The Russian’s Forced Pregnant Captive (Kamarov Bratva #10)

Prologue – Gregory

I wasn’t supposed to feel anything.

That was my purpose.

Volkov was always loud after midnight—not celebratory exactly, but charged like the air before a storm that hadn’t decided yet whether it wanted to destroy something.

Smoke hung in layers beneath the ceiling lights.

Vodka moved around the table in a rotation so practiced it had become ritual.

The bass from the speakers lived in your chest if you let it, a second heartbeat you hadn’t asked for.

I didn’t let it.

I sat back in my chair, glass in hand, and watched my brothers be loud without me.

That was my usual position in these things.

Slightly removed. Present enough that no one questioned it, distant enough that I could see the whole room without being part of it.

Old habit. The kind you stop noticing after enough years because it stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like anatomy.

Across the table, Luka and Damir were destroying each other over a harbor worker who had apparently dropped a crate of product into Lake Michigan.

The details kept shifting with each retelling, the crate getting heavier, the worker getting stupider, Luka’s voice climbing the kind of octave that meant he had already lost the argument and hadn’t figured it out yet.

“Three years,” Damir said flatly. “The man has moved our shipments for three years without a single problem—”

“Until the problem was at the bottom of the lake, Damir—”

“One mistake—”

“An expensive one.”

Yegor sat at the far end of the table and said absolutely nothing, which was his contribution to most conversations.

He stared at a point somewhere past Luka’s shoulder with the expression of a man silently calculating how many more minutes he was required to be present before leaving became acceptable.

Luka turned to him anyway. “Well?”

“No.”

“I haven’t asked you anything yet.”

“You were about to.” Yegor picked up his glass. “The answer is still no.”

Stephen, sitting beside him with a glass of water because Stephen had never needed alcohol to be the most unsettling person in any room, set it down quietly and looked at Luka. “Let it go.”

“I’m not—”

“You are.” A pause. “Let it go.”

Luka let it go then immediately started a different argument about something else entirely, and the table shifted with him the way it always did, because that was just the weather in our world—loud, circular, and strangely comfortable if you’d lived in it long enough.

I watched all of it and felt a stillness that had become the closest thing I’d had to peace.

Not happiness. I wasn’t confused about what I was. But on nights like this, between assignments, between problems that needed dissolving—on these rare, borrowed nights—there was an absence of pressure that almost passed for rest.

I was not a man who got attached to rest.

But I’ll admit, I’d just decided it was a decent night.

Then my phone buzzed.

One vibration. I glanced down.

Matvey.

The stillness inside me sharpened into something else entirely.

The Pakhan didn’t text. That was simply not a thing that happened.

Matvey Kamarov communicated through summoning, through silence, and looks that made men straighten their spines without understanding why.

The fact that his name was on my screen, in writing, at midnight, meant something had shifted.

Something quiet and significant and requiring no witnesses.

I read the message.

I need a word with you. Come outside. No one should know.

Twelve words. And somehow every single one of them landed differently than the one before it.

I set the phone face down, picked up my jacket from the back of the chair, and stood.

“Calling it a night,” I said.

The table didn’t stop. Luka glanced at me, read whatever he read in my face—which was nothing, which was the point—and gave a single nod. Yegor didn’t look up. Damir raised two fingers in something that might have been a farewell.

I walked out without looking back.

***

The Chicago night was cold and unapologetic, smelling like exhaust and damp concrete and the ghost of lake wind that cut between buildings like it had somewhere important to be. I stepped off the curb and stopped.

The SUV was already there.

Black, unmarked, sitting across the street with its lights off and its engine silent, I’d seen Matvey’s vehicles enough times to know them by their absence. No plates that meant anything. No driver visible through the glass. Present by design. Invisible by design. ‘

I crossed the street.

The door opened before I reached it.

Inside was warm, and the air carried something I’d never been able to name—cedar, maybe, or something older than that. Matvey sat in the far corner, his face half-lit by the ambient glow from the street. A folder rested across his knee.

I got in and closed the door.

Silence.

This was one of the few things I genuinely respected about Matvey Kamarov.

He didn’t need to fill the silence. Most powerful men did; they mistook quiet for a loss of ground and rushed to reclaim it with words.

Matvey understood that silence was just another kind of language, and he had spoken it longer than most men had been alive.

He let it settle. Then: “Tomas Alvarez.”

I waited.

“You know who he is.”

“Latin businessman,” I said. “Real estate, trade. His daughter married Yegor.”

“His eldest daughter.” A pause that had something deliberate in it. “There is a younger one. Sofia.” He said the name the way you say something you’ve been thinking about for longer than you’ve admitted. “Twenty-two. Medical student. She has nothing to do with her father’s business.”

I noted it. Filed it. “All right.”

