The Bratva's Forced Bride

Chapter 1 – Iris

She sat across from me, slurping her espresso a little too loudly, the legs of her chair scraping against the floor.

Even with my eyes on the plate in front of me, I could still feel her lingering gaze. I didn’t need to look up at her to know she had that smug smirk on her face.

Evelyn Carter was trying to get under my skin. She knew I hated it when people slurped their drinks around me. Yet she did it constantly, making sure to make a noise with her chair.

I threw a French fry in my mouth, refusing to react the way she wanted me to. My jaw moved slowly as I ate, my eyes darting out the large window beside us.

She leaned in, her perfume filling the air around me. The next thing I heard, so close to my ear, was another loud slurp that made my fingers clench into fists.

“I swear to God, Eve, if you do that one more time, I’ll…” I was still spilling my empty threats when her laughter cut me off.

I raised my head, casting a mocking glare at her. “It’s not funny.”

“Yeah, it kinda is,” she said, amid chuckles, her green-gray eyes crinkling at the corners. “You should’ve seen the look on your face—you had murderous intent.”

“Why, Eve?” I pursed my lips. “Why do you enjoy pissing me off?”

“Because I’m your best friend, duhh?” She slurped her espresso again. “It’s my job to make sure you never have a moment of peace in your life.” Her grin widened.

I stared at her, struggling to suppress the smile tugging at the corners of my mouth. “I hate you.”

“No, you silly goose.” She wiggled her brows. “You love me.”

I chuckled, fingers rubbing my eyes.

“Wanna tell me what’s on your mind?”

I raised my brows. “What do you mean?”

“You seem distracted,” she said. “That’s why I tried every means necessary to get your attention.”

I paused, then grabbed my coffee cup and took a sip. “I’m sorry I zoned out. I was just…”

“…thinking about work while you’re hanging out with me,” she stated, her gaze unwavering. “You do know that’s considered cheating, right?”

“Huh?”

“Yes. You’re cheating on me with your office work. I was supposed to have you for two hours today, remember? Now I can’t even have your full attention.”

I laughed. “Says the girl who literally stood me up at the same café two weeks ago.”

“Don’t do that.” Her face twisted into a plastic frown. “Don’t bring up the past.” She shrugged. “I’m a changed person now.”

“Ahh, I see.”

We both laughed.

“But seriously, what’s up?” She combed her fingers through her dark blond hair.

“I have an urgent deadline I haven’t met yet,” I replied. “And my supervisor’s on my case.”

Silence.

Eve studied me for a moment. “Is this about the deadline…or is there something else?”

I met her gaze but didn’t respond right away. It was crystal clear she could see right through me—she’s always been able to see right through me.

I leaned in, elbows on the table. “Some things aren’t adding up in the files my supervisor asked me to clean up.”

Her brows knit together, accentuating the hint of confusion in her gaze. She edged closer. “Like what?”

“I’m not at liberty to say,” I replied. “Honestly, I don’t even have a clear picture yet. But I can feel it in my bones that something’s off.”

“Okay…um…let’s not jump to conclusions yet.” She cleared her throat. “Maybe if…”

My phone chimed on the table, interrupting her. I glanced at the screen and saw it was a text from my supervisor.

It read: Miss Hart. How’s it going? Are you almost done?

I stared at the screen a moment longer than I should, my heart skipping a beat.

“Everything all right?” Eve’s voice sliced through my thoughts.

“Yeah.” I looked up at her. “That was my supervisor. He wants to know if I’m almost done with the file.”

“Are you?” she asked. “…almost done?”

I rubbed the back of my neck, rolling it in a massaging motion.

“Go,” she said. “Finish up your assignment. Then we can talk.”

“Are you sure?” I raised my brows.

“What kind of friend would I be if I were the reason you lost your job?” A pause. “Get to work.”

I reached out and took her hand. “I’ll make it up to you. I promise.”

“You better.” She locked her jaw, attempting to suppress her smile.

I grabbed my coffee and bag and headed out of the café.

“Call me when you get home!”

“Will do!” I raised my cup in acknowledgment.

The cool evening breeze brushed my face the second I stepped out of the café. My thumb rattled across the keyboard as I replied to my supervisor’s text.

Almost done, Boss.

I hit send and slid the phone into my pocket.

The golden glow of the setting sun draped over the busy streets, and blaring horns filled the air.

I pulled my coat together and started walking down the block. Cars rolled past, their tires hissing over the pavement.

A bus sighed to a stop at the curb, letting a few people off as I headed to my apartment. In under twenty minutes, I was home.

Once inside, I hung my coat on the hook by the door, tossed the keys on the nearest table, and kicked my shoes off.

The floor was cool beneath my socks as I strolled into my small living room and dropped my bag onto the couch. I piled my hair into a messy bun on my way upstairs.

I took a nice, warm bath and then headed down again, ready for work. After changing into my favorite nightgown, I sat at my desk by the window in my living room and cracked my knuckles.

“All right, Iris.” I let out a soft sigh, eyes on my lit screens.

My workspace was simple: two monitors, a cheap ergonomic chair I’d bought secondhand, and an Alienware keyboard. It wasn’t much. But it always got the job done.

I worked remotely for a London-based corporate consulting firm that outsourced digital reputation management and data recovery.

I was on a deadline. Although the job was simple, something felt off, something I’d yet to wrap my head around.

My supervisor had asked me to perform a thorough cleanup for Tarasov Imports, a luxury shipping and logistics company with ties to Russian ownership.

