Bratva Bride (Underworld Daddies #3)

Chapter 1

Ivan

Sometimes in life, it’s the tiny little things that cause big changes. Bumping into an old friend. Choosing one coffee shop over another. Deciding to wear the blue shirt instead of the white.

That was other people’s lives. In my life as a high-ranking member in the Volkov Bratva, change always came in big packages.

Murder.

Deception.

Betrayal.

Or in this case, a fucking bomb.

I breathed in deep.

The monitors cast blue-white light across my face in the war room on the third floor of the compound. The smell was so familiar to me—hot electronics, coffee, the tang of distant blood.

My fingers moved across three keyboards simultaneously—left hand tracking federal chatter, right hand analyzing financial exposure, middle keyboard running facial recognition on the Brighton Beach security footage. The screens hummed. My eyes burned. I'd been here seventy-two hours.

Monitor six replayed the bombing at The Golden Samovar for the tenth time.

I watched the footage with the sound off.

I didn't need audio anymore—had memorized every detail. Before the attack, the restaurant had been full. Normal dinner service. A couple celebrating an anniversary at table twelve. Family with two kids at table seven, the little girl maybe five years old, wearing a pink dress. Our soldiers—Konstantin, Pavel, Yuri—occupied the corner booth, exactly where they should be for territorial presence. Two Morozov soldiers at the bar, watching, everyone wary of the messy war we’d been fighting for months.

The flash originated under table nine. White-hot explosion that overloaded the camera for 2.3 seconds. When the image returned, there was smoke. Fire. Bodies.

My jaw clenched. I forced it to relax. Counted to four.

The little girl in the pink dress died instantly.

Shrapnel to the chest. The anniversary couple survived with third-degree burns.

Konstantin, Pavel, Yuri—gone. The two Morozov soldiers—gone.

Three other civilians caught in the blast radius.

Seven people total. Four of them had nothing to do with our world. Four people who just wanted dinner.

Monitor one showed the federal response.

FBI, ATF, NYPD. They'd swarmed the scene within eleven minutes.

Someone—maybe the Morozovs—had tipped them off before the blast. The feds had cameras, evidence collection, witness interviews all documented within an hour.

Professional. Coordinated. Designed for maximum legal impact.

A RICO investigation was inevitable now. The federal prosecutor had been circling for eighteen months, looking for an opening. Four dead civilians gave her everything she needed.

I pulled up the cost analysis on monitor three. Legal fees for a RICO case: $3 million minimum. That was conservative. If they went after our seventeen legitimate business entities, seized assets, froze accounts—I ran the calculation three times. $11 million in potential losses. Maybe more.

My hands trembled on the keyboard.

I made fists. Forced them flat. Kept typing.

Monitor four tracked the Morozov communications we'd intercepted.

Viktor Morozov had gone silent after the blast. Complete radio blackout from their entire organization.

That meant one of two things: they'd planned the bombing and were covering tracks, or they were as blindsided as we were and scrambling to figure out what happened.

I pulled up the restaurant's purchase orders, electrical inspections, gas line maintenance records.

Monitor five displayed the blueprint. Monitor six still showed the explosion on loop.

I overlaid the blast pattern on the blueprint, calculated trajectory, tried to reverse-engineer the device placement.

The angle was wrong. If the Morozovs planted the bomb, they'd positioned it to maximize casualties on their own soldiers. That made no strategic sense.

My vision blurred. I blinked hard. The screens came back into focus.

3:00 AM. My phone alarm vibrated. Medication time.

I reached for the amber prescription bottle on the desk beside keyboard two. Beta-blockers, 40mg. Propranolol. My hands shook as I twisted the cap. Three pills spilled onto the desk. I corrected—took one, swallowed it dry. The bitter taste coated my throat.

My stomach growled. It was seventy-two hours since the bombing. Seventy-two hours since I'd slept. Maybe eighty since I'd eaten anything substantial. Clara had brought food yesterday—or was it the day before?—and I'd nodded, set it aside, forgotten it existed.

My body registered protests I'd learned to ignore. Headache building at the base of my skull. Tremor in my hands that the medication would suppress in twenty minutes. Hollow feeling in my stomach that wasn't quite hunger, more like my body had stopped expecting fuel.