Matvey looked out the window. Whatever was moving behind his eyes, he kept it behind them. “There are reports that Tomas has been supplying arms to rival factions in Chicago. Quietly, through layered channels built specifically so nothing traces back to a single name.”

He turned to me then, fully, the weight of it direct and without softening. “He has been doing this, if the reports are true, while sheltered by the truce we honored at Yegor’s wedding. While sitting at our table.”

The temperature in the car didn’t change.

Something else did.

“You want confirmation,” I said.

“I want the truth.” His voice was the same as it always was—even, composed, the way a man sounds when he has already walked through every possible outcome in his mind and chosen which one he can live with.

“The truce matters. Yegor’s marriage matters.

I won’t move against the Alvarez name without certainty.

” A beat. “But if Tomas has betrayed us—”

He left it there. He didn’t need to finish it. Men like us didn’t need sentences finished.

He held out the folder.

I took it.

“Why me?” The question was genuine. I was an enforcer. I was the end of a process, not the middle. There were men better built for this kind of quiet, careful work.

Matvey’s expression shifted. Not quite a smile. Something drier than that, something that lived in the space between amusement and certainty.

“Because this mission requires someone who lacks emotions,” he said.

The words sat in the air between us.

I turned them over once. Found the edge in them—because Matvey always put edges in things—and recognized it wasn’t an insult. It was a diagnosis. A deliberate one.

I filed it. Opened the folder.

Her photograph was on top.

Sofia Alvarez. Twenty-two. Dark hair, olive skin, brown eyes that the camera had caught mid-look—not at the lens, but slightly past it.

Like something just out of frame had caught her attention at exactly the wrong moment.

Or the right one. She wasn’t performing for whoever was holding the camera.

She was just…existing. Caught in the middle of a thought that had nothing to do with being looked at.

It was an unguarded face.

I noted it and moved on.

The rest of the folder was clean and precise: shell companies, financial routing that bent in directions money shouldn’t naturally bend, names of rival faction leaders whose operations had quietly expanded over the past eight months with no visible explanation.

The architecture of it was careful. Deliberate. Built by someone who understood how to hide inside legitimacy.

Someone had been constructing something. And they had been doing it slowly, patiently, from inside the shelter of a name the Bratva had no reason to question.

Until now.

I closed the folder.

“The younger daughter,” Matvey said. “Sofia. She is your way in. Alvarez keeps his business separate from his family—but he is not untouched by them. She is close to him. Close enough.” A pause. “Proximity to her places you near enough to learn what you need to learn.”

Use the girl to get to the father. Clean. Logical.

I’d done worse for less.

“How much time?”

“As much as the truth requires.” He looked at me steadily. “But understand, Gregory: If Alvarez is guilty, there will be no delay for sentiment. Not even Yegor’s marriage changes that.”

“And if he’s innocent?”

The question landed in the silence and stayed there a moment.

“Then the real traitor,” Matvey said quietly, “is still inside our walls. And that becomes a very different problem.”

***

The SUV pulled away without a sound and disappeared around the corner.

I stood on the empty street with the folder under my arm and the city pressing in from all sides—noise from somewhere, wind off the lake, the distant rhythm of Volkov still breathing two blocks away as if nothing had happened.

Which, technically, nothing had.

I’d been given an assignment. I would complete it. That was the full, uncomplicated shape of my life, and I’d stopped expecting it to be anything else long enough ago that I no longer noticed the absence of expectation.

Someone who lacks emotions.

I’d been called worse. I’d been called nothing at all, which was somehow more accurate.

I was the Bratva’s blade. I’d accepted that the way you accept anything inevitable—without drama, without protest, with just the quiet recognition that this was the shape of the thing and no amount of looking at it differently was going to change the shape.

A blade doesn’t need to understand itself. It only needs to be sharp.

I looked down at the folder.

At the corner of it, just barely—the edge of her photograph.

An unguarded face. A girl not looking at the camera because she had no reason to suspect she was being looked at.

Sofia.

I tucked it under my arm and walked.

The mission was clean. Simple. Get close. Learn the truth. Walk away.

I was exceptional at all three.

What I didn’t know—standing there on that empty street, the lake wind at my back and the city humming its indifferent hum all around me—was that I’d already made the mistake.

Before the first step. Before the first word.

Before I ever stood in the same room as her and told myself I was in control of what happened next.

The mistake wasn’t in the mission.

It was in the moment I looked at her photograph and filed it away and moved on—and then, without meaning to, without understanding what that meant yet—

Found it again.

Somewhere I hadn’t put it.

I walked back toward the club, and the city swallowed the sound of my footsteps, and somewhere across Chicago, in an apartment I didn’t know yet, in a life that hadn’t collided with mine yet—

A girl was sleeping.

She didn’t know my name.

She didn’t know that I already knew hers.

And she had absolutely no idea that tomorrow, everything she thought was safe was going to start coming apart at the seams.

Neither did I.

Not yet.