Page 46 of Forced By the Bratva

Tears were streaming down her face while she stared straight ahead, hands folded tight in her lap.

“Are you all right?” I asked, unsure whether to move closer to her.

Asking a crying woman if she was all right was a dumb thing to do. If she were all right, she wouldn’t have tears in her eyes.

“My father used to joke about this,” she said, voice thin. “Walking me down the aisle. Embarrassing me in front of everyone. Crying during the speeches…” She huffed and dried her tears.

I realized that I didn’t even know anything about her that wasn’t in her profile. I didn’t know her on a personal level, and vice versa.

“He raised me alone after my mother abandoned us.” She let out a short, humorless breath. “She said I was a mistake and that raising a child would ruin her modeling career.”

The pain in her eyes was obvious, and watching her tear up did something to me I couldn’t yet name.

“Where is he now?” I asked. “Your dad.”

Her hands tightened in her lap. “Six feet under.”

A pause.

“He passed away a few years ago. And now I’m married.” She turned to look at me, eyes red, voice cracking on the next part. “In a ceremony I never chose. And he’s not even here to witness it.”

I sat with that for longer than I should have, the weight of it settling somewhere I didn’t have practice dealing with.

I’d taken things from people before. Lives, mostly, quick and final, the kind of taking that ended clean. But this was different.

I’d taken something from her that couldn’t be returned, no matter what I did afterward. Her wedding day, or at least the version she’d carried in her head since she was a kid.

By bringing us together, I had stolen not just her freedom but her whole life, too. I’d rewritten her future without her consent, one piece at a time, starting the night I knocked on her door.

For the first time since taking her, I understood the full scale of what I’d done.

I reached over and took her hand.

She didn’t pull away this time.

I sincerely wanted to apologize and reassure her that it would make sense later. But I couldn’t find the right words. So I just gripped her fingers with a soft expression on my face.

Saying “sorry” wasn’t something I’d ever been great at anyway.

She stared at me, fingers in mine, as her tears began slowing eventually. The silence between us was different than before. Less hostile. Heavier in a different way.

Underneath the guilt, something else sat there too, something darker, something I didn’t examine too closely because I already knew what it was.

She was my wife now. My name belonged to her the same way hers now belonged to me. That should have felt strategic.

But it didn’t.

Instead, it felt personal in a way that scared me more than I’d ever care to admit.

Chapter 17 – Iris

It was official. I was his wife now.

Iris Hart was gone the moment he slid that diamond ring onto my finger. And just like that, my life as I knew it was no more.

I stood by the window, still dressed in my ivory gown, my eyes fixed on the rain trickling down the misted glass. My heart was heavy with emotions: sadness, anger, uncertainty, and pain.

Tears stung my eyes, but I’d already told myself that I was done crying. It wasn’t going to change anything. Crying wouldn’t erase the past few weeks or prevent Ilya from showing up at my doorstep at night.