Page 3 of Forced Pregnant Prisoner of the Bratva
“Talk.” My voice is low, a command carved sharp enough to cut.
Ivan swallows again, his eyes flickering toward the monitors. “The firewalls buckled. Too much incoming traffic. Layered, masked, hidden through proxies. Hundreds. Thousands, maybe. We caught alarms—everywhere at once. We tried to trace it, but…” He falters.
“But you failed.”
His silence is the only admission I need.
“What did they take.”
His answer comes quiet, strangled. “Financials. Laundering paths. Contact chains. Maybe more. We cut power mid-stream, but damage was done.”
I feel it like a blade sliding between ribs. Months of operations, maybe years. Fragile networks stitched together through bribes, threats, bodies buried so deep they should never have surfaced. In a single night, gone.
I don’t move. The stillness makes Ivan sweat. He knows this stillness. Knows it better than anyone.
Then I slam my fist into the desk. The sound cracks like thunder, rattling glass, sending papers skittering to the floor in pale, fluttering panic. A glass tips and shatters, shards scattering across the concrete.
“Who?” My voice tears through the room. “Who touched my system?”
“We don’t know yet,” Ivan blurts, words rushing like he thinks speed will soften them. “Not amateurs. This was precise, surgical. Whoever it was knew where to push.”
I stalk the length of the room, pacing tight circles. My blood roars in my ears, anger lashing sharp with every step. Violence is how I keep control, but fists don’t mean anything here. This isn’t a battlefield of men and knives and bullets. This is wires and shadows. Numbers. It taunts me because I can’t break it with my hands.
“Why wasn’t it stopped?” The words crack out, one after the other. “Why do I pay for security if my walls fall in an hour? Why are my men watching cameras instead of catching this?”
“We tried—”
“That’s not good enough.”
The monitors flare brighter, drowning the room in blue. It paints my face in cold fire, reflection fractured across everyscreen. I don’t look whole anymore. My empire doesn’t look whole anymore.
My mind pulls forward, racing through the worst possibilities. Shipments flagged at customs. Accounts frozen. Rivals sitting smug with knowledge of my routes, my laundering trails, my secrets. Foreign hands waiting to slip in and cut my throat while I bleed from the inside out. The government… always hungry, always waiting for a crack.
The hum of servers gnaws louder, mechanical mockery, as if the machines themselves know what I’ve lost.
“No one does this to me.” My voice is low, but it carries, steady in a way fury shouldn’t be. “No one reaches into my house, my empire, and walks away.”
Ivan shifts, the fear in his posture clashing with the loyalty etched into his face. He doesn’t speak. Smart.
“They want to fight me in the dark?” My hand drags across the desk, scattering papers like ash. “Then I’ll drag them out into the light. I’ll carve their names from the wires they hide behind. And when I have them, I’ll make sure they understand—”
I turn, eyes locking on Ivan, and he flinches at the sharpness in my gaze.
My fists curl, the ache of split knuckles pulsing, reminding me of what I do best. Violence is language, and I’ll speak it fluently when I find the one who dared touch me.
Whoever they are, they’ve made a mistake.
The doors slam open, hard enough to rattle the glass along the walls. The room swallows a different kind of army now—hoodies pulled tight, glasses reflecting the glow of monitors, quiet men with fingers sharpened into weapons. They look out of place among men who bleed for me with fists and guns, but Iknow better. These are killers too, only their battlefield is made of wires and shadows.
At their head is Miron.
My brother moves with deceptive ease, tall frame angled with lazy grace, lean like he’s been carved from steel. The sharpness in his gaze betrays it, though—cold, analytical, cruel in ways even I can’t match.
Where I break men’s bones, he dismantles empires one keystroke at a time. He carries the Sharov blood in him, ruthless as I am, but his cruelty is intellectual. Detached. It’s what makes him dangerous, and what makes him mine.
Still, every time I look at him, I see both my greatest asset and the reminder of a kind of power I can’t cage.
“Rostya,” he greets me softly, voice pitched calm, like he’s walking into a library and not a battlefield. “You’ve made a mess.”
