Page 32 of The Bratva's Forced Bride

I asked, “Why don’t you just cancel? Say no? Refuse to make the dress.”

“Stop talking to me like we’re friends.”

“What—no. It’s not like that.” I tried to get through to her. Maybe if she resisted, it would irritate him, and there’s a likelihood that he’d get enraged and shift the wedding date. And then, it’d never happen.

“Look,” I swished around in the unfinished fabric, trying to get her attention. “I’m just saying, you look like you’re in a lot of physical pain doing this. You can tell him to find someone else.”

“Stand still.” She’d deliberately poked me with a needle and glared before responding. “You’re obviously just a young girl. If you were more exposed and had some knowledge of how this world actually worked,” she pricked me again. “You would know that no one says no to a man like Mark.”

She put a tape around my neck, but I resisted. Who did she think she was to hurl that at me?

“Firstly, I am not just a young girl. Secondly, the only reason it seems so is because no one has stood against him to challenge him.”

“Oh, plenty have, darling,” she laughed in such a motherly way, I started to wonder if she was older than her late-twenties appearance. “And they resumed their place in the soil. From dust, they came, back to dust they went—or however, it’s said.”

“Really? You’re saying every single person who opposed the Bratva is dead?”

“Oui. And the ones that are not, are going to be.”

She moved around the corset, inspecting, and taking short notes on her iPad. Then, she narrowed her eyes to my hair. “For this look, you’ll have to cut that mane of yours or wear it up.”

I eyed her cute baby-blue blouse and black pencil skirt outfit and the way she had her hair held up in a messy bun. Maeva was beautiful, and her smooth French accent made her sound even more sophisticated. Like what I imagined his type of woman to be like.

The type that would be more than just a good fuck.

My heart squeezed in my chest most uncomfortably, and I looked away.

There was no way I was going to cut my hair for a wedding that would never happen. I didn’t want to believe it was real; this fitting, the elegant white and green wedding invitations staring at me from the dresser, everything. I refused to accept that I was giving my whole life over to a man who only wanted to use me to get revenge. A man who didn’t love me.

“'You’re lucky,” I heard her say and looked up to see her zooming in on a bridal sketch displayed on the bright screen. I swallowed a scoff. To me, that was the most inappropriate word to describe what I had found myself in. A curse fits the description better.

“I don’t want to get married.”

Her brows rose to her hairline. “You don’t want to get married, or you don’t want to get married to Mark?”

Her question threw me into a greater whirlwind of confusion, and I didn’t have words. I thought about it; was I really opposed to the idea of getting married or just getting married to a mobster boss?

Since I couldn't think of an answer, I decided to turn the question around.

“You like him, don’t you?”

She tugged on her lower lip, biting on thick red lipstick before she muttered something in French and began packing up. “I’ve never hidden it, not even from him. We’ve fucked a few times. He’s good, rough. Gives it to you just the way he likes it, the way that will make you beg for more. He was the best I’ve had ever.”

I shouldn’t feel like someone who'd just been stabbed through the heart by a sword when she said that, but that's exactly what it was. I suppressed the mental images. Didn’t want to think about it; if he touched her like he touched me or made her feel like she would burst from so much pressure and desire.

Maeva was still talking when I snapped out of the trance. She had finished packing up her fabrics and was standing at the door. She smacked her lips. “But he never looked at me the way he looked at you.”

What?

“What are you—”

“The next fitting will be the final one. I’m weary of these visits. You’re not that fun to look at.” She flashed a smile and turned on her nude stiletto heel. “Au revoir.”

What did she mean? Maeva must have been mistaken, whatever she thought she saw. For I remembered the coldness in his eyes as he had watched me leave his room, and how annoyed he had seemed. His thoughts about me couldn’t be good.

To Mark Varkov, I was nothing more than a good fuck.

****