The Pakhan's Pregnant Bride

I run the second I see him.

Cold night air. Wet pavement. The echo of footsteps that never speed up and never slow down—because a king of the Bratva doesn’t need to chase. He just follows, certain I’ll run out of places to hide.

He thinks I’m a ghost from his past, a woman he lost and never buried. That’s the only reason a man like him would bother with a nobody like me. Until the truth slips: I’m not his lost lover. I’m his enemy’s little sister.

That’s when the rules change.

One moment, I’m clawing my way toward my own life—cheap apartment, crappy job, freedom that still tastes new on my tongue. The next, I’m being shoved into the back of a black car that smells of leather, smoke, and someone else’s fear.

He’s older. Harder. His suit is always spotless, though I’ve seen his knuckles raw and red. He tells me he wants a wife who talks back, a bride who spits fire instead of tears. He says my defiance makes him hungry.

He doesn’t understand that I’m already lost the second his hands close around my wrists.

In a house built on secrets and silent bodyguards, our war moves to his bed. I fight him with words, with nails and teeth and every last shred of pride. He takes, and takes again—until the first flutter in my belly turns our twisted arrangement into something far more dangerous.

On the blood-soaked West Coast, Pakhans keep empires, not families. But when the Pakhan’s forced bride begins to show, every choice he’s made sharpens into a single line: power on one side, the woman carrying his child on the other.

And there’s no way for him to hold both without something breaking beyond repair.