Page 87 of Forced Plus-Size Bride of the Bratva

In my mind, I see her as she must be now—bound, afraid, thrown into some stinking room, surrounded by filth and shadows and men who think she’s just a girl. I imagine her flinching at every sound, breathing through panic, wondering if I’ll come for her.

The image blurs my vision with fury.

I blink once. Then again. It doesn’t go away, only sharpens.

I’ve already imagined a hundred ways to kill Jackson. Some quick. Most slow. All of them precise, intentional, crafted for suffering.

When I get there—when I take Alina back from their hands—I will make sure the ground remembers their screams.

Dima leans forward from the passenger seat, tapping the screen twice, then pointing to a blinking red boundary.

“We’re close,” he says, voice low. “Isolated farmhouse. No registered owners. No utility records. Looks clean on the outside.”

“Kill box,” I say.

He nods once. “Perfect for it.”

Of course it is. They want me charging in blind, arrogant, desperate. They want to gut me in front of her. End the Bratva’s most feared enforcer in a farmhouse in the woods, with my pride bleeding out at her feet.

What they don’t understand—what they never understood—is that I am never blind.

I am certain.

My hand rests lightly on the pistol at my thigh. Checked. Loaded. Ready. Another in the small of my back. A knife strapped under my jacket. Each one a promise.

Every second we get closer, the calm inside me deepens.

Not peace. Not hesitation. Just control.

The kind of control I need to keep the vision in my head from overtaking everything—the one where I find her dead, broken, used. The one where I was too late.

Even now—alone, terrified, locked away—I know there is steel in Alina’s spine. I’ve seen it. Felt it. In her voice, in herstare, in the way she said my name like she hated me and needed me in the same breath.

I will not let her be a casualty. I will not let her be mine and then be lost.

“ETA?” I ask.

“Ten minutes,” Dima replies.

I nod.

The rain picks up slightly, whispering against the roof. The road narrows. The trees press in closer. The last stretch before the slaughter.

I don’t know what I’ll find behind those walls, but I know what I’m bringing with me.

Hell.

I haven’t slept, not even for a second.

***

Alina

The cold, sour air presses down on me, and my skin itches from it, my lungs feel tight, and my nerves are flayed raw. I pace in tight, anxious circles, eyes glued to the barred window like I expect something—anything—to appear out there in the dark.

All I see is mist and trees.

I’m a prisoner waiting for execution.

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