Stolen By The Bratva Brothers

Chapter 6

Seraphine POV

I didn’t sleep the way people are meant to sleep. The kind that puts you back together. I slept how soldiers sleep on enemy ground. One eye half open, every sound registered. My brain refused to shut down all the way because shutting down felt too much like dying. The underground cell had one bulb, no window, the walls close enough to make the space feel tight on purpose. Someone had measured this room and had decided this much space was enough and no more.

I kept Roman’s note on the mattress beside me the whole night. Don’t provoke Viktor. Three words. No context. No warning about what would happen if I did. That silence told me the price was something he did not want written down.

I folded the paper, unfolded it, folded it again; the paper was thin, the ink was dark. His writing was neat and careful, the kind of print a man uses when he wants every word to carry the meaning he wants.

At some point, the light under the door changed from black to pale grey. I understood I had survived the first night without learning anything useful; that felt like its own small failure. Voron used to say every hour you spend in a new place without gathering information is an hour your opponent uses against you. I had almost nothing. I knew the size of the cell; I knew the guard changed twice because the footsteps changed; I knew Viktor’s bandage was fresh when he stood in front of me. That meant this place had medical supplies ready and waiting; this was not their first time doing this. That was not enough.

The door opened around seven. It was not Viktor, not Roman. A woman stood there in uniform, tall, dark hair cut short, and a face that gave nothing away. She set a tray on the stool by the bed. Steam rose from a bowl of real food, not the cold, untouched plate from last night. She said, “Anya Petrova. I’m responsible for you while you’re here. Get up. You’re being moved.”

Not a question, not a request. Just a direct order. I got up and followed her. I watched her the way Voron taught me to watch someone whose place I had not figured out yet. You look without looking. You take the picture from the edges: how she held her shoulders, where her weight rested, whether her eyes checked exits before people. Anya’s weight sat forward. Her eyes had already checked every corner of the room when she walked in. She did not look at me the way the guards did, like I was a problem to be handled. She looked at me the way someone looks at a situation they have already measured and decided the outcome. This woman was not a guard; she was something else. I do not know what yet.

The walk upstairs was short. She did not speak. I counted the steps: twenty-two, a left turn, a window at the end of the upper hall showed a tree line, a high wall, and a sky turning pale blue. I noted the distance between doors. I noted how quiet the corridor was: no extra footsteps, no voices; the place felt controlled down to the last sound.

The room she brought me to was not a cell. That was the first thing that hit me. The room had a window, a real one, large, looking out at the same trees I had seen from the corridor. Forest pressed close against a wall built to keep things inside. Bars were there if you looked for them, worked into the frame so they did not stand out at first glance. Dark wooden floor, a proper desk, a bed made with sheets that felt like they had actual weight. The air felt different here. Cleaner. Wider.

There was a wardrobe. I went straight to it and opened it before I looked at anything else: clothes, several sets, my size, not close, not roughly, exact. The cut matched my height and the way I carry weight in my shoulders. Details no standard chart would know. Someone had measured these things before I ever arrived. Someone had known my body before I stepped into that ballroom, before the BMW, before Roman found me in the hallway and said my name like he had always known it, because he had.

I stood there and let that understanding settle. This room had been prepared. Someone had sourced these clothes weeks, maybe months in advance. I was not a reaction, but was a plan already carried out. Part of that plan involved making sure I would be comfortable enough to stay a long time.

The room smelled faintly of cedar. Something clean underneath it, like it had been aired out on purpose. Like someone had thought about what a room should smell like right before a girl who spent the night in a cell walked into it. I noticed and hated that I did. I stood at the wardrobe with my hand still on the door and understood, with total clarity, that the worst cages are the ones built to feel like something else entirely.

“The bathroom is through there,” Anya said behind me. “Meals come at seven, twelve, and six. If you need something between those times, knock.” A pause that felt deliberate. “Don’t wander.” She walked out.

I did not hear a loud lock. As soon as her footsteps faded, I went to the door and tried the handle. Locked, of course. But she had not locked it with any show; no sharp click, no look back to make sure I heard it. She simply walked out, and the lock was already there. A guard who makes a point of locking the door reminds you what you are. A guard who does not tells you she already knows you understand, and she does not need to explain it.

I stood at the door a moment longer, then turned and saw the book. It sat in the center of the desk. Not pushed aside, not left by accident, placed. The kind of placement that happens when someone holds a thing for a second and decides exactly where it should sit so it will be seen. I crossed the room and picked it up. The title was not random. It was the kind of book a person chooses when they have thought about what another person might actually want to read. Not what was safe. Not what was proper. What I might want. Something moved in my chest that I did not give permission for. I opened the cover. Inside, in the same careful print as the note under the plate, one line: “This is not forever. But it is nothing either.”

I read it once, then again. It was not comforting, not really; it was honest. And honesty from this particular man, the man who had planned my abduction down to the size of the clothes hanging in the wardrobe, was somehow worse than cruelty would have been. I knew exactly what to do with cruelty. I had trained for it. I had no idea what to do with Roman Bratva choosing me a book, writing one true sentence inside it, and walking away without asking me to thank him for it. I put the book face down on the desk and sat on the edge of the bed. Outside the window, the forest was still. The tree line was dark against the pale morning sky. The wall beyond it was solid, high and certain. My hands were in my lap; I looked at them, pressed them flat against my thighs, and held them there until they stopped being unsteady. It took longer than I wanted.

The book stayed face down on the desk. I did not pick it up again. I did not move it. I sat there a long time thinking about what that meant. The clothes in the wardrobe, the exact fit, the prepared room, the quiet way Anya had left without performing the lock. And that one line in Roman’s handwriting sitting in the center of the desk as if it belonged there. I had come in expecting a fight, pressure, questions, the usual tools of men who take people. Instead, I got a bed with real sheets, clothes that fit like they had been made for me, and a book chosen by the man who put me here. The honesty of it sat heavier than any threat. It left no clean place to put my feelings. I did not know yet what he wanted from me beyond the obvious. I only knew the room was ready, the door was locked without ceremony, and the book was still face down where I had left it. I did not touch it again. I sat with the weight of it and waited for whatever came next.