The Bratva's Forced Kidnapped Bride
All they saw were my bruises, which were a lot better but still pretty horrifying to family members who had been looking for me for a month, maybe already fearing the worst. By the time I figured out that they must have either been keeping an eye on this house or had somehow tracked Anatoli, Dan’s men had converged in a large group behind Anatoli.
Just as my cousin Aleks conked him over the head with the butt of his gun, I tried to jerk away. Anatoli was on the ground, out cold by the time I let out a scream. And kept screaming. They were all over him, a knee in the back, wrenching his arms behind to zip tie them together. He was out cold, but they wouldn’t stop.
“Dan,” I shouted, finally getting out of the vice grip around my wrist. “Daniil, stop.”
He whipped around to give me an appraising look, full of anger and then pity when he assessed my battered appearance. “Take her outside,” he ordered. “She doesn’t need to see this.”
Oh my God, he was treating me like I was some fragile flower, like I was traumatized. Not even that could keep me from trying to break free from the two men who gathered close around me and began to hustle me toward a door leadingoutside. No one paid any attention to a single word I said, or rather screamed.
I was near hysterics, imagining the worst happening to Anatoli, waiting with all my hair standing on end for a gunshot that would mean he was dead. No one would listen to me. It was like I wasn’t there despite all the thrashing and all the noise I was making.
They got me in a car, and two different men had to sit in the back with me to keep me from clawing my way out of the moving vehicle. It was either that or tie me up and put me in the trunk, but my own people couldn’t do that. They could rip my heart out by not listening to me defend Anatoli just fine, though.
“Damn it, Masha, calm down,” the driver said.
“August,” I cried, a brief burst of happiness to see him alive and well-doused by the ice in his eyes. It was then that I recognized Vik as one of the men holding me in the backseat, looking at me as if I’d gone crazy. Not even my old friends would listen to me.
By the time we arrived at Aleks’s house, I was no longer screaming. My throat had given out, and now I was just wracked with desperate sobs. There wasn’t a time in my life I could remember crying so hard, as if there was a bottomless well of tears that might never stop flowing.
Before I moved to the Silicon Valley area with Mat, I had lived with my sister in my cousin Aleks’s huge, sprawling mansion, and Lilia still lived there. “I want to see my sister,” I said, sounding pathetic, miserable, and small.
That was how I felt without Anatoli. If I couldn’t save him, if no one would listen, and he was killed, I would feel that way for the rest of my life. Oh God, I loved him. What a time to figure it out.
As they helped me down the hall, which felt more like being dragged, Daniil appeared before me, still in most of his riot gear and looking stressed. “You need to rest,” he said.
“No, I don’t,” I snapped. “What have you done with Anatoli? What I need is to see him.”
He took a deep breath, like he was counting to ten before answering me. If Vik and August hadn’t had their hands on my arms to “help” me walk, I would have connected my fist to his face.
“You’re not thinking straight,” he said. “It’s normal after what you’ve been through. Don’t worry. We’ll begin working on Anatoli right away for what he did to you.”
I burst free at last, lunging for him. I didn’t hit him, but grabbed his shoulders, pleading in my raw, tattered voice. Only broken, incoherent sentences came out, and he wasn’t listening anyway. He already made up his mind. They were going to kill Anatoli in a long, drawn-out way, and there was nothing I could do to make them see reason.
Because I was hardly being reasonable. I had to make myself see myself the way they saw me, think the way they thought. I had been caught up during a secretive mission, my guards had somehow gotten free, and I informed them I’d been taken violently. No one had a clue where I was for more than a month, and then I turned up with Anatoli, covered in half-healed cuts and bruises as if he’d been abusing me all along. They might even think I had lost my mind, that I was completely broken.
I took a deep breath, stopped screaming, and stopped gripping Dan’s shoulders. I actually counted to ten, silently, then nodded briskly. Straightening my spine, I looked Dan in the eye.
“I’m going to be the only one who deals with Ovinko,” I said, forcing my voice to remain steady and ice-cold.
Dan remained quiet for a long moment, never taking his eyes off me, and I never dropped my gaze. He needed to think I was angry, nothing else. Finally, he gave a begrudging nod.
“That’s fine. You deserve that chance. But only after you rest. He’ll keep just fine until then.”
I kept my mouth clamped shut against a barrage of arguments and more pleas that I be taken to Anatoli immediately. The matter was settled, and I had to keep up the ruse that I wanted to be the only one to torture Anatoli. I let them escort me to my old room without another word.
Once inside, I waited to hear a lock click, but of course, they weren’t going to lock me in. I had no idea where they were keeping him, so I had to wait until Dan deemed me rested enough to deal with our common enemy. And then I’d have to find a way to get him free without harming anyone or accidentally getting him killed.
Then I guessed I’d have to give up my family, because they’d never forgive such a betrayal.
Lilia came in as new tears were forming. I swiped them away, disgusted at what a fountain I had become in the last hour. My sweet younger sister rushed over to me and grabbed me up in a fierce hug that knocked the breath out of my lungs.
“Sorry,” she said when I gasped for air. “What happened to you? No, you don’t have to tell me. Let me get a first aid kit.”
I was perfectly fine. I had been treating my cuts with the ointment the doctor in Mexico gave me. The bruises were mostly yellowish-green and more itchy than sore by now, and my ribs hardly hurt at all when I wasn’t being hugged half to death.
But there was no stopping Lilia, and I sat as patiently as I could while she dabbed at me, tears forming in her sky-blueeyes. Those came from our grandmother, and were some kind of miracle since both our parents had brown eyes.
“I used to wish I had your eye color,” I said, making her eyebrows rise. “But I’m pretty sure Anatoli loves mine being whiskey colored.”
