The Don Shielded Her. So I Became Bratva Queen.

Chapter 1

The first bullet shattered the restaurant window at 9:14 PM. My husband dove across the table. Not for me. For her. And while I stood in the open, seven weeks pregnant, glass in my hair and blood running down my arm, Dante Moretti wrapped his body around his first love and never once looked back. The shooting lasted eleven seconds. I know because I counted. It is what you do when you are waiting to find out whether your husband remembers you exist. When it stopped, the room was smoke and screaming and broken wine bottles. Dante's men poured in through the kitchen, guns drawn. And Dante, Don of the Moretti family, the man who had once sworn in a church that he would take a bullet before he let one touch me, lifted his head from the floor and cradled Sienna Russo's face in both hands. "Sienna. Cara. Are you hurt?" She was trembling in her white silk dress. Not a scratch on her. "I'm okay. I'm okay, Dante. Don't let go." He didn't. I pressed my palm against my arm. The bullet had only grazed me, but it burned like acid, and warm blood slid between my fingers. Tonight was our fifth anniversary. I had chosen this restaurant because it was where he proposed. Sienna had chosen to come because, in Dante's words, "She's terrified to be alone since her husband was killed, Ana. Have a heart." I'd had a heart. I'd set a third place at my own anniversary dinner. Finally, his eyes found me. They moved to my bleeding arm, and something flickered there. Then Sienna let out a small, broken sob, and whatever he'd felt disappeared. "Rocco," he snapped at his guard. "Take my wife to the hospital. I'm getting Sienna somewhere safe." Somewhere safe. With her. He carried her out the back door like a bride. He didn't touch me. He didn't ask if I was okay. The door swung shut behind them, and I stood alone in the ruins of the place where he'd once knelt and promised me forever. Rocco draped his jacket over my shoulders. His voice was very quiet. "Mrs. Moretti. I'm sorry." He was the only one who said it. At the hospital, a young doctor stitched my arm and then ran the scan I asked for. I held my breath until I heard it. That fast, fluttering rhythm. Stubborn. Alive. "Your baby is fine," she said, smiling. "Should I call the father in?" I looked down at my clutch. Inside was a small velvet box tied with a gold ribbon. My anniversary gift to Dante. Inside the box was an ultrasound photo, and on the back I'd written: Hi, Papa. The ribbon was soaked in my blood. "No," I said. "The father is busy." When the doctor left, I reached into the lining of my purse and pulled out a phone I hadn't turned on in five years. A burner. One number saved. A number that could start a war on three continents. It rang once. "Anya." The voice was low, Russian-accented, and I hadn't heard it since the day I walked away from it. My father. Nikolai Volkov. Pakhan of the Volkov Bratva. Nobody had called me Anya in five years. My husband didn't even know that was my name. "Papa," I whispered. "I want to come home." Silence. One breath. Then: "Are you hurt?" "He let someone shoot me. And he held her instead." The silence on the line turned to ice. "Give me his name, dochka, and he will not see morning." I closed my eyes. "No. Death is too easy. I want him alive. I want him to understand exactly what he threw away." "Then you should know something," my father said slowly. "I have had men watching you since the day you left. The shooters tonight were not aiming at Moretti." My blood went cold. "They were aiming at you."

