BRATVA’S Poisoner Bride (BRATVA’S Dangerous Brides #3)

Elizabeth

The ink on the page is older than I am, soft and feathered into the paper like it’s been whispered into a hundred times.

My grandmother’s handwriting curls across the yellowed sheet in looping Cyrillic, careful and patient.

In the margins she drew tiny symbols only the women in my family ever understood.

A flower where something healed. A circle with a cross through it where something didn’t.

I slide my fingertip along the note I’ve read so often I can feel it in my bones.

For young brides only.

Then, hidden behind a picture of a plant that has been stitched to the page:

Not for men. Weakens the flesh without lingering in the blood.

There’s a pressed sprig beside it, brittle with age. Once it was green. Alive. Now it’s nothing but a shadow of what it used to be.

A bit like me, I guess.

The kitchen smells like boiling water and cardamom. It should be comforting, this room used to be, but nothing’s been comfortable here in years.

My mother’s laugh used to live inside these walls, bright and careless. My grandmother’s softer voice used to weave underneath it, explaining which leaf eased fever, which flower coaxed sleep, which herbs belonged where in the garden and the kitchen.

Nobody laughs here now.

Steam rolls around my wrists as I lift the kettle.

My reflection in the metal warps, my eyes stretched, mouth thin.

It’s a stranger looking back. I set the kettle beside the tray I’ve arranged with the precision of a ritual.

Two cups. Two saucers. Sugar bowl. Lemon slices fanned like petals.

My grandmother always said tea is a conversation, and every detail matters.

Her diary lies open in front of me. The ink is faded now, soft and brown. My own symbols cut through the page in stark black. A secret code meant only for me.

Three months: appetite fading. Increased dose by half.

Five months: tremor in hands, occasional slur. Increased dose by half again.

Six months: hair loss, pallid skin. Dose doubled.

The evolution between healer and whatever I’ve become sits there in two sets of handwriting. Her kindness. My control.

I reach for the little jar tucked behind the sugar canister. The outside’s plain glass, nothing special. Inside is a graveyard of leaves and roots, dried and crushed and quiet. The smell hits me when I pull the cork lid, thin, bitter, a whisper of something old and wild.

“Only a pinch,” my grandmother once told me, guiding my small hand with hers. “For women who struggle.”

I hadn’t understood then. I do now.

The tiny spoon whispers against the herbs as I dip it in. My hand doesn’t shake. It hasn’t in a long time. The first time I did this, I could barely breathe. Now it feels like part of me. Like choosing myself.

A pinch, then a second, disappears among the tea leaves in one cup. I stir until it’s combined.

Steam curls up from the kettle as I pour.

Amber swirls through the water. Time folds in on itself.

For a second, I’m a girl again, twelve years old, watching my mother laugh as she stirs soup, my grandmother arguing gently with her about “too much salt, Yelena,” and both of them turning to smile at me, like I belonged to something warm and whole.

Before Piotr. Before fear. Before funerals and anger and silence.

I close the diary softly, pressing my palm over its cracked leather. It still conjures up memories with just a touch, and I close my eyes and take a breath. I tuck it back in its hiding place beneath the floorboard in front of the cupboard where we store pickled vegetables.

I turn back to the tray. Two cups. Only one is tainted.

I slide my hands under the tray. The china rattles, and I take a moment to steady myself. This should be it. The final dose if I’ve done my math right and my observations are anything to go by.

The hallway stretches long and quiet as I walk, lined with portraits of ancestors my father pretends to care about. Their stares follow me. Stern men, hollow-eyed women, the ghosts of expectations I stopped trying to meet years ago.

When I reach the office door, the voices seep through before I even touch it.

“—it’s time,” Piotr is saying, sharp and irritated. “She is getting older… soon will be too old… can you honestly say you’ve had a better offer?”

My father’s reply cracks like something worn down. “I can’t understand it. She is a beautiful young woman, educated, intelligent, would make a fine wife—”

“You’ve had time to find an appropriate husband for her.” A chair scrapes. Piotr’s voice is a sickening thing. “And you’ve run out. A deal is a deal, and I want what was promised.”

I stop just short of the door. My pulse stays steady. It always does near him now. Panic belongs to another lifetime, before I learned that being calm is deadlier.

“I promised you five years,” Piotr says. “That five years is up today.”

The world tilts. Not enough to topple me, just enough to split something open inside.

“Are you sure Yelena agreed to this?” my father asks sharply, and for a second, he almost sounds like the man he used to be.

But Piotr only laughs. “Your daughter was promised to me, Lukan, and I’ve been a reasonable man but even I have my limit. It’s time she became my wife. Then we can both rest knowing our bloodlines will continue.”

My fingers tighten around the tray. Hot tea ripples.

A wife. His wife.

A life spent under the hand of the man who killed my mother.

The panic tries to rise, but something heavier presses over it. Something thicker and darker, like smoke. Like destiny dragging its finger down my spine and whispering: Finish what you started.

I look down at the cups. One life. One death.

My father’s voice comes through the door, hoarse and defeated. “I just don’t understand why she’s had no other offers.”

Piotr claps his meaty hands together. “That settles it then. Yelena would be pleased,” he says, triumphant and smug. “Her daughter will be well looked after.”

Silence. Long and heavy.

Then, barely audible—

“Fine.”

The word breaks something I didn’t know I was still holding.

Not the girl, she died with my mother, but the woman who still had a tiny bit of faith tucked away in her father.

I shift the tray in my hands, smoothing my expression into something quiet and dutiful. The kind of face men like Piotr never look at twice.

And then I knock on the door.