Page 57 of The Bratva King's Auctioned Bride

“Get out,” he snapped.

“Excuse me?” I asked, crossing my arms. He slowly narrowed his eyes at me, and the front door flew open behind him.

Oh, good, it was his wife, Daria. Finally, a voice of reason. “Did you find her?” she called, face tense with worry.

“I’m fine,” I shouted past Ivan.

Then I scurried around him and ran for her. She had grown up with one of the most ruthless brothers imaginable. He made my bossy siblings seem like newborn kittens, so surely she would understand that the way Ivan was treating me was wrong.And he would listen to her because he was wrapped around her little finger.

Instead of a warm smile and a hug, I got a cold, disappointed look. “I can see that you’re fine,” she said.

“Yes,” I sighed. “Now, can you please make him see reason and just—”

“I’m staying out of it,” she said, retreating up the stairs as soon as we were all inside.

“What? Daria, please—”

“You’re lucky you’re just facing my wrath,” Ivan said, dipping his chin to his chest and pointing at the top of his head. “Look.”

I stood on my tiptoes but couldn’t see any cuts. “What am I looking at?”

“My gray hairs,” he shouted. “From you and all the sleepless nights you caused. All while you were perfectly fine the whole time. And where, exactly? Or were you really gallivanting around all those places we got intel about?”

I cringed inwardly. Apparently, that was how Arkadi kept my location a secret, sending them on wild goose chases. It wasn’t ideal, and I did feel bad about it.

“I can hardly see them,” I said, rolling my eyes at him, trying to play it off as a joke.

He was far from joking, though, and it seemed best to stay quiet about Arkadi for the moment. As if he read my mind, Ivan brought him up anyway, making my heart sink.

“I get if you wanted some time on your own, but how could you be so cavalier when our main rival is still on the loose?” Before I could think of something to say that wasn’tan outright lie, Ivan took my moment of silence as confusion. “Arkadi Mikhailov?” he needlessly reminded me. “The one who nearly burned us to the ground a few months ago? The one who’s plotting attacks against us right now?”

“Bullshit,” I said, stunned at that new information.

He blew out some pent-up air and paced away from me, heading toward the kitchen, where he poured us each a glass of ice water. “Not that you deserve it,” he muttered.

I was about to bring up the Geneva Conventions, but the mere memory of my early days with Arkadi gave me a little tremor. There was no way that what Ivan said about attacks against us being underway was true. Yes, Arkadi wanted his properties back, but eventually, through diplomacy. Or so I had thought.

I was already reeling with guilt over the pain I had caused my family. Daria was barely speaking to me, which meant my other sisters-in-law were probably similarly pissed off. I loved them so much, happy to have other females to team up with after a lifetime of living in a male-dominated family, and now I might have completely ruined our close friendships.

Ivan had gray hair, for goodness’ sake, and he was as steady as a rock. If I had caused him sleepless nights, my other brothers had probably been making themselves sick with worry, and all this time, I was living in a dream world.

A dream world I completely made up in my head. But no, there was no way Arkadi was going behind my back. If only Ivan would calm down enough to listen to me, I could explain to him that our family was no longer in any danger from the Mikhailov organization.

“The intel must be bad,” I said after he’d had a sip of water and seemed a bit calmer. “Do you even know where Arkadi is right now?”

“Not precisely, but we know every last man who still works for him,” he said. I shook my head, still not believing.

Ivan pulled out his phone and stepped to my side, showing me some pretty sound evidence that there were indeed attacks about to be underway. Every organization had spies, and even if they were low-level grunts and not allowed into any big meetings, things always ended up leaking eventually.

“We only just got this,” he said. “Another day or two, and we would have been completely taken by surprise.”

I grabbed his phone and peered at the surveillance photos more closely, scrutinizing the messages from the man they had on the inside. It seemed legit, much too legit to keep arguing over.

What a damn fool I had been, beginning to trust Arkadi enough to blithely give him the extra time he asked for. The time he was using to once again try to bring my family down. Was anything he said to me real? Did I mean anything to him at all?

It didn’t really matter in the end, did it? I had to put a stop to it.

“You’ve got to let me go,” I said urgently.

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