Chapter 2

Someone had paid to have me killed. I sat in the back of Rocco's car with that sentence echoing in my skull while Manhattan blurred past the window. Somebody wanted Dante Moretti's wife dead. And Dante had been too busy saving someone else to notice the bullet had my name on it. "Take me to the house," I told Rocco. "I need twenty minutes." He glanced at me in the rearview mirror. He'd been my guard for five years. He'd seen everything. "Are you leaving him?" "Yes." He said nothing for three blocks. Then: "Good." The Moretti mansion was dark except for one lit window upstairs. My bedroom window. I climbed the stairs slowly, stitches pulling in my arm, and pushed open the door. Sienna Russo was sitting on my bed. Wearing my silk robe. Brushing her hair with my brush. She looked up and smiled. "Oh. You're back. Dante thought you'd stay at the hospital tonight. He said I could sleep here because the guest room windows face the street, and after tonight I'm just so scared." "Where is he?" "Downstairs. On the phone, hunting whoever did this." She tilted her head, studying my bandaged arm. "You're so lucky, Ana. Another inch and…" She let the sentence hang. Then her smile widened, just slightly. "Well. You're alive. How fortunate." Something about the way she said it made the hair rise on my neck. Six months. That's how long she'd been back. Six months since Dante's childhood sweetheart returned to New York as a grieving widow, and my marriage started to vanish piece by piece. First it was my seat at Sunday dinner, because Sienna "needed family around her." Then my guard rotation, reassigned to her because "she's the one in danger, Ana." Then my birthday, which Dante missed because Sienna had a panic attack. Then the charity gala where she wore a dress identical to mine, and Dante told me to go change because "people will talk." Every time I said something, his answer was the same. "She's lost everything. You have everything. Don't be petty." I'd stopped counting at thirty. I walked past Sienna into my closet and pulled out a single leather bag. Five years of marriage, and everything that was truly mine fit inside it. Because everything else, the cars, the jewelry, the house, belonged to the Moretti family. Dante had reminded me often enough. "You came to me with nothing, Ana. Everything you are, I made." He thought I was an orphan from Queens. A waitress he'd rescued. A nobody he'd been generous enough to marry. He had no idea. I took off my wedding ring. I set it on the pillow, next to the divorce papers I'd drafted myself two months ago and kept hidden, waiting for a night that would give me the courage to use them. Then I set down the velvet box. The blood on the ribbon had dried brown. Sienna watched me with bright, curious eyes. "What's in the box?" "Nothing that concerns you." I walked down the back staircase. I heard Dante's voice in his study, low and furious on the phone. "Find who did this. Nobody touches Sienna. Nobody." Nobody touches Sienna. I didn't knock. I didn't say goodbye. Outside the gate, headlights flooded the driveway. Four black SUVs, engines humming, rolled to a stop. Armored. Tinted. On every driver's door, a silver wolf's head was etched into the paint. The Moretti guards at the gate froze. Two of them reached for their weapons, then slowly lowered their hands. Everyone on the East Coast knew that wolf. Nobody drew on it and lived. A tall man stepped out of the lead car. Blond. Scarred. Wearing a black coat and the same gray eyes I saw in the mirror every morning. My brother. Alexei Volkov. He looked at the stitches on my arm, and his jaw locked. "Who did this?" "Later," I said. "Just take me home." Rocco stood beside me, staring from the wolf crest to my face. His voice cracked. "Mrs. Moretti… who are you?" I handed him my bag so I could get in the car. Then I looked back at the mansion where I had spent five years making myself small. "My name is Anya Volkova," I said. "And I was never Mrs. Moretti."

Chapter 3

I woke up in my childhood bed with snow falling past the window. The Volkov estate sat on three hundred acres in the Hudson Valley, behind stone walls, electric fences, and sixty men who had all been trained in places that didn't appear on maps. I hadn't slept here in five years. My room was exactly as I'd left it. My mother had made sure of that. Irina Volkova was sitting in the chair beside my bed when I opened my eyes. She was a small, elegant woman who had once stabbed a man with a fountain pen during a business negotiation. She didn't ask me what happened. She simply handed me a cup of tea with honey and lemon. "Your father told me," she said. "And the baby?" "Fine. Strong." She nodded once. Her eyes were wet, but her voice didn't bend. "Good. Drink. Then go downstairs. The men are waiting." My father's office was all dark wood and old maps. Nikolai Volkov stood when I walked in. He was sixty-two, silver-bearded, broad as a door. The most dangerous man in the northern hemisphere, according to Interpol. He crossed the room in three steps and pulled me against his chest, careful of my arm. "Five years," he murmured. "You were gone five years, and he did this." "I chose him, Papa." "You chose wrong. It happens. Now we fix it." Alexei leaned against the fireplace, arms crossed. When we were children he'd taught me how to shoot. He'd also been the only one who begged me not to marry Dante. He didn't say I told you so. His silence said it for him. "Tell us everything," my father said. So I did. I told them about Sienna. About the thirty times I was erased and told not to be petty. About the anniversary dinner. About the eleven seconds I stood in the open while my husband protected her. When I finished, my father's hand rested on his desk, perfectly still. Only the whiteness of his knuckles gave him away. "When you left to marry the Italian," he said, "what did I tell you?" "That my seat would be waiting." "It has been waiting. Your shares in the family. Your authority. Your place at the table. All of it is still yours." He paused. "I let you go because you wanted to be loved as a woman, not as a Volkov. I understood. Your mother wanted the same thing once." I felt something in my chest crack open. Not breaking. Unlocking. "I don't want to hide anymore," I said. "I want my seat back. All of it." My father nodded. "Then first, you need to understand last night." Alexei pushed off the fireplace and laid a folder on the desk. Photos. Two men in hooded jackets, captured on a traffic camera two blocks from the restaurant. "Hired guns," Alexei said. "Freelancers out of Jersey. We picked one up at dawn." He didn't explain how. I didn't ask. "He talked. His instructions were clear. Hit the woman in the green dress. Don't touch the Don. Don't touch the woman in white." I had worn green. Sienna had worn white. The room tilted. I gripped the edge of the chair. "Whoever paid for this," my father said quietly, "knew exactly where Moretti would be sitting. They knew what you would wear. They knew which woman he would protect when the glass broke." "They were counting on it," Alexei said. "They knew he'd dive for her. They knew you'd be left standing alone." I thought of Sienna in my robe, brushing her hair on my bed. Another inch and… Well. You're alive. How fortunate. "Follow the money," I said. My voice didn't sound like mine. It sounded like my father's. "We already did." Alexei slid a final sheet of paper across the desk. A wire transfer. Fifty thousand dollars, routed through three shell companies. "The money trail," my brother said, "ends inside your husband's house."