I typed faster. Pulled more data. There had to be something I missed.

Monitor seven showed social media analysis—posts from people near the restaurant, news coverage, speculation running wild on Russian community forums. Everyone had a theory. No one had facts.

The monitors blurred again. I rubbed my eyes. Pressed my palms against them until I saw stars. When I opened them, the screens were still there, still showing the same nightmare from forty-seven different angles.

Missing details gets people killed.

The thought arrived with my grandmother's voice. Her rule. The one she'd drilled into me from the time I was twelve years old and started really understanding what the family business meant.

"Patterns are in everything, Vanya. Water, leaves, time. You just have to pay attention. The detail you miss is the one that kills you."

I'd missed the detail with her.

My hands were shaking violently now. I gripped the edge of the desk. The medication hadn't kicked in yet. Twenty minutes. I could hold on for twenty minutes.

Focus. The bombing. That's what mattered now.

I pulled up the footage again. Watched the flash.

Counted the seconds. 2.3 seconds of white light before the image returned.

The blast originated under table nine. The couple celebrating their anniversary had been sitting at table twelve.

If the device had been under table twelve instead, the angle would've taken out all three of our soldiers and none of the Morozov men.

Someone had miscalculated. Or the target had changed. Or—

The detail I was missing. It was right there. I could feel it like a splinter under my skin. Something in the timing, the placement, the federal response that was too coordinated.

I opened new windows. Started cross-referencing. The Morozov soldiers at the bar—who were they? I ran facial recognition. Names appeared. They were both low-level. Not the kind of soldiers you'd sacrifice in a bombing unless they knew something you needed to silence.

Unless they were the message.

Maybe the Morozov soldiers were the target? The bomb was meant to silence them. Our soldiers were collateral damage. The civilians were—

The door opened without a knock. Only two people had the override code for the war room—a security measure I'd implemented after realizing I'd locked myself in for eighteen hours straight during the Kozlov crisis last year.

Alexei entered first.

My oldest brother moved with the controlled precision of a man who'd been awake almost as long as I had.

Of course, you'd never know it from looking at him.

His suit was still pressed, charcoal gray with subtle pinstripes, white shirt crisp despite the hour.

Three-piece. Perfect Windsor knot. He'd probably been in meetings all night with our lawyers, our accountants, everyone scrambling to prepare for the federal shitstorm heading our way.

But his ice-blue eyes tracked across my face with the assessment that made him Pakhan. Taking inventory. Cataloging damage.

I looked away. Went back to monitor three.

Dmitry followed, filling the doorway with his bulk.

My middle brother wore tactical gear—black cargo pants, tight black t-shirt that showed every muscle, boots still caked with ash.

He'd must have visited the bombing site.

I could smell it on him, that acrid combination of burned plastic and wood smoke and something else.

Something organic I didn't want to identify.

His dark eyes held the same concern as Alexei's, but Dmitry never learned subtlety. He wore his heart on his fucking sleeve. Right now it was breaking for me.

I hated that.

"You're still here." Alexei's voice carried that particular tone—not quite a question, not quite a command. The voice of a man used to being obeyed.

"The situation is complex." I pulled up the financial analysis I'd been running.

Numbers I could control. Numbers made sense.

"I've calculated the federal exposure across our seventeen legitimate business entities. The restaurant bombing gives them probable cause for RICO warrants. It’s going to cost us a lot.

If they seize assets during investigation—"

"Ivan."

I kept typing. "—we're looking at $11 million across our businesses. That's assuming they only target the primary accounts. If they dig into the shell corporations, find the secondary—"

"Ivan." Dmitry's voice, closer now. He'd moved across the room while I was talking. "When did you last sleep?"

"Sleep is not the priority—" I gestured at monitor six, still showing the explosion on loop. "We have four dead civilians. Federal investigation. The Morozovs are silent, which means they're either guilty or preparing for war. I need to model probability outcomes before—"

"Vanya."

My fingers stopped. Alexei only used that name—our grandmother's name for me—when he was genuinely worried. Not just concerned. Worried.

"Three days," Alexei said quietly. "Clara says you haven't eaten. The food she brought yesterday is still sitting on your desk, untouched."

I glanced at the desk by the door. Thai takeout containers, congealed. I'd completely forgotten they existed.