Page 16 of Captured By the Masked BRATVA
I thread my fingers through hers. Together, we turn away from the stage, from the crowd that’s already slipping into something primal, and start toward the edge of the ballroom where her father waits, still holding court behind a mask that hides everything but greed.
Elena
We move through the crowd together, and every masked face turns to watch. The Orlov heir and the daughter of an enemy family, side by side. The whispers follow us like smoke.
I spot my father near the back of the ballroom, his silver mask glinting as he laughs too loudly with the men who orbit him. He looks exactly as he always does, controlled, certain, untouchable. But when his eyes find me, his smile falters.
“Papa,” I say flatly, my voice carrying more power than I expect.
He steps forward. “Elena. You shouldn’t be here. Not tonight.” His gaze cuts to Artem, sharp and dangerous. “Orlov.” His tone cuts through the music like static. “You’ve overstepped, dragging her into this.”
Artem doesn’t rise to it. He just stands there beside me, tall, composed, unflinching.
My father turns back to me. “What have you done, Elena? Please tell me you haven’t…” he trails off, the disgust in his voice makes something inside me snap.
“I’m leaving with Artem, Papa. I wanted to be the one to tell you myself.”
“You leave with him, and you disgrace this family. You didn’t ask permission. You didn’t even think what this looks like.” His voice drops lower, full of barely contained fury. “Do you haveany idea what you’ve done? What people will say? That he took you. That he—”
“Stop,” I say, the word catching hard in my throat. “I don’t care what they’re saying.”
He stares at me like he doesn’t recognise the woman standing in front of him. “You don’t get to decide that, Elena.”
“Yes, I do.”
The silence around us tightens. He’s still trying to intimidate me, but I’ve already lived through worse things than his temper. “You didn’t even notice I was gone from the ball. He came here to kill me, papa. Maybe you should be grateful the he wants to claim me instead.”
“That man took what wasn’t his,” my father growls. “He defiled you.”
“He chose me,” I say, and the truth of it comes out like a knife drawn from its sheath.
He steps closer, anger bleeding through the cracks in his composure. “You’re making a mistake.”
Artem’s voice cuts through the space between us, low and lethal. “Lay one finger on her, Donskoy, and you’ll see what lengths I go to to protect what’s mine.”
My father’s head snaps toward him. “You think you can take my only daughter without my consent, without consequence?”
“I think,” Artem says quietly, “that I already did. Granted, my intentions tonight were to end her life, to make you pay for what happened to my brother...but life is nothing if not full of surprises.”
The air between them hums with danger. My father knows better than to push, but pride is a hard habit to kill. His jaw flexes; then he exhales through his nose, slow and poisonous.
“You’ve humiliated me tonight. You’ve shamed your family,” he says to me. “If you walk out with him, you don’t ever come back.”
“I won’t,” I say. “Because I finally know where I belong.”
For a heartbeat, everything is still. Then Artem’s hand finds the small of my back. “We’re done here.”
He leads me through the crowd, past the whispers and the masks and the heavy pulse of music, and I don’t look back. Not once.
Artem
The drive back into the city is silent.
Elena leans her head against the window, the streetlights sliding across her face in gold streaks that make her look half real, half a dream. I keep one hand on the wheel, the other clenched against my thigh, fighting the urge to reach for her.
By the time we reach my building, the world outside has gone quiet, the kind of quiet that only comes before dawn. The elevator hums as it carries us to the top floor, thirty-two stories above the noise.
When the doors open, she steps out ahead of me. The penthouse is mostly glass and concrete, cold by design. It’s never felt like home, just a vantage point. But when she walks in, barefoot, her heels and mask held loosely in her hand, something shifts. The space feels smaller. Warmer. Dangerous.
