Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin (Golovin Bratva #3)

Chapter One

Isla

It had been a good night. The kind where everything worked and flowed smoothly.

I sighed in satisfaction as I watched Hendricks, my venue coordinator, lift the final bottle above a flute, tilting it with a theatrical twist from across the room. The donor beside him laughed at something he said.

I should give Hendricks a small bonus.

The Solaris Charity Gala had been on my books for eleven months.

It had been eleven months of venue negotiations, floral logistics, celebrity handler emails, dietary restriction spreadsheets, lighting rigs, and one very dramatic disagreement with the sound team about the decibel level of the string quartet.

Eleven months of turning a blank ballroom on the Strip into something that made people feel like the world was, for a few hours, genuinely beautiful.

And it had been beautiful. I knew how to make things beautiful. It was, arguably, the only thing I’d ever been naturally gifted at.

By the time the last guests filtered out in their gowns and their tuxedos, trailing perfume and goodwill into the Nevada night, I was running on fumes.

Every muscle in my body ached. My feet had stopped forgiving me for walking around in four-inch heels for over three hours.

But I was smiling because the numbers on the silent auction board had exceeded the client’s target by 30%, and that was the kind of occurrence that made eleven months feel like a gift rather than a grind.

I’d done a final sweep of the ballroom myself out of habit.

That was when I had checked that the florals were being handled correctly by the breakdown crew, confirmed the lost-and-found box had been passed to venue security, and exchanged a genuine hug with the gala’s chairwoman, who smelled like gardenias and kept saying, ‘You’re a miracle, Isla, you’re an absolute miracle.

’ I’d deflected the way I always did, redirecting the credit toward the team, the vendors, and the volunteers.

I never really knew how to hold a compliment. I just knew how to earn one.

By 11:20 pm, I was outside.

The loading bay at the back of the hotel was the unglamorous exit—the one nobody photographed, the one that smelled like recycled kitchen air and idling delivery trucks.

I’d used it a hundred times at a hundred events.

It was my version of a stage door: the place where the public appearance ended and I became just a person again.

Heels in hand, I unlocked my phone and dialed Val’s number, my phone pressed to my ear.

She picked up on the second ring.

“Tell me it went well,” she said, without hello. And that was typical Val, no intro, especially when she deemed the discussion very important.

Val and I met at an event I planned when she had just become a VIP hostess. Then we met more frequently at more events and, since then, she’d been the closest I had to a best friend.

“It went better than well.” I stepped over a coil of electrical cable the breakdown crew had left on the pavement, navigating it in bare feet. The concrete was still warm from the day’s heat. “The silent auction cleared four hundred and twelve thousand.”

Her shriek was loud enough that I pulled the phone from my ear and laughed.

“Isla.”

“I know.”

“Four hundred—”

“I know, babes,” I repeated, chuckling.

“We are celebrating this weekend. I’m not asking; I’m telling. Brunch, somewhere obscenely expensive, my treat.”

“Val, no, you can’t afford—”

“I said what I said.” I could hear her smiling through the phone. “Are you heading home? Do you need me to—”

“I’m fine, mother,” I cut in, laughing despite my tiredness. “I’m leaving the venue right now. We’ll talk later.”

“Sleep for at least eight hours. You hear me?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I drawled. “Bye.”

“I’m super proud of you. Take care.”

I thought of putting my phone into my bag but ditched the idea. I was too tired. Besides, I’d be in a cab in a minute. But then, holding my heels and phone seemed even more herculean an effort. So I unzipped my small bag and was about to place my phone inside it when I instinctively raised my head.

I heard the SUV before I saw it.

It wasn’t the sound that alarmed me at first—there were always vehicles back here, catering trucks, linen services, hotel fleet cars idling while drivers waited on guests.

What pulled my attention was the absence of noise after the engine cut.

It was a sudden, deliberate quiet. Like the vehicle wasn’t here to carry equipment and was here to find something.

I turned my head.

