Page 13 of Forced Pregnant Prisoner of the Bratva
The hum of the servers under the floor is a steady pulse, the kind that keeps men awake and machines honest. It fills the silence between my thoughts, steady and indifferent. I watch the screens until the images start to feel like flesh.
On one feed, small and boxed, she moves. Karmia, they called her. The hacker. The girl who pried a hole into my world.
She paces at first, the cadence nervous and defiant both—bare feet, hoodie draped like armor, the marks of zip ties faint and angry on her wrists.
At times she sits, jaw clenched, eyes tracking the door as if expecting the next blade to slip in. Other moments, she simply stares at the concrete wall, the same blind courage I’ve seen in other men when they decide to die on their feet rather than kneel. It fascinates me. It annoys me. It wakes an angle of curiosity I keep locked away.
I replay her face in my head the way others turn prized knives over their palms. The first time Ivan pulled the blindfold from her, she should have been small and broken, an animal come to heel. Instead she gave me that stubborn silence, the tight set of her mouth. She looked at me like a thing that had been wronged and decided, in spite of everything, not to plead.
Dangerous, yes. Interesting, yes.
My hands, big and scarred, are careful on the glass screen as I tap it once. The feed magnifies, the pixels resolving into theslack of her shoulders, the way her fingers flex when she runs them along the edge of the metal bench.
I think of the men I’ve broken in similar rooms—how quickly their defiance curdled into useful information. I think of the women I’ve had used as symbols, trophies, alliances. Everything has its price, everything its use.
If she knows nothing, if she’s a hired ghost with no strings attached, I can close this clean. Dispose. A quick end. No parade. No problem. The logic is simple and sharpened by years of practice. Yet the thought of discarding this, whatever it is, grinds in my teeth. Waste is its own kind of crime. Talent is rarer than loyalty, and a mind that can thread a fortress and laugh at its locks… such a thing is a blade you sharpen, not a stone you throw away.
Miron’s voice echoes in the background of memory—cold, amused, always seeing the world as a gameboard. He’d argue the same: a mind like that could be turned into an instrument.
Ivan’s face when he uncovered her rigs—pride and worry braided together—says they did not capture a common thief. The elders expect a scapegoat to be displayed and blood to be spilled to close the wound. They will demand satisfaction. They will want spectacle.
Spectacle is for them. Strategy is mine.
I pull back from the screen and let my thumb rub the rim of the untouched glass. There are a dozen ways to make a girl useful. Teach her fear until she trades names for bread. Break her until she reshapes into what I need: a confession, a bargaining chip, a ghost who walks into rival lairs and opens doors. Or retrain her. Make her small, yes, but sharp.
The idea settles like iron on my tongue. There is an efficiency in keeping her alive, in making her necessary. Killingquiets one problem; repurposing creates thirty solutions. It is a calculus of patience and cruelty, the arithmetic I understand best.
She shifts on the screen, presses her palms to the concrete as if testing for weaknesses. The sight is almost tender. I tell myself I’m not sentimental. I only appreciate utility. The line between appreciation and interest is thinner than most men expect.
“Bring her to me in the morning,” I say at last, voice low, not loud enough to startle. There’s a weight in the order—a command that doesn’t ask.
Outside the office, footsteps answer—quick, certain, the machinery of obedience. I turn back to the monitors one more time. The pale light paints the contour of her face. For now she is a question.
The thought hits me like a clean strike—sharp, inevitable. A marriage would end the whispers in the council chamber, silence the elders, placate allies who want me tethered. Rivals would think twice before reaching for her once she bore my name. With a single move, the problem becomes solution.
I lean back in my chair, let the leather creak under the shift of my weight, and taste the idea slow. Her stubbornness—the way she bit down on silence even when my fist cracked the wall beside her—already I can imagine it splintering beneath decisions she had no say in. Her defiance turned into obedience, her spirit caught raw under my control. The humiliation of it curls through me like smoke. It would prove what I already know: she isn’t a player at my table. She’s my pawn.
My mind flicks to the Sokolov girl, the one the elders want. Docile, dressed in silk, an ornament with no edge. A leash, nothing more. I will never wear it.
Karmia, though—she’s sharp. Bright. Dangerous. A blade I can sheathe when it suits me, brandish when I choose. And in my world, a blade like that is worth more than gold. More satisfying to wield.
For the first time tonight a smile touches my mouth. Faint. Edged with cruelty. Rare enough that Ivan would mark it, rarer still that Miron might.
Still it’s there, sharp as broken glass. The pieces have aligned.
On the monitors, she paces her cell, restless, stubborn, not yet broken. I picture her somewhere else—walking into the next Bratva council on my arm. The old men choking on their cigars, their voices snuffed out in one glance. The Sokolovs silenced before they can even open their mouths. Enemies watching, realizing she belongs to me now. Untouchable. Claimed.
“Something amuses you, Brother?” Miron’s voice cuts from the doorway, smooth and cold as ever. He’s leaning against the frame, hands in his pockets, eyes narrowing at the rare curve of my mouth.
I don’t answer right away. I sip smoke instead, let the idea steep deeper, darker. “I’ve found the solution,” I murmur finally.
Ivan shifts from his place near the wall, wary as ever. “What solution is that? To silence her, or make an example?”
“Neither,” I say, voice steady. “She won’t be discarded. She’ll be displayed.”
Miron’s eyebrow arches. “Displayed?”
“On my arm,” I reply, my tone as flat as the edge of a blade. “At the council. In the streets. Everywhere eyes are watching.”
