Kidnapped By the Russian Bratva (Yuri Bratva Brides #4)

Chapter 1 - Nadya

There is a man in the bed. He’s sprawled out on his stomach beside me. Both his forearms are stacked beneath a high cheekbone. His pillow is cast aside.

It strikes me as peculiar, before I remember how that was the pillow he used to—

Holy shit.

My skin heats as the memories flood me in vivid technicolor. The rhythm of last night’s music, thumping out the Disco Monkey club’s speakers and spilling out into the back alley, pulsing through our entangled bodies like a joint heartbeat.

Who knew a well-timed smoke break could be so fortuitous?

My mind is a tsunami of psychosomatic sensations.

One after another, it washes over me—the unwavering weight of his hands on me, devouring my waistline; the hot tangle of our tongues in the corner of an elevator; the husky brag of his voice, drawling, “How hard do you want it?”

Hard as you can go, I’d told him.

He hadn’t asked twice.

And oh, the things my beautiful stranger has made me feel.

I don’t know his name, but I know what his face looks like when it’s twisted in pleasure.

I know the taste of his sweat. I know what he feels like, tearing me apart to make room for himself inside of me.

And I know the kind of marks he can, will, and enjoys leaving on a woman’s body. Can I still call him a stranger?

He groans softly in his sleep.

It’s a looser, sweeter rendition of the sounds I stole from him overnight.

My grin is victorious.

And yet, I already know nothing can keep this stillness from swiftly, suffocatingly becoming toomuchtoomuchtoomuch.

It’s already time to go.

Stop, drop, and roll out of bed is all it takes to get the residual, butterflies-in-belly ache juddering through every muscle in my body.

I stretch my arms up over my head, fingertips reaching for the ceiling they’ll never make it to.

I can feel the knobs of my spine pop-pop-pop like bubble wrap.

A moan lives and dies at the back of my mouth.

My throat’s already hoarse after a night of suppressing nothing at all.

Fortunately, soreness is as symptomatic a part of me as bolting. The new variable is the man I’m leaving behind—slumbering, tangled up in the sheets I helped soak and rumple.

Soundless and limber as a cat, I tiptoe across plush carpeting.

I slip last night’s dress over my head, wincing as its silver sequins rustle. My wide-eyed gaze cuts across the room to the glorious man in the bed.

God bless—he doesn’t even stir.

I’m almost home free.

I’d say I’m not fleeing from him, but that’d be a pointless goddamn lie, wouldn’t it?

I am. And I’m not ashamed of it either. It’s what the first person awake after a one-night stand does.

It stands to reason that it’ll preserve the integrity of an awesome, inimitable moment in time that’s already a memory.

Besides, I suspect I’m pretty much immune to shame. I’ve certainly been told as much before. I prefer seeing it as being a maestro at reframing.

For example, doing the Walk of Shame without any underwear on could be a soul-shriveling humiliation ritual.

Or… I can admit that the ferocious, frenetic, fucking sexy man who rocked my goddamn world last night ripped my panties off before he buried his head between my thighs, giving me many an orgasm, and eventually saving me the trouble of searching for them.

The difference between a pro and a con can be as simple as a flip and twist of one’s perspective.

As I slip out of the hotel room, letting the door gently click shut in my wake, I hope he sees it that way.

I don’t leave a note, number, or name to find out, regardless.

***

No matter which way I turn, the mirrored walls reflect back infinite versions of me—silver-blonde hair in a wreck, frizzed around my shoulders, smudged smoky eye makeup in tear-tracks down my cheeks, and the elegant lighting refracting off the sequined sheath that clings to my rail-like frame.

It’s like they say, isn’t it? Wherever you go, there you are.

I look thoroughly fucked.

My blue-grey eyes are wild. Alive.

“Miss Nadya?” The voice lassos my attention.

It’s taken me forever to get him to switch from Miss Yuri to my name. Helped, of course, by the fact that Miss Yuri could be my sister, Darya, too. Not to mention the wives that three of my brothers have somehow wooed and won over.

“Otto!” I chirp back. My smile in the reflective elevator doors is sheepish. “Could you come get me, please? I’m at the Encore.”

Otto never hesitates. “I’ll be there in ten, Miss.”

“Thanks, dude. Appreciate you.”

His awkward, coughed-out response leaves me giggling as I hang up, dropping the phone back into the clutch I tuck into my armpit.

I don’t love summoning my brother Iosif’s driver, especially when I’m always kicking up a fuss about being surveilled by all the employees on our eldest brother Trifon’s payroll.