It was all black, and there were no plates I could read in the low light. Parked close—too close, at an angle that wasn’t accidental.

Everything happened in the space between one breath and the next.

A door. Movement. Two shapes—no, three—and then a hand clamped over my mouth so hard my teeth cut the inside of my cheek, and another arm hooked around my waist like a vice, and my phone left my hand before I’d consciously decided to drop it.

I heard it hit the pavement. Heard the crack of the screen.

I threw my elbow back into something solid and felt the grip tighten in response, not loosen.

Someone said something in a language I didn’t catch—clipped, low—and then my wrists were being forced together and the zip tie bit into my skin with a swiftness that told me this wasn’t someone’s first time doing this.

A bag came down over my head. Dark fabric.

It smelled like canvas and something chemical underneath, like cleaning solvent.

Then the car was moving, and I was in it.

Breathe

Isla, breathe.

It was the only useful instruction I had. My heart was pounding violently against my ribs, and my body wanted to shake, but shaking wasn’t going to help me. My hands were bound in front of me.

I noted that the seat beneath me was leather. Cold air conditioning. The men around me smelled like cigarette smoke and something colder, something that didn’t have a name but that my body recognized as danger the way you recognize a dip in temperature before a storm.

Nobody spoke to me; they spoke about me. Not loud or clear enough that I could really make much out of, though.

“He’ll be pleased,” I heard one of the men say in accented English, the accent sitting somewhere Eastern European that I couldn’t place precisely.

Who is ‘he’?

And then another voice, quieter, said, “If she’s who he says she is, the debt’s already half settled.”

Debt.

That single word went deep into me and seemed to detonate.

I couldn’t unhear it. I hadn’t heard it spoken in that particular tone in years.

Not since when I was a different Isla. Not since I’d wired every dollar I’d saved across three years of working double shifts to an account number I’d never been given a name for.

Not since I’d changed my phone number, changed my last name on everything that didn’t require legal documentation, and driven to Las Vegas in a car that barely made it over the state line because I had decided, with absolute conviction, that I was done.

I’d been so sure I was done.

The car ride felt endless in the dark. I stopped trying to track turns after the first few minutes because I had no reference points and the mental effort was burning energy I couldn’t afford to waste.

Instead, I focused on breathing and noting the small physical details I could register.

The sound of the road surface changing at least twice.

The faint, distant throb of music at one point, bass-heavy, before it faded.

Vegas music. We were still in the city.

My feet were still bare. I’d dropped my heels when they took me—or they’d fallen.

I couldn’t remember which. The concrete had been warm under my feet.

Now there was carpet, and then there wasn’t, and at some point, the car stopped, and I was hauled upright with hands that weren’t rough, exactly, but weren’t careful either.

Like moving freight. Like I was a thing that needed not to be damaged, not a person who needed not to be hurt.

The warehouse smelled like damp concrete and machinery that hadn’t been run in a long time.

They pulled the hood off, and the light hit me like a slap—bare industrial fluorescents, the kind that drain the warmth from everything they touch. I blinked, forcing my eyes to adjust, and when they did, I wished briefly that I’d had more time in the dark.

There were five of them that I could count, arranged with casual authority.

One was leaning against a support beam with his arms crossed, watching me.

One sat on an overturned crate with his phone out, not even looking up.

Two flanked the doorway. And one—heavyset, older, with a gold ring on every finger—stood directly in front of me and examined my face like he was checking a receipt against an order.

My wrists were still bound. My back was against a concrete pillar, and there was a chair involved, though I’d fought being sat in it long enough that two of them had needed to convince me. The left side of my face was still warm from where the arm of the chair had connected during the struggle.

Good, something vicious in me thought. At least I made them work for it.

“Calmer now?” The heavyset man had a voice like gravel shifting.

I said nothing.

“Smart girl.” He said it like a compliment, which it wasn’t. “You’ll get explanations when the time comes. For now—” He gestured vaguely, as though the warehouse, the zip ties, and the five armed men were merely administrative details. “You wait.”

