Pride, Prejudice and The Brotherhood (Darkest Vows #2)

Chapter 1

ELENA

The warehouse reeked of gunpowder.

Not just the faint scent of it—but thick, suffocating clouds that burned the inside of my nose and coated my tongue in bitterness.

The metallic tang of blood clung to the air. It soaked into the concrete, into the splintered wood of shattered crates, into the torn fabric of the life I’d been barely clinging to for the past two months.

My hearing aid buzzed violently in my left ear.

A sharp crackle.

A high-pitched whine.

Then distortion.

I flinched, instinctively pressing a hand to it as if I could force it to cooperate.

The world of sound was already fragile for me. Now it came in broken fragments—muffled echoes, dull booms, the vibration of gunfire traveling through the soles of my bare feet.

I couldn’t hear clearly.

But I could feel everything.

The tremors in the ground.

The rush of bodies moving.

The heat of chaos closing in.

War had come to my prison.

“Easy... easy,” Dario’s voice reached me in uneven waves, distorted but recognizable.

Two strong hands steadied me—one on each side.

Dario stood at my right, his dark curls plastered to his forehead with sweat and grime. Blood streaked across his jaw, not all of it his.

His grip on my arm was firm but careful, as though I were made of glass. Ethan held my left, lean and tense, his sharp eyes scanning every shadow.

They were breathing hard.

We all were.

Behind us, Luca, Marco, Nico, and Vito moved in formation, weapons still raised, boots crunching over debris.

They looked like something pulled straight from a battlefield—clothes torn, faces smeared with soot and blood, expressions carved from stone.

They were not my blood brothers.

But they were mine.

My foster brothers. My protectors. My family.

For two months, this warehouse had been my cage.

Cold concrete walls. Rusted metal beams. No windows. No sunlight. Only flickering bulbs that hummed overhead like dying insects.

I had memorized every crack in the ceiling, every stain on the floor, every shadow where men stood and watched.

Where he stood and watched.

The masked man.

Even now, I could feel phantom traces of his presence—like oil on my skin that would never wash off.

“You should have known better than to reject me, Elena,” he had hissed one night, crouching in front of me while I knelt tied to a pillar. His breath seeped through the fabric of his mask. “So you will pay.”

My stomach twisted as memories clawed up my throat.

The filthy floor beneath my cheek.

The ropes cutting into my wrists.

His hands.

The laughter of his men circling like vultures.

No privacy. No mercy.

When it was over, I would bleed onto the concrete, red pooling beneath me while they watched. He would shove me aside with his boot, like discarded waste.

“Look at Baranov’s precious wife,” one of them would sneer. “Doesn’t look so precious now.”

I never screamed.

Sometimes because the gag stopped me.

Sometimes because I refused to give them the satisfaction.

It began the night the masked man tore me away from my six brothers. We were on our way to New York—my so-called fresh start after prison. I had barely tasted freedom when he took it from me again.

One second, I was surrounded by my brothers’ protection. The next, I was dragged into darkness.

That was two months ago.

Two months of silence. Of chains. Of learning how much pain a body can hold without dying.

And then the rescue came.

Not gently. It came like a storm ripping through hell.

At first, I thought it was another trick. Another performance meant to terrify me.

But then the explosions began.

I felt them before I heard them—deep concussive shocks that rattled my bones and made dust rain from the ceiling. The ropes around my wrists trembled as the ground shook.

Men started shouting.

Boots pounded.

Gunfire erupted.

My hearing aid screeched uselessly, overwhelmed by the chaos, reducing everything to broken noise and static. But I didn’t need perfect sound to know what was happening.

Someone had come.

Bullets tore through crates. Sparks exploded from metal beams. Bodies crashed into the concrete around me. I saw blood spray across the floor in violent arcs.

Then—

Him.

Ruslan.

Even through the haze of smoke and panic, I recognized him instantly.

Tall. Broad-shouldered. Dark coat flaring behind him like the wings of a predator descending. His face was set in cold fury, jaw tight, eyes burning with something lethal.

He didn’t shout my name.

He simply killed.

Efficient. Brutal. Precise.

Men fell around him as though death itself had taken human form. My brothers stormed in from the opposite side, their forces merging with his.

The masked man’s crew had fought back savagely, automatic weapons blazing in relentless bursts.

Horror had rooted me to the spot.

Bound to the steel pillar in the center of the warehouse, I could do nothing but watch.

The ropes around my wrists had long since cut through skin. My hands were numb, fingers tingling uselessly, but I still strained against the restraints as chaos swallowed the room.