Nevertheless, the steep price of ditching my security last night was leaving my Ducati behind as well.

And if any of my brothers find out I tried to Uber around the city, I’m dead meat.

Iosif is always telling me to use Otto whenever I want anyway, since he likes to drive himself nine times out of ten.

It helps that good ol’ Otto wouldn’t ever ask questions—no matter how thoroughly debauched I look right now. As far as I’ve tested him, he’s no snitch either.

Though I guess that wouldn’t matter.

Iosif and I keep each other’s secrets.

If there’s a soul in the universe to whom I can spill my guts about my night, it’s my brother. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I need to.

I try standing still, hands clasped in front of me like a normal person riding down from the twenty-sixth floor. It lasts approximately nine seconds before I’m bouncing on the balls of my bare feet. My strappy black heels are dangling off a crooked finger.

The elevator spits me out.

I’m a tall drink of water. It doesn’t bother me to turn heads all the way through the hotel’s lobby, and a couple on the street when I perch on a decorative concrete planter.

I use the respite to tug my heels back on.

The leather straps bite into my ankles when I stand.

It definitely hasn’t been ten minutes when Iosif’s Escalade glides down the street.

He can kill a person very quickly, and in many ways, or he wouldn’t have this gig.

But when Otto hops out, more agile than a plump, sweet-faced man in his 50s should be, and opens my door for me, it’s easy to forget that.

“Hello, Miss,” he greets.

There’s a coffee cup waiting in the backseat cupholder. “You’re my fucking hero,” I sigh, bumping my hip into his on my way in.

“Home, Miss Nadya?” Otto prompts once he’s slid back behind the wheel.

I know I should say yes.

The smart thing to do would be to return to the Yuri estate, tail between my legs, and go to sleep.

“Is my brother home?” I ask instead.

“I dropped the missus off at work. But sir is still at the penthouse.”

“Iosif’s then, please,” I say, punctuating with a scalding sip of mocha latté.

Without further ado, he puts the Escalade in drive and navigates seamlessly toward the Financial District, where my brother’s penthouse is located. “Yes, ma’am.”

Sipping slowly on my latté, I try to unwind my limbs and relax against the leather seat.

But my body refuses. Restlessness whirs within me, buzzing beneath my skin like my veins are live wires.

I shift my legs this way and that, crossing them on the seat and swinging them back down to the ground, and nothing helps.

Every action seems to burn away a little more of last night’s satiation.

It takes effort not to let it disappoint me.

I’d thought the satisfaction would linger at least a full 24 hours.

Losing my virginity—though I hate to think of it that way, as an inaccurate lack of agency—felt like something that would have a more lasting impact.

The way pop culture, not to mention everyone and their grandmother, goes on and on and fucking on about it, I can admit that a part of me did expect to come out changed on the other side.

Obviously, I’ve never been overly sentimental about my virginity.

It isn’t like I was waiting for “the one” or any of that antiquated bullshit.

All my life, I’ve mostly been surrounded by a particularly unfortunate breed of man.

The kind that huffs and puffs and tries too hard to charm me, like I’d ever fall for that slick, ooey-gooey shit.

Like all women are so formulaic and endlessly susceptible to placeholder niceties.

But this man… Well, he’d been something else.

I’ve got no regrets about sharing it with him.

I press my forehead against the tinted window, watching Boston blur past. The city’s already awake—buildings catching the pink-gold morning light, cars whooshing by.

We drive past Disco Monkey. Its neon sign has gone dark now.

My mind ricochets back to the back alley where we first collided, and my stomach does a wicked little flip.

I cling to the feeling, my insatiable soul reaching for a thrill that’s already dwindling to nostalgia.

I don’t know why I am the way I am, or what this yawning void inside me is. I can never fill it. Not for long, at least.

The coffee’s gone by the time Otto finally pulls up to Iosif’s apartment building.

“I’m good, thanks,” I tell him, before he even reaches for his door to come open mine. “You don’t have to tell anyone where you got me from if they don’t ask. ‘Kay, dude?”

Otto’s expression is carefully neutral, but I swear I catch a faint smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Of course, Miss Nadya. Enjoy your day.”

With a nod, I leap out of the car. My heels land on the pavement with a dramatic, cacophonous clack.

Like all cats, I stick the landing.

The doorman waves me through without pause. I’m here all the time. If not seeing my favorite brother, then to see Janella, his sweet wife.