Page 11 of Forced Pregnant Prisoner of the Bratva
My hands are trembling so violently they feel like they belong to someone else. My throat throbs, every swallow sharp and hot where his fingers pressed.
When I touch the skin lightly, it’s already tender, bruises blooming under my fingertips. My chest still heaves, and everymuscle feels wired, weak, like I’ve run miles without moving an inch.
I’m alive. That much is obvious. The question gnaws at the edges of my mind—alive for how long?
I draw my knees up to my chest, arms wrapping around them, forehead resting on the soft fabric of my hoodie. My pulse still slams at my temples, loud enough to drown the trickle of water and the hum of some distant machine. Surviving one more night, does that even count as victory? Or is it just stretching out the inevitable, a slow countdown instead of an execution?
For the first time, the enormity of this hits me fully. There’s no screen to hide behind. No code to slip through. No username, no encryption, no anonymity. Only me, stripped down to bone and fear, sitting in the dark with a predator who can reach out and close his hand around my throat any time he wants.
The image of his eyes rises again, unbidden—icy, cruel, magnetic. I can still feel the weight of his stare like a bruise on my skin. Terror sits heavy in my chest, but under it, something colder grows. Calculation. If I want to survive, defiance won’t be enough.
A sound outside the cell makes me lift my head. A guard shifting his stance, boots scraping against stone. Voices murmur in Russian, low and clipped. I can’t understand the words, but the tone carries finality, command. The sound tightens something invisible around my neck, like a noose drawing closer with each passing minute.
I realize it then: survival won’t come from outlasting them. It won’t come from waiting for a crack to appear. It will require more than defiance, more than hope. I’ll have to think like him—cold, precise, deliberate. If I don’t start mapping hisweaknesses the way I map a system, I’ll be dead before I have the chance.
The cell feels smaller now, the air heavier. The damp creeps deeper into my skin, cold worse than before, or maybe it’s just me sinking into it. I pull my knees tighter to my chest, nails biting into my sleeves, trying to hold what little warmth I have left.
I stare at the door, its rust-flaked bars and heavy hinges, waiting for it to open again. Waiting for boots on concrete. Not knowing if the next visit will be the end of me or the chance I’ve been waiting for. The cell seems to breathe with me, dark and patient, like it already knows which way the story ends.
Chapter Six - Rostya
The council room reeks of smoke and power. Heavy curtains blot out the night, trapping the haze of cigars beneath the high ceiling. Polished wood gleams under dim light, the table a dark mirror ringed with men who pretend to be equals but know better.
Vodka sits in cut-glass tumblers, sharp scent cutting through the musk, but none of it is touched. Not yet.
The air thickens when I step through the doors. Silence settles like ash. No word spoken, no chair shifts, but I feel it. The room bends, eyes tilting toward me, suspicion sharp as knives. The breach hangs over us like blood on the floor, unseen but stinking, and every gaze says the same thing:if my walls can be breached, so can theirs.
I take my seat. I don’t need to clear my throat, don’t need to announce myself. Attention is already mine.
“Is the empire compromised?” The question comes soft from the far end, but its edge is meant to cut.
Another follows, cloaked in diplomacy. “Could someone inside be… feeding the enemy?”
The smoke twists upward, veiling the pause I allow before answering. Calm. Clipped. I don’t rush. My words are deliberate, the way a knife slides into a sheath.
“The culprit has been caught,” I say, voice steady, low enough that men must lean forward to catch every syllable. “The interrogation will strip truth from them soon enough. There is no compromise. Only delay.”
No one breathes for a beat. Then the scrape of a chair leg breaks the silence, and the council shifts, restless but cautious.My tone carries what my words don’t: doubt me and you’ll learn the cost.
Still, one pair of eyes lingers. Narrowed. Testing.
I let mine find him. I don’t blink. I don’t speak. The silence stretches, heavier with each second, until the weight of it presses like a hand at his throat. He lasts longer than most—ten seconds, maybe twelve—before his gaze falters, sliding down to the table.
I sip my vodka at last. The burn cuts sharp down my throat, and the room exhales as if permission has been given.
I don’t raise my voice. I don’t need to. The inevitability of me is louder than shouting, and they all hear it.
The talk of business dwindles the way a storm drags itself out, leaving behind heavy air. Ledgers closed, agreements nodded through, the elders settle deeper in their chairs. Cigars glow, vodka pours. The smoke thickens until the chandeliers blur, and with it comes the inevitable shift.
Business gives way to politics, and politics to the matter they consider just as vital: bloodlines, marriages, the weaving of names into chains stronger than steel.
One of the elders leans forward, his voice slow, oily with familiarity. “It has been long expected,” he says, tapping ash into a silver tray, “that your betrothal to the Sokolov girl be finalized. A union of such weight would steady the empire in the eyes of those who watch us.”
The words scrape against me. I’ve heard them before, over years that bleed into each other, each repetition wearing thinner at the thread of my patience. To them she is an asset, a seal pressed into wax. To me, she’s a set of shackles, her name a chain, her family a prison. An alliance forged not from loyaltybut from obligation, another hand reaching to control what I’ve built with my own blood.
My irritation sharpens into something cold, brittle. Enough.
I don’t wait for him to finish the sentence. My voice cuts through the smoke, steel splitting air. “I already have a fiancée.”
