Bought & Bred by the Bratva (Bred By The BRATVA #16)

Chapter 1

NINA

Idip my brush into red paint and drag it down the canvas, drawing an angry streak into the monstrous gray-black shape looming behind an otherwise cheerful picture of a girl on a swing.

Red tears akin to drops of blood stream down the nightmare figure’s cheeks from the pits of his soulless black eyes.

I don’t know what his real features look like. If I did, I might fear him less, even knowing vaguely who he is. Someone in the Volkov bratva faction. A violent man, naturally. All men are violent in my world.

I add more red. Some of it bleeds into the gold of the sun’s rays behind the girl, turning it orange.

I sigh and use a different brush to touch up the botched line, layering more yellow over it until the edge is crisp again.

Pointless perfectionism, but it is the only control I have over my life, and I choose to exercise it.

Ordinarily, the monster I paint is my own father. The juxtaposition of bright innocence and dark horror is, if you believe art critics, eerie, disturbing, and compelling.

“Nina! You’re still here!” High-heeled shoes click briskly into my studio.

“It’s Fri-yay. Are we going out for drinks tonight?

It’s your birthday, after all. Finally legal after all these years of underage drinking.

” Kinsley Sager, the gallery’s director and sole curator, strides in like a galloping horse, each thundering tap of her four-inch heels punctuating her singsong call to fun.

She’s tall, exuberant, and charming. Her entire persona is calculated to exude the kind of warm sophistication that entices rich people to spend money on art.

As far as Kinsley knows, I’m a rare, lucky, young art genius who managed to attract a cult following in her native Russia.

I’m the Golden Skies Gallery’s in-house artist, an unusual arrangement that she doesn’t question, since my father owns the gallery.

Kinsley isn’t stupid. She has to know there’s something off with the way the Gallery—GSG for short—is run, but she knows better than to ask questions.

She handles the marketing and sales while my father’s bookkeeper deals with the finances.

A tidy little money-laundering scheme with plausible deniability for the socialite fallen on hard times.

“Sorry, Kins, I can’t. My dad has something planned for me.” Nothing good, I’m sure. His text message was as blunt and brutal as the whole man is. Don’t let his stature fool you. I’ve seen my father strangle a woman with his bare hands.

That woman was my mother.

“Ooh, this one’s extra creepy.” Kinsley eyes my latest oeuvre with a slight shudder.

I paint monsters in plain sight because that is who I have been surrounded by for my entire life—terrible men who do awful things to other people for money and status. Some of them undoubtedly deserve it.

Like the man whose shadow looms over my life.

He has a way of turning up wherever I least expect to see him.

I suspect he gets off on keeping me scared.

I hardly went out before he started leaving unwanted gifts for me.

Most of the underage drinking Kinsley referred to took place here in this gallery—sips of bad boxed wine that never actually got me drunk.

“It’s so sweet the way your daddy dotes on you,” she coos, waving away her mild criticism of my artwork.

I suppress a shudder and force a smile. “Will you be coming in this weekend?” Kinsley asks, not registering my subtle wince.

“We have two private showings. They’d love to meet the brilliant artist.”

“I doubt it. My father hasn’t told me what his plans are for me but he did tell me I might need to take a few days off. Hold down the fort for me, will you?” I cast her a small smile, toe off my worn paint-spattered tennis shoes and step into expensive black leather flats.

Actually, what my father said was, Finish whatever you are working on at the gallery. Your services are needed elsewhere for a while.

Whatever he’s planning, it’s big. He’s been waiting for this day.

I sigh heavily and set about cleaning up my slow-drying acrylic paints.

Cleaning the brushes in the utility sink, rinsing cups of dirty water.

My hands are unsteady, but unlike stray paint, no one will notice my subdued shakiness if I’m only cleaning up.

With my father’s birthday threat and the anxiety of never knowing when my unknown stalker will make himself felt, I feel so unfathomably distant from Kinsley’s bright and relatively untroubled reality that I might as well live on another planet. Or in an alternate dimension.

Oh, she has problems, all right. Everyone does. But she isn’t the only daughter of a bratva faction leader who has made it clear that I will live as he wishes, marry whomever he orders me to, and die painfully if I ever attempt to escape.

I’ve played along for years. Biding my time. I have been forced to back away from each careful plan I’ve made. But now, I think I have to act.

I unbutton my smock and hang it with the others. Run my fingers through my hair. Ruisy, the color is called in my father’s native language. Gray mouse. A sad name for a shade of cool ash-blond. I think about dyeing it brighter, but that feels too cheerful for my life. I haven’t earned it.

Besides, if I can make myself small enough, maybe one day I can escape my father’s notice. My stalker’s, too.

The night I accepted a dinner date with a handsome oligarch who took me to one of the fanciest restaurants in Washington, D.C.

? He was there. Watching. Thought nothing of paying over a hundred dollars for a meal he barely touched.

I felt his gaze like the touch of a malevolent finger dragged down my spine.

I was so uncomfortable that I asked my date to take me home before dessert.

Needless to say, the billionaire didn’t ask me out again.

He thought he was the one who had made me viscerally uncomfortable, but in all honesty, I hardly paid him any attention that night.

Outside, rain has begun to fall over Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

I scan the sidewalk quickly before popping up my umbrella.

My father usually likes to have one of his bratan ferry me around in bullet-proof SUVs, but today, his men were busy, undoubtedly with some criminal enterprise that I don’t want to know the details of.

We’re stretched thin. A ragtag upstart faction.

Therefore, I drove my own car, a Mini Cooper.

Cute. Bright. Completely impractical for anything except tight parking in urban environments.

I love my car. I call her zolotse—little golden one or precious.

Or, when I’m feeling silly, Goldbug, after the children’s book.

Her color shines like a beacon, although the car is so short and small that sometimes I can’t see her behind larger ones.

Like owner, like car. I, too, am short and easily lost.

I have to get away from the bratva if I’m ever going to have the kind of life I can bring a child into.

My father considers any son of mine his heir—and any girl as worthless as I am.

I clutch my worn vintage purse with the ten thousand dollars in cash hidden in the lining and one precious square of plastic sewn into the pocket.

Should I get into my car and drive off? Enact the plan I’ve memorized? Drive to the Amtrak station and abandon my car there, then take a bus to D.C. and buy a ticket anywhere west?

Disappear before Melor Kotov, my loathsome father, can enact whatever horrible plan he has for me?

Or would I be wasting my one chance at escape on running away from birthday candles and cake? He is cunning. He can surprise you. I can’t afford to let fear cloud my thinking. I wish I knew what to do…

Absorbed in my thoughts and feeling safely anonymous beneath my enormous black umbrella, I click my car open from ten steps away.

I usually wait until I’m standing right next to it.

Just in case. When you’re a bratva princess, you are raised to understand that you’re collateral in a war you didn’t start.

But today, I’m eager to get out of the rain.

The white rose on my windshield stops me in my tracks. I lower the umbrella and whip my head around. There is only a smattering of drops on it. It couldn’t have been there more than a minute or two.

I pick it up with trembling fingers.

Inside, on my driver’s seat, is the rest of the bouquet. Six more white roses. I try to swallow, but my throat is inexplicably dry.

I know enough about the language of flowers to understand the meaning immediately. Seven roses from a secret admirer.

“You’re not so secretive, though, are you?” I mutter in Russian. Despite there being no note, I know they’re from him. My stalker. I start the engine and peel out into traffic without looking, narrowly escaping a collision with an oncoming vehicle, wondering, How the fuck did he get inside my car?