Chapter 2 #2
His arm tightens around me. "You will. Because you're a smart girl who knows when she's beaten. Because you don't want to find out what happens to people who disappoint me. And because..." His lips brush my ear. "Deep down, you want to. Your body wants to. I can feel it."
He's right. I can feel it too—the way I'm leaning into him instead of away. The way my breathing has gone shallow. The way heat is still thrumming through my veins from that kiss.
I'm so screwed.
***
The rest of the funeral service passes in a blur. I stand beside the casket and accept condolences and pretend to grieve while Pyotr watches from the back of the room. I can feel his eyes on me. Heavy. Possessive. Patient.
Like a wolf watching prey that's already caught.
When it's over, when the last guest has paid their respects and left, Sofia finds me in the hallway. She's crying again.
"I'm sorry," she whispers, pulling me into a hug. "I'm so sorry, Vera. Your father—he made this deal. I tried to talk him out of it but he was desperate and—"
"It's okay." It's not. But what else can I say? "It's not your fault."
"Pyotr's not a bad man," she says desperately. "Dangerous, yes. But he'll take care of you."
"I know." I pull back, trying to smile. It feels wrong on my face. "I should go."
She packed my things during the service. Everything planned, controlled, no choices left to make.
The black SUV is waiting outside. Pyotr leans against it, checking his phone. He looks up as I approach, pocketing the device.
"Ready?" he asks.
No. I'll never be ready.
He opens the passenger door. "Get in."
Run. Scream. Fight. Do literally anything except get in that car.
But I think about Sofia. About my cousins. About the casual way he threatened them.
I get in.
He closes the door behind me, walks around to the driver's side, and slides in. The interior smells like leather and expensive cologne, something dark and woodsy that shouldn't affect me but does.
He starts the engine. One hand goes immediately to my thigh, possessive and warm through the thin fabric of my funeral dress.
I look down at it. At the tattoos on his knuckles. At the way his hand completely covers my leg.
"I know you're scared," he says, pulling onto the road.
I don't answer. What's the point?
"I know you think I'm a monster."
Still nothing.
His hand tightens on my thigh. "But you're mine now. And I take care of what's mine."
I finally look at him. The sharp profile could have been carved from marble. Silver threads through his dark hair catch the late afternoon sun. The wolf tattooed on his throat shifts as he swallows, seems to prowl across his skin.
"How old are you?" The question comes out before I can stop it.
"Forty-five."
The number lands heavily in the space between us. He's twenty-five years older than me. Could have been at my birth. Old enough that when I was learning to walk, he was already...
What? Killing people? Is that what Bratva kapitans do?
"I'm twenty," I say, though he obviously knows this.
"I know." He glances at me, those ice-blue eyes reading something in my face I don't want him to see.
"I know everything about you, Vera. Your coffee order.
Your class schedule. That you study in the library's third floor because it's always empty.
That you sleep on your left side. That you're afraid of thunderstorms and keep a nightlight plugged in by your bed.
That you have a journal under your mattress where you write about feeling lost."
Each detail is a violation. A trespass. He's been cataloging me like a scientist studying a specimen, learning my patterns, my habits, my private thoughts.
The anger I expect doesn't come.
Instead, that warm, shameful feeling again. Because my father never knew I was afraid of storms. Never knew I took my coffee black. Never asked what I studied in school beyond "how are your grades?"
This stranger has spent two years learning about me. Two years paying attention.
And some broken part of me wants to lean into that attention like a plant toward sunlight.
"Three days," he says, turning off the main road onto a private drive.
Trees close in on both sides, blocking out the world.
"Then I make you my wife. And then..." His hand slides higher, stopping just below where my thighs meet.
Heat radiates from his palm through the thin fabric of my dress. "Then I breed you."
My body responds before my brain can intervene: heat flooding low in my belly, pulse jumping in my throat. The clinical word breed should sound wrong. Dehumanizing. Like I'm livestock instead of a person.
But my virgin body doesn't care about linguistics. It just feels his hand on my thigh, hears the dark promise in his voice, and wants.
I turn to look out the window so he can't see whatever truth is written on my face. The trees thin, and a massive estate appears, all stone and glass and isolated elegance. Beautiful. Remote. No neighbors for miles, probably.
"Welcome home, malyshka," he says as iron gates swing open before us. His hand flexes possessively on my thigh. "Your new life starts now."
The car rolls through. The gates close behind us with a final, definitive clang.
Soon, I become Vera Maksimova. Before this man takes everything I am and remakes it into what he wants.
And the most terrifying part isn't that he's doing this.
It's that some part of me—some sick, broken part I didn't know existed—has already stopped fighting.