Page 49 of Forced Pregnant Prisoner of the Bratva
The warehouse reeks of iron and cordite, smoke curling in ghostly ribbons that cling to the rafters. Blood slicks the concrete in wide arcs, black under the jaundiced light. Bodies lie twisted, grotesque shapes left in the wake of steel and gunfire.
My pulse still thunders from the fight, lungs dragging air heavy with the copper stench of spilled life.
I drag my blade across the front of my shirt, streaking red into black fabric. The motion is steady, practiced. My chest heaves, but my hands don’t tremble. The echoes of violence still hum in my bones. It’s muscle memory, instinct replaying each strike, each shot, each breath stolen from the men who thought they could take me.
Ahead, Denis Volkov staggers. His suit hangs in shreds, one arm limp at his side, blood dripping in a steady patter that blends with the spreading pool underfoot. His eyes are wild, red-veined, frothing with hatred. He spits blood, a spray of red against the floor, and bares his teeth like an animal cornered.
“You think this ends with me?” His voice cracks, hoarse and broken. “You’ll choke on your own empire, Sharov. One day, it’ll eat you alive.”
For years, the Volkovs have been shadows at my heels, snapping and circling, their name whispered in dark corners as if it carried weight. And now the last of them sways before me, broken, desperate, still clinging to the idea that he matters.
I study him with no more feeling than I’d give a column in a ledger. This isn’t triumph. It’s arithmetic. One line item, years overdue, finally brought to zero.
Denis takes a stumbling step forward, his smirk faltering as he realizes I don’t need his curses, his warnings, his dying breath. I need only the end.
I move before he can raise another insult, the blade a natural extension of my arm. The strike is sharp, merciless, steel sinking into flesh with a wet crack that reverberates in the silence. Denis’s body jerks, mouth open on a soundless snarl. The smirk dies first, then the light in his eyes. I rip the blade free,and he collapses, crumpled like all the others, another shadow burned out beneath my boots.
For a second, satisfaction flares bright and hot. Years of rivalry, of knives in the dark and whispered threats, reduced to this one final silence.
The flare fades almost instantly, hollow at the core. The war is won. The Volkovs are erased. My empire is secure again, stitched tight with fear and consequence.
Yet my mind is already circling elsewhere. Not the spoils of victory, not the weight of command. It drifts to her. To Karmia, pacing halls that echo like tombs, her eyes wide with the memory of my fury. To the way her voice cracked when she told me to stop, the plea that still clings in the back of my skull.
I step over Denis’s corpse, blade still dripping, boots slick with blood. The empire holds. The night is mine. In the quiet that follows, all I can think of is the woman waiting in my house, and the truth I haven’t yet named.
Miron emerges from the smoke like a shadow given shape, his boots dragging across the blood-slick floor. In one fist he grips the collar of a broken man, a survivor barely conscious, his head lolling with every step. In the other hand, glinting faintly under the harsh warehouse lights, is something far more dangerous.
Karmia’s phone.
Miron tosses the prisoner aside like garbage, then holds the device out between two fingers. His face is calm, unreadable beneath the grime and blood.
“We cracked it open,” he says, voice steady. “Nothing. No messages. No coordinates. No signal bouncing back to Volkov. It was a corpse. Dead tech.”
The words should hit like relief, but they don’t. They cut sideways, sharp in a place I don’t want touched. My jaw locks. I glance at the phone, then back to him, unwilling to take it.
Miron tilts his head, studying me like he’s dissecting the fracture lines in stone. “Any woman in her position would have used it. To beg for rescue. To cut a deal. To save her own skin.” His voice doesn’t rise. Doesn’t accuse. He simply lays it out with the calm certainty of a man holding a mirror too close. “The fact that she didn’t speaks louder than anything you think you saw.”
I hate the logic. Hate the way it threads into me like a splinter. My suspicion has always been my shield, the armor that kept me alive when trust meant a knife in the spine. I built an empire on doubt. Betrayal has been the only constant, the only lesson I could never unlearn.
Yet I think of her face, pale and stricken in the headlights, the terror that wasn’t calculation but raw fear. The way her hands shook as she threw the phone away, as if cutting herself free from something she couldn’t name.
I grind my teeth, shaking my head. “You’re too quick to believe.” The words are harsh, sharper than I intend. “Volkov could have stripped it clean before giving it to her. He wanted us exposed, not her exonerated.”
Miron doesn’t flinch. “Maybe. You saw her, and I know you, Brother—you’re not arguing with me. You’re arguing with yourself.”
His calm is a knife I can’t block. I turn away, shoving the weight of his words aside, clinging to suspicion like a drowning man to driftwood. To believe otherwise would mean admitting weakness. Admitting that, for one breath, I lowered the gun not out of calculation, but out of something I don’t want to name.
The phone lies cold and silent in Miron’s hand, its emptiness louder than all the gunfire that tore this place apart.
We leave the wreckage behind, boots echoing over concrete still slick with blood. Denis Volkov’s corpse is cooling in the dark, the war won. My chest feels hollow, unbalanced, as though a piece of me was carved out and left behind.
***
Victory tastes like ash when certainty slips through my fingers.
The car rolls up the long drive, gravel grinding under the tires. The mansion looms above, windows glowing like watchful eyes. My body hums with exhaustion and victory, shirt torn and clinging with sweat, knuckles raw, blood staining my sleeves. The battle is still in me, buzzing in bone and muscle, violence with nowhere left to go.
Then I see her.
