Page 2 of Bought By the Masked BRATVA
The thought shifts something cold and heavy inside me. But underneath it is something sharper, hotter. Something that tastes like fury and feels like choice.
They've already branded me a traitor; I might as well own it.
I walk to the bathroom and stare at myself under the harsh fluorescent light. My hair is long, poker straight, dark brown. Styled the exact way I've worn it for years. Professional. Forgettable. Safe.
I reach for the scissors in my toiletry bag.
Twenty minutes later, my hair is shorter, layered around my face. It changes everything. My cheekbones look sharper. My eyes look harder. I look like someone who could walk into a room full of criminals and not flinch. I reach for the bleach in my bag. I’d bought a couple of boxes the night I ran from my apartment. I’ve never coloured my hair before, much less bleached it. I hesitate for a moment, wishing there was a professional I could call.
But there’s no one.
The process doesn’t take as long as I expected with the help of a few tutorials online. It’s patchy in places, but a well-styled updo should hide the worst of it.
I don’t have a mask, so I quickly cut up a black skirt and stitch some ribbon that I cut from the inside shoulders of two cashmere jumpers to it. The criss-cross pattern is enough to hide the worst of my stitching, and I’m suddenly grateful to my mother for forcing me to learn some sewing basics, even if I was never very good at it. There’s just enough ribbon left to tie the mask around my head, and I’ll clip it into place for extra reassurance.
I hold the mask up to my face and study the effect. Up close, it’s obviously handmade, but from afar it looks delicate and anonymous. It covers everything from my forehead to my cheekbones and down my nose in a sharp point, almost like a beak.
Grace Casey, political consultant, is gone. In her place is someone else. Someone who can walk into that masquerade and offer herself up like a commodity. Someone who can look powerful men in the eye and name her price.
Someone who can survive this.
I hope.
The invitation catches the light, gold lettering gleaming like a promise or a threat.
The Bratva Masquerade. Tomorrow night. Terms of your own choosing.
I set the mask down carefully, precisely, next to the invitation.
Tonight, I'll disappear into that crowd of monsters and power brokers. I'll watch them move through their world, these people who've been pulling strings while I thought I was the one in control. I'll learn the landscape, figure out who's who beneath the masks.
And then, at the auction, I'll step onto that stage and offer them exactly what they want.
Information. Leverage. Truth.
In exchange for my protection. My survival.
My phone buzzes again, but I ignore it. That world, the one where I answer to reporters and scramble for redemption, is over. That Grace is gone.
Tonight, I enter a world I’ve only ever heard whispers about.
Tonight, I become someone new.
Liam
The ballroom that hosts the masquerade smells like old money and newer sins. I adjust my cufflinks and scan the room, cataloging faces behind masks, noting who's here and who matters. The Antonov brothers near the bar, deep in conversation with a German arms dealer. Three British MPs I recognize from parliamentary footage along with US judges, senators and the Minister of Defense. A Russian actress whose oligarch husband just died under convenient,for her, circumstances.
Business as usual.
I'm here for one reason: the Kozlov shipping routes. Viktor Kozlov finally got desperate enough to put them on the auction block, and I've spent six months positioning myself to win them. Those routes give me access to the Nordic corridor, which means leverage over half the shipping in the Baltic.
The Orlov shipping empire runs on three principles: discretion, efficiency, and control. We move everything from luxury cars to pharmaceutical supplies, and if some of those shipments bend international law, well, that's why clients pay premium rates. I built this network from the ground my father left me, expanding routes, cultivating contacts, ensuring that when someone needs something moved quietly, they call me first.
Relationships, emotions, attachments…those are liabilities. They make you soft. Predictable. Weak.
I've never been weak.
I've done the research, run the numbers, secured the financing. Kozlov's desperate. His operation is bleeding money and he knows it. I'll get those routes for thirty percent less than they're worth, and he'll be grateful for it.
