Page 104 of The Bratva Enforcer and His Virgin Bride

The pain is instant and blinding, a physical ache that wraps around my ribs and squeezes until I can barely breathe. In this exact, horrific moment, as I watch her tear down everything we built, the truth hits me with the force of a bullet: I am in love with her. Truly, desperately in love with her. And I’m heartbroken.

The realization doesn’t bring warmth; it brings an absolute, suffocating despair because I know this ruin is entirely my fault.

“Sofia, no,” I plead, taking a step forward, completely abandoning the cold, calculated mafia boss she thinks I am. “I admit I planned the date to soften you. I admit that was the initial goal. But before the date was even over, I was more interested in just getting to know you. I swear to you, Sofia.”

She scoffs, crossing her arms tightly over her chest as if to shield herself from my words. “Yeah, right.”

“And the sex was the best gift, Sofia. I swear it,” I rush out, my voice thick, cracking under the weight of a desperation I have never felt in my entire life. “I would never take advantage of you like that. It wasn’t a game. Not that part. Never that part.”

She just shakes her head at me, her eyes full of a profound disappointment that makes me feel smaller than the dirt beneath her shoes.

She just stares at me and says absolutely nothing else. There is no screaming, no throwing things, no explosive rage. Her reaction is entirely internal, a quiet, devastating collapse happening right behind her eyes.

That restraint makes the moment a hundred times more impactful, a suffocating silence filling the space between us. I can see her processing each piece of information, her understanding deepening with every word, rewriting every memory of the past few weeks until it turns to ash.

The trust she had so carefully, tentatively begun to build collapses completely under the weight of the truth. What had felt so real, so safe, is now entirely overshadowed by the dark knowledge that it all began as nothing more than a masterclass in manipulation.

“Lukyan, I can’t trust you anymore,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper, yet it cuts through me like a razor. “I’m sorry. This is too much. It’s just way too much.”

She turns to leave, her shoulders trembling.

Panic spikes through my veins. “Sofia, wait—”

I quickly cross the room to her, my boots slamming against the hardwood. But as I raise a hand to touch her arm, to pull her back to me, she flinches violently away from my reach.

The sight of her recoiling from me hits me like a physical blow. I freeze, instantly pulling my arm back, my hand dropping uselessly to my side.

She shakes her head, stepping backward toward the door. “Don’t touch me. Just stay away from me from now on, Lukyan. I want nothing to do with you.” She looks at me one last time, her eyes shining with unshed tears, and lets out a bitter, broken breath. “I hope you’re happy.”

“Sofia, please, listen to me,” I say, the words rushing out of me, raw and completely unscripted. “I know how this looks. I know what I was when I brought you here. I was a man looking at an asset, calculating a risk. But I swear to you on my life that man died weeks ago.”

I take a half-step forward, my hands open, pleading with her to see past my past.

“I didn’t plan for you,” I choke out, the admission tearing at my throat. “I didn’t plan for the way you look at the world, or the way you laugh, or how it felt to hold you in the dark. Somewhere between that date and the moment I thought I lost you in that warehouse, the mission stopped mattering. The code stopped mattering. You became the only thing that made sense to me. I don’t care about your father’s money, Sofia. I don’t care about the secrets. If you want me to burn those books, I’ll do it right now. Just don’t look at me like I’m a stranger. Please.”

But the words carry absolutely no weight in this moment. They sound hollow, like the frantic excuses of a liar caught in his own trap.

From Sofia’s perspective, the foundation of everything between us is fundamentally compromised. There’s no fixing a house built on lies, and as she turns her back on me and walks out of the study, she takes the last remnants of my heart with her.

Chapter 19 – Sofia

I’m alone again.

The estate feels quieter than it should, like even the walls are listening but refusing to answer me back. My books are spread across the floor and the couch, open like wounded things. Pages I once loved now feel unfamiliar, like they belong to someone smarter than me. Someone who knew what they were doing.

Now that I know the truth, I can’t unsee it.

Every spine. Every margin. Every little habit I thought was mine—it all feels… arranged. Intentional.

My fingers hover over a familiar book before I pull back, as if it might bite me. This was never just reading. It was something else. A system.

A language I was apparently meant to understand without being told how. I press my palms into my eyes.

“Think, Sofia,” I whisper to myself.

But thinking doesn’t help.

I sit back on the floor and force myself to breathe slower, to stop chasing the panic rising in my chest. Lukyan thinks the answers are here. Hidden in these books. Hidden in me.