Page 1 of Bratva Bride
Chapter 1
Ivan
Sometimesinlife,it’sthe tiny little things that cause big changes. Bumping into an old friend. Choosing one coffee shop over another. Deciding to wear the blue shirt instead of the white.
That was other people’s lives. In my life as a high-ranking member in the Volkov Bratva, change always came in big packages.
Murder.
Deception.
Betrayal.
Or in this case, a fucking bomb.
I breathed in deep.
The monitors cast blue-white light across my face in the war room on the third floor of the compound. The smell was so familiar to me—hot electronics, coffee, the tang of distant blood.
My fingers moved across three keyboards simultaneously—left hand tracking federal chatter, right hand analyzing financialexposure, middle keyboard running facial recognition on the Brighton Beach security footage. The screens hummed. My eyes burned. I'd been here seventy-two hours.
Monitor six replayed the bombing at The Golden Samovar for the tenth time.
I watched the footage with the sound off. I didn't need audio anymore—had memorized every detail. Before the attack, the restaurant had been full. Normal dinner service. A couple celebrating an anniversary at table twelve. Family with two kids at table seven, the little girl maybe five years old, wearing a pink dress. Our soldiers—Konstantin, Pavel, Yuri—occupied the corner booth, exactly where they should be for territorial presence. Two Morozov soldiers at the bar, watching, everyone wary of the messy war we’d been fighting for months.
The flash originated under table nine. White-hot explosion that overloaded the camera for 2.3 seconds. When the image returned, there was smoke. Fire. Bodies.
My jaw clenched. I forced it to relax. Counted to four.
The little girl in the pink dress died instantly. Shrapnel to the chest. The anniversary couple survived with third-degree burns. Konstantin, Pavel, Yuri—gone. The two Morozov soldiers—gone. Three other civilians caught in the blast radius. Seven people total. Four of them had nothing to do with our world. Four people who just wanted dinner.
Monitor one showed the federal response. FBI, ATF, NYPD. They'd swarmed the scene within eleven minutes. Someone—maybe the Morozovs—had tipped them off before the blast. The feds had cameras, evidence collection, witness interviews all documented within an hour. Professional. Coordinated. Designed for maximum legal impact.
A RICO investigation was inevitable now. The federal prosecutor had been circling for eighteen months, looking for an opening. Four dead civilians gave her everything she needed.
I pulled up the cost analysis on monitor three. Legal fees for a RICO case: $3 million minimum. That was conservative. If they went after our seventeen legitimate business entities, seized assets, froze accounts—I ran the calculation three times. $11 million in potential losses. Maybe more.
My hands trembled on the keyboard.
I made fists. Forced them flat. Kept typing.
Monitor four tracked the Morozov communications we'd intercepted. Viktor Morozov had gone silent after the blast. Complete radio blackout from their entire organization. That meant one of two things: they'd planned the bombing and were covering tracks, or they were as blindsided as we were and scrambling to figure out what happened.
I pulled up the restaurant's purchase orders, electrical inspections, gas line maintenance records. Monitor five displayed the blueprint. Monitor six still showed the explosion on loop. I overlaid the blast pattern on the blueprint, calculated trajectory, tried to reverse-engineer the device placement.
The angle was wrong. If the Morozovs planted the bomb, they'd positioned it to maximize casualties on their own soldiers. That made no strategic sense.
My vision blurred. I blinked hard. The screens came back into focus.
3:00 AM. My phone alarm vibrated. Medication time.
I reached for the amber prescription bottle on the desk beside keyboard two. Beta-blockers, 40mg. Propranolol. My hands shook as I twisted the cap. Three pills spilled onto the desk. I corrected—took one, swallowed it dry. The bitter taste coated my throat.
My stomach growled. It was seventy-two hours since the bombing. Seventy-two hours since I'd slept. Maybe eighty since I'd eaten anything substantial. Clara had brought food yesterday—or was it the day before?—and I'd nodded, set it aside, forgotten it existed.
My body registered protests I'd learned to ignore. Headache building at the base of my skull. Tremor in my hands that the medication would suppress in twenty minutes. Hollow feeling in my stomach that wasn't quite hunger, more like my body had stopped expecting fuel.
I typed faster. Pulled more data. There had to be something I missed.