“Wait for what?” My voice came out steadier than I deserved credit for.

He smiled. It was the worst kind of smile—patient, indulgent, the smile of a man who finds a mouse’s defiance charming rather than threatening because he’s never once worried about what mice can do to him.

“For the game to begin,” he said.

Someone across the room said something that made two of the others laugh. I caught fragments—bet, stake, pretty, price—and the meaning assembled itself slowly, then all at once, the way a shape emerges from fog.

I was not a victim; I was a bargaining chip.

The panic that moved through me then was different from the panic in the car. That had been animal, instinctive, the body’s basic terror at being trapped. This was something different. Something that understood the situation clearly enough to be truly afraid of it.

I forced it down. Forced my breathing level. Forced my jaw to stop clenching.

Think, I told myself. Isla, you are the person who builds things on impossible timescales.

You are the person who unfucked the Meridian wedding when the venue flooded four hours before the ceremony.

You have managed crises that grown adults cried over.

You are not going to fall apart in a warehouse in Las Vegas because five men with bad posture decided you were useful to them.

But even as I built the internal scaffolding, even as I shored up every beam of practical resolve I had, something underneath it all was cracking quietly open.

‘Debt’ kept echoing in my skull.

They moved me again after a few hours. It was a different vehicle this time. Smaller and quieter. The hood went back on, and I stopped fighting it, not because I’d surrendered but because I was choosing my battles now.

My feet ached and my wrists burned along the line of the zip tie. My silk blouse—dusty rose, chosen for the gala, chosen with care—was torn at the shoulder seam from the initial struggle.

I thought about the flute of champagne I hadn’t gotten to drink. The one I’d promised myself at the end of the night as a reward, the small private celebration I’d been looking forward to since the venue walkthrough six weeks ago.

I thought about Adrian.

Not the version I usually let myself remember—the laughing one, the charming one, the brother who could make any room feel like a party just by walking into it.

The other version. The one who’d shown up at my apartment at 2 am with blood on his shirt and a number he needed me to call, pleading, ‘Please, I’ll pay you back, I swear I’ll pay you back’.

The one who’d made promises the way other people breathe: reflexively, without weight.

The one who wasn’t here anymore.

There was a moment, somewhere in the dark of that second drive, when tears threatened. But I didn’t let them fall. I couldn’t.

Because something else was settling over me now, beneath the fear and the grief. A terrible, quiet recognition.

This wasn’t bad luck.

I had known, somewhere beneath the clean life I’d constructed with such painstaking care, that clean wasn’t the same as finished.

That changing your number and your city was geography change, not erasure.

That the world Adrian had moved through didn’t operate on the same rules as mine—where debts had ledgers, where ledgers got closed, where closed meant done.

In his world, nothing was ever done.

Which meant—

The car stopped.

I heard voices outside. Different voices from before.

Whatever I had imagined might happen to me tonight—ransom, leverage, a terrifying conversation that ended with a number I’d somehow find a way to pay—I hadn’t imagined this.

Hadn’t imagined being brought somewhere that smelled, even through a hood and a car door, like money and cigarettes and masculine ego.

Hadn’t imagined being brought to a game.

The door opened. Hands found my arms, guiding me out.

And I understood, with a clarity that was almost peaceful in its horror, that I hadn’t been kidnapped randomly. I hadn’t been grabbed because I was convenient, or because someone wanted money, or even because of a straightforward debt negotiation that had gone theatrical.

The thought settled into my chest like a stone into still water, heavy and inevitable, sending ripples through everything I thought I’d safely buried.

This is connected.

Not to tonight. Not to the gala or the champagne or the charity donors with their flutes and their laughing mouths. This was connected to something older, something that had waited.

The thing I had run from and renamed myself to escape and built an entire careful, beautiful life on top of, as though beauty were a foundation rather than a decoration.

As though I could plan my way out of something that had never agreed to let me leave.