The company recently suffered a cyberattack that led to the leak of internal emails and the corruption of financial records.

My job wasn’t to catch whoever did it. My job was to go in after, trace inconsistencies, clean up the mess, and put the pieces back together without making more noise than necessary.

However, the inconsistencies I spotted three days ago, when the file first arrived, were why I believed something was off about this case.

I’d been on the server for three nights running, sorting fragmented folders, matching timestamps, and rebuilding what the breach had scrambled.

Normal cleanup work involved restoring what was damaged. But someone inside Tarasov Imports wasn’t restoring anything. They were manually deleting records.

Files that had survived the breach intact were vanishing on a schedule unrelated to the attack.

And I’d done this long enough to know that meant one thing. Someone was covering something up.

I knew I should let this go and just do what I was paid to do. Backend cleanup. But unfortunately, I’ve never been good at looking away from suspicious activity like this.

If I were being honest, this was the reason I hadn’t finished the work yet. I had to set it aside for days, hoping that delaying the job until the deadline would somehow shift my focus from the inconsistencies to the fact that I had limited time to deliver.

I was wrong. Looking at the file now, there was no way I wasn’t going down that rabbit hole, even with the short amount of time I had on my hands.

I drew a deep breath, finally deciding to satisfy my curiosity. “Here goes nothing.” My voice was a low whisper.

Within the next hour, I was already deep into my investigation.

I found hidden ledgers buried three folders down, beneath a pile of shipping manifests that didn’t match anything in the inventory system.

The files were encrypted, but not well. Whoever set this up didn’t think anyone would dig this deep.

I did. It took me forty minutes to crack the first layer.

Inside were payments. Big ones. All of them routed through shell companies that popped up, moved money, and then closed down a few weeks later.

My brows drew together as I studied the numbers. At first, I thought it was tax fraud—I mean, companies hide money in uglier ways than that all the time. So it wasn’t far-fetched.

The next second, my eyes caught a name I recognized.

Dimitri Udinov.

I would’ve brushed it off as nothing, but then again, I noticed the same name kept appearing multiple times. On different pages.

Hmm.

Wait. Why does that name sound familiar? Why do I recognize it? Where have I heard that name before? I thought for a moment, allowing my brain to do its magic.

Then it hit me.

I’d read about him months ago in an article about a businessman who died in a boating accident off the coast of Italy.

I remembered the name more than the story. And the man’s image was still a bit blurry in my head. But what has the deceased got to do with Tarasov Imports?

My curiosity was piqued, so I dug even deeper.

According to the ledger, payments tied to his accounts continued for eleven days after he was supposed to be dead.

I sat back in my chair and stared at the screen for a moment. There had to be a logical explanation for that. And there was.

Estate accounts don’t always shut off right away. Automated transfers can run for weeks before anyone catches them. I told myself that, but deep down, I didn’t believe that was the case here.

That discrepancy was more unsettling than I cared to admit. So I kept digging, and the deeper down this rabbit hole I went, the stranger things got.

Next, I looked into the employee files, mostly out of habit, just to see if anything else looked off.

A handful of records had been wiped completely. Not corrupted from the breach. No, these were deleted—on purpose, and deleted well. Whoever did it knew what they were doing.

That’s not shady at all, I thought, sarcasm lacing the voice in my head.

In what was left, I started noticing short notes tucked into date fields and shipping logs where they didn’t belong. A few words at a time. A date. A location.

Nothing that explained itself. But one phrase kept showing up, over and over, in different files that otherwise had nothing to do with each other.

“Asset removal.”

I wasn’t someone who jumped to conclusions.

I liked to build them, piece by piece, and I didn’t say anything out loud until I was certain.

But I sat there, running through every boring, ordinary explanation I could think of for “asset removal” appearing next to a person’s name, a location, and a date, and none of them held up. Not one.

I told myself I only wanted proof. Something concrete to report to my supervisor, so it wouldn’t sound like a conspiracy theorist.

I copied the files to a private drive. The transfer bar crawled across the screen, and I watched it with a racing heart.

The second the transfer finished, my screen froze. Just for a second. Long enough to notice, short enough to almost convince me I’d imagined it.

Then a window flickered open in the corner of the display—a remote access prompt. It was gone before I could read more than the first line.

My cursor jumped on its own, half an inch to the left, and then everything went still again, as if nothing had happened.

I yanked my hands back from the keyboard as if it had shocked me.

For a few seconds, I didn’t move. I just watched the screen, waiting for it to do something else. It didn’t. The cursor stayed where I’d left it. My open files were exactly as I’d left them.

Without hesitation, I disconnected from the server manually, unplugged the Ethernet cable instead of trusting the software, and shut the laptop halfway, like that would help.

My heart was racing faster than the situation probably warranted, a bead of cold sweat trickling down my temple.

I told myself it was leftover malware. The breach two weeks ago could easily have left something behind, some backdoor nobody had found yet. That explanation should have been enough. But it wasn’t.

I got up and instinctively headed to the front door to make sure it was locked. It was.

I knew it was; I just needed to check it anyway. Then I went to the window and pulled the blinds shut after scanning the streets outside.

It felt like I had tampered with something I shouldn’t have. And now I couldn’t help thinking that the “glitch” on my computer might be tied to something more dangerous than I’d thought.

I sat back down at my desk and stared at my computer’s black screen for a long time.

Someone else had been in that network with me. I didn’t know who. I didn’t know why. But I knew for sure that whoever they were, they had seen exactly what I’d been looking at.

And the worst part was that they might have known I’d seen it too.

Fuck.