Page 18 of Bred By the Masked BRATVA
But it doesn’t feel like the end.
It feels like the beginning.
My body still trembles from the force of what he did to me. Again. I can feel his seed still hot and heavy inside me, a reminder with every pulse that he meant every word about breeding, binding and owning me. My wrists ache from where he pinned me. My throat burns where his teeth grazed too hard. My lips are swollen, my mask half-fallen, and this time I can’t bring myself to push it back into place.
Because the truth is, I don’t feel ruined.
I feel alive.
And that’s the problem.
I’m supposed to hate this. I’m supposed to be disgusted, scrambling for my clothes, clawing for the nearest exit. Instead, I’m lying here staring up at him, watching the way his chest rises and falls, the way his eyes, dark, steady and terrifying, never look away from mine, not even now.
He’s already building a future in his head, I can see it in his smile, in the way he strokes his thumb along my hip as if he’s soothing what he just shattered. And worse, my treacherous mind is already sketching it too.
A future where I’m not just reporting on the Bratva. A future where I am the Bratva. His wife. His queen. His… broodmare?
God, the word makes me shudder, half in horror, half in heat.
What would it mean if I said yes? If I stayed? If I let myself be claimed completely, not just for a night, but forever?
It would mean access. A lifetime of stories no reporter could ever touch. Names, secrets, empires laid bare. I wouldn’t just be writing the story of the Bratva. I wouldbethe story. The woman who walked into a masquerade hunting monsters and ended up marrying one.
What happens to my integrity then? My voice? My freedom? How do you expose corruption when you’re sleeping in its bed? When you’re carrying its child?
My conscience claws at me. This is wrong. This is unethical. I can’t join the very thing I came here to burn down.
But my body knows the truth. I wanted this. I still do. Every inch of me aches for him, even as my mind screams about betrayal and cages.
I squeeze my eyes shut, ashamed of the thought that slithers up through the chaos.If I can’t beat them… maybe joining them is the only way I win.
The doesn’t just terrify me. It tempts me.
He doesn’t move off me right away. He doesn’t need to. The weight of him alone is enough to remind me whose bed I’m in, whose body I just let inside mine. His thumb is still stroking lazy patterns across my hip as if he has all the time in the world. As if this is inevitable.
And maybe it is.
“Do you feel it?” he murmurs, his breath hot against my ear. “How right it is. How you fit against me, around me. There’s no leaving this. Not now. Not ever.”
My chest tightens. I should tell him he’s wrong. I should push him away, demand my clothes, find the nearest exit before I lose myself entirely. But my lips stay pressed shut and silent.
He tilts my chin with one finger until I’m forced to meet his gaze. The silver mask shadows half his face, but his eyes are bare. Dark. Certain. Hungry. “Tomorrow night, when the masks fall,” he says softly, “you’ll be on my arm. My wife. My future. My heirs already growing inside you.”
The words hit me harder than his thrusts ever could.
I swallow, my voice raw. “You don’t know that. You don’t know me.”
A slow smile curves his mouth. “I don’t need to know your past. I know your future. And it’s mine.”
My stomach lurches. My conscience claws at me. This is madness, this is a prison with gilded bars. And yet, deep down, part of me thrills at the certainty in his tone. How many men have ever looked at me like that? Not as if I’m replaceable. Not as if I’m just another face in the crowd. But as if I’m inevitable.
He presses his palm flat to my belly, still slick, still claimed. “I’ll make you strong here. Safe. No editor, no rival, no man in this city will dare touch you once they know who you belong to. And when my child grows inside you, the whole world will see whose story you’ve become.”
My throat goes dry. I want to spit the words back at him, tell him I’m nobody’s possession, nobody’s story but my own. But I can’t get them past the lump in my throat. Because what if he’s right? What if safety, power, certainty have always been thething I was really chasing? Not a byline, not an exposé, but the kind of belonging I’ve never once had?
I feel it again, that tug-of-war inside me. Reporter versus woman. Integrity versus survival. My principles shrieking that I’m becoming exactly what I came here to expose, while my body curls into him like it’s already chosen.
“You think this is love?” I whisper before I can stop myself.