One of Ruslan’s men—tall, broad, someone I vaguely remembered from the estate— had jerked violently as a bullet tore into his chest.

His body snapped backward, then collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut. He didn’t even have time to scream.

I flinched.

Luca.

My third brother.

He had roared—at least I saw the roar shape his mouth—as he lunged forward, blade flashing in the dim light.

He had moved recklessly, fury overriding caution. For a second, I thought he would reach the man who’d fired the shot.

Then steel met flesh.

An enemy sword slashed across Luca’s arm. Blood sprayed in a sharp arc, dark and vivid against the gray concrete.

He staggered but didn’t fall. His teeth bared.

But, one by one, the masked man’s soldiers dropped. Throats slit. Heads bashed. Bodies riddled with bullets. The air thickened with the copper stench of slaughter, so dense it felt like breathing through liquid metal.

The floor became slick.

My brothers fought harder.

More viciously.

Until—

Silence.

Not true silence.

Just the absence of enemy resistance.

Every last one of them lay dead.

The warehouse had transformed into a grotesque tableau of carnage.

And yet—their leader escaped.

My stomach dropped at the realization. The masked man.”

The monster who had stood over me just hours earlier, injecting himself with something clear and vile while I lay bound on the marble slab he’d dragged into the center of the room.

“Watch,” he’d ordered, gripping my chin. “You should understand what you do to men.”

The drug had made him manic.

Unhinged.

He had laughed as it coursed through his veins, pupils blown wide behind the mask. His hands had trembled with anticipation.

And then he’d taken his time.

Forcing me to watch the syringe empty.

Forcing me to watch his transformation.

Forcing me to endure what came next.

Now he had slipped into the shadows during the chaos.

Even Ruslan’s fury hadn’t caught him.

“Find him!” Ethan had barked, his voice faint and distorted in my ear.

My brothers had rushed to me.

Their faces—God—their faces.

Blood-smeared. Sweat-soaked. Eyes wild with fear when they looked at me.

Dario had reached me first, slicing through the ropes at my wrists. The cords fell away, but the damage remained. My skin was torn open in deep grooves, raw and swollen, as if I’d been branded.

Ethan had crouched in front of me. “Elena... look at me.”

I tried.

My vision blurred.

When they cut the ropes at my ankles, my legs buckled. Dario caught me under the arms before I hit the ground.

And then I felt it.

Warm.

Slow.

A trickle down my inner thighs.

Fresh blood.

Humiliation burned hotter than the pain.

Just minutes before the raid, the masked man had pinned me to the marble slab he’d placed in the center of the warehouse like some sick altar.

My hands bound above my head. My legs restrained. My mouth gagged so tightly I could barely breathe.

The marble had been freezing beneath my back.

His body had been suffocating above me.

The drug had made him relentless.

Manic. Cruel.

Every second stretched into an eternity. Every movement deliberate. He had wanted it to hurt.

And it did.

Now every shift of my weight sent sharp, stabbing pain through my abdomen. A burning ache tore through my core with each trembling breath.

My thighs shook violently as I tried to stand.

The bleeding wouldn’t stop.

It wasn’t dramatic. Not a gush. Not enough to make anyone panic at first glance.

Just a slow, steady seep.

It soaked through the torn fabric of what remained of my gown, warm against my thighs, sticky as it dried in the night air.

Each step made me aware of it again—the pull of wet cloth against torn skin, the humiliating reminder of what had been done to me for a good two months here in this warehouse.

Eight weeks since I’d been taken.

Eight weeks of hell.

And the physical wounds—raw wrists, torn skin, fever-burned veins—were nothing compared to what those weeks had done to my mind.

Sleep had become the enemy long before tonight.

Whenever exhaustion dragged me under, he followed.

The mask.

Always the mask.

Black. Featureless. Inhuman.

It hovered over me in dreams, his laughter echoing in warped fragments through my damaged hearing aid. Even when there was silence, I heard him. Even when I was alone, I felt watched.

Sometimes I would stare at the warehouse wall for hours, dissociating, letting my mind float somewhere far above my body just to survive what was happening to it.

Other times I woke—if I could call it waking—convulsing in silent screams, throat straining around a voice that no longer existed.

I had stopped trusting shadows.

Stopped trusting touch.

Even now, with my brothers surrounding me, protecting me, a part of me flinched when fingers brushed my arm.

Because for eight weeks, touch had only meant pain.

And consequences.

My stomach tightened as memory punched through me.

I forced myself to move forward.