Page 83 of Captive Virgin of the Bratva

A bag is yanked over my head. The world vanishes in darkness. I scream, loud and sharp, raw from the back of my throat.

“KOLYA!” I shout, my voice echoing off the stone arch above us. “Help me! Please—somebody!”

The van door slams open. My knees scrape the metal as they force me inside. Hands push me down, hard. My wrists are yanked behind me, bound with something rough and unyielding. I thrash, my breath ragged inside the stifling canvas of the blindfold.

“Don’t fight,” one of them growls in my ear.

“Fuck you,” I spit, kicking until someone grabs my ankles too.

Everything spins. My body jerks with each turn of the tires as the van lurches forward, accelerating fast. The floor vibrates beneath me. My cheek is pressed to cold steel. I can taste blood where I must’ve bitten my lip, but I barely feel it.

Terror blots everything else out.

“KOLYA!” I scream again, my voice hoarse. “Please!”

I don’t care how it sounds. I don’t care if it makes me weak. I just want him to find me. To storm in with that fury I’ve seen in his eyes, the violence he wears like a second skin.

I want him tocome for me,but no one answers.

I’m alone in the dark. Again.

My father’s words echo in my skull.He chose you.

He chose me, but what if Kolya was never the only monster in this game?

What if I’ve just been handed off—traded like currency—by the only two men who were ever supposed to protect me?

The van swerves. I hit the side wall with a thud, gasping, coughing against the fabric at my mouth. My wrists burn. My head throbs. My lungs feel too full, like I can’t get air, like the darkness is swallowing it before it reaches me.

I scream again, just to hear something.

It’s useless. The van barrels forward into the night, and I have no idea where I’m being taken.

Chapter Twenty-One - Kolya

I know something’s wrong the moment I step through the doors.

It’s not the silence—my house is often quiet, the kind of quiet that keeps men on edge. It’s not even the lack of staff in the halls. No, what gets me is the tension in the air, thick and humming, like gunpowder waiting for a spark.

I see it on Boris’s face the second he comes around the corner. He stiffens. Eyes shift. Not in fear—no one here fears me like that anymore—but in guilt.

Guilt always means one thing. Something happened when I was gone.

“Where is she?” I ask, cold, measured.

Boris doesn’t answer right away. That’s his first mistake.

I grab him by the collar and slam him back against the wall hard enough to make the artwork rattle on the opposite side of the hallway. “Where the fuck is she?”

“I don’t know, I’ve been with you the whole time. The guards, they say she snuck out again—”

My blood freezes over. I don’t hear the rest.

I storm down the hallway, boots echoing off marble, heart thundering louder than my steps. Her door is closed. Locked from the outside like always. But when I shove it open, the room is empty.

Bed untouched. Blankets cold. No trace of her.

I turn, the fury in my chest splintering outward like shrapnel.

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