Page 79 of Forced Virgin Bride of the Bratva
I lean back against the door, trying to catch my breath. “Then we hit first.”
He stops moving. Looks at me like he’s seeing something different for the first time.
“You think you can still be useful?”
I lift my chin. “I know everything about him now. His habits. His fears. The layout of the estate, his alliances, the files. I know how he thinks.”
“Do you?” Tiago says sharply. “From where I’m standing, it looks like you got caught up in your own fantasy.”
“That’s not fair,” I say through gritted teeth. “I stayed in that house for weeks. I slept in his bed. I bled for this.”
“And you still failed,” he spits back.
That lands hard, but I don’t let it show.
He exhales again, long and bitter. “We don’t have time for emotions anymore. It’s a full assault now. We hit him where it hurts. Burn his contacts. Shatter his name.”
“If that doesn’t work?” I ask, voice thin.
Tiago doesn’t answer right away. When he does, his voice is colder than I’ve ever heard it. “Then we kill him. We do what your father never could.”
A beat of silence stretches between us. That name—my father—hangs there like a ghost.
He still doesn’t know. About me. About how close I was to the man we’re trying to avenge.
I swallow hard, and nod. “Then tell me what to do.”
Tiago studies me for a long moment, then gives a single sharp nod. “You’ll lay low here. I’ll move some pieces into position. Kiera—if you’re still playing both sides, if I find out you hesitated because you feel something—”
“I don’t,” I say quickly. “Not anymore.”
It’s not true. I don’t know what it is I feel, but it’s not nothing.
Tiago nods again, this time slower, still unconvinced. “We make the next move in forty-eight hours. Get cleaned up.”
I slide down the wall slowly until I’m sitting on the cold tile, arms wrapped around my knees. My whole body still hurts, but it’s my chest that aches the most. Like something inside me cracked during the fight and never healed right.
Maxim’s face rises in my mind again—bloodied, smiling, dangerous—and my stomach twists.
“We will be prepared,” I say, quieter than I mean to, but my voice doesn’t shake. That’s something. Tiago doesn’t look at me right away, just nods once, already halfway down the hall. He’s not angry anymore—he’s focused, cold, calculating. That’s what we need now. What I need to be too.
As soon as he’s out of sight, the words I spoke settle like stones in my chest. I stand and have to brace a hand against the wall to stay upright.
Prepared.
The word tastes bitter. War has always been inevitable—this game was never going to end in whispers or exile. We were always going to bleed our way out of it. Now that it’s here, now that it’s real, my body won’t stop trembling with a dread I can’t name.
I take a deep breath. Straighten. Fix my face into something flat. That little girl who flinched when doors slammed and cried in corners after funerals—she’s long gone. I buried her in New York, in the Sharov estate, somewhere between the first time Maxim kissed me and the last time I lied to him.
There’s no space left for weakness.
When I walk into the war room—Tiago’s study, really, but everyone calls it that now—he’s already drawing lines on a map. Thick black ink cuts through Manhattan like a wound. He barely glances up.
“New York’s over,” he says, final and brutal. “We pull everything tonight. Contacts, equipment, accounts. Anyone left behind is on their own.”
I nod once. “São Paulo?”
“It’s the only place we can regroup. We’re strongest there, and it’s already fortified. We move at dawn. I want you packed and ready in four hours.”
