Tarnished Prince: A Dark Mafia Romance (Koalistia Bratva Book 2) by Autumn Reign

Author:Autumn Reign [Reign, Autumn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

5

Manya

Fucking bullets.

Before marrying Dmitry, I’d never been in the vicinity of a gunfight, much less right in the middle of one. In a matter of less than a week I had come to find my husband with a knife wound so deep that even days later it still pulled open, narrowly escaped a gunfight in a Bratva mansion, and been involved in a car chase down what was apparently Bratva territory lines. Blyat was the right word indeed.

“Manya, it is a marriage. You do not have to like him. You do not have to tolerate him even.”

My grandmother’s words chased me through my marriage, echoing in my head at the most inopportune times. I didn’t have to like him, she’d said, and I’d held to that belief like a nun to her rosary. I had wanted to hate him, to continue to despise him until he fell dead of the life he had held us to. But like those territories we’d just crossed, Dmitry and I had long since blurred the lines between us. Three days of blurring—in every available surface of his house.

I was no longer sure that I hated him. I wasn’t even sure I disliked him at all.

My grandmother had said to tolerate him, with her fingers like claws on my cheeks, holding me in place and forcing me to hear the wisdom in her words, but I wondered if they hadn’t been part warning as well. What if she had meant that I was only supposed to tolerate him? To find a balance there and not allow for anymore?

My grandmother had been my safe haven when I was in high school. It was her who had shown up to the jail with my bail money when I had been arrested, her who had plaited my hair for my day in court, and her who had held that same braid back later that night as I heaved up all the heavy Russian food she had fed me. She was strict and serious, lacking the warm, round frame of so many grandmother’s I had seen in America—but she was my baba still.

She had raised me on Russian lore at her knee as she brushed my hair, a hundred strokes for each side, and promised me a life in her whispers that I had yearned so desperately for.

Magic, she had said once when I was little, will eat you away if it can. It festers in the heart and grows until you have no more use of the real world and all of its hidden traps.

Dmitry, to me, felt a lot like what I had imagined magic to be back then.

My grandmother, back in her day, had been married to a Pakhan. She had born sons and daughters for the man and arranged the marriages of all of her children . . . including my father. She had lived through this life that I was now learning to field . . . and I had never wanted more than to sit at her feet and ask her for her advice again.

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