For three years, I've been Dvorak's.
Not willingly. Not happily. But when a man like Dvorak finds out what you know — when he holds a document you wrote in a moment of catastrophic honesty — you don't say no. You keep your face blank, you interpret what he needs interpreted, and you stop writing things down.
I'm very good at blank faces.
I'm also very good at six languages, a perfect memory, and noticing things I'm not supposed to. Like the word Dvorak dropped in Slovak in a room full of men who assume interpreters are furniture. Like the man across from me who heard it at exactly the same moment and turned to look at me like I was the most interesting thing he'd seen in a long time.
His name is Luca. He's Morozov's second. He ordered water.
He found me in four hours.
He said: tell me what you need. Not what he had to offer. What I needed. Like the difference mattered.
It did. Nobody had asked me that in three years.
He also arranged for my cat to be collected from Prague overnight and flown to Chicago. Her name is Kafka. She's small, grey, opinionated, and apparently now a Chicago resident.
So am I.
The building I've walked into is nothing like the arrangement I left. No locked doors. No managed silences. People here ask what you need before they offer you things, and the man who brought me here has been holding a thread since a restaurant in Bratislava three years ago — a night I remember too, though I didn't know he was there.
But Dvorak is still building. What he's building is bigger than any of us understood. And I have three years of his architecture in my head — every meeting, every name, every transaction — and I am done being furniture in other people's rooms.
I'm paying attention now.
Kept is a dark Bratva romance featuring a guarded heroine rediscovering herself after years of coercion, a warm and devastatingly patient hero who asks what she needs before he offers anything, and a grey cat named Kafka who supervises every significant decision. Interconnected standalone — can be read without Book One, but best enjoyed in order. HEA guaranteed.
Content warnings: past coercion, dark themes, morally grey characters, violence, mature sexual content 18+
Not willingly. Not happily. But when a man like Dvorak finds out what you know — when he holds a document you wrote in a moment of catastrophic honesty — you don't say no. You keep your face blank, you interpret what he needs interpreted, and you stop writing things down.
I'm very good at blank faces.
I'm also very good at six languages, a perfect memory, and noticing things I'm not supposed to. Like the word Dvorak dropped in Slovak in a room full of men who assume interpreters are furniture. Like the man across from me who heard it at exactly the same moment and turned to look at me like I was the most interesting thing he'd seen in a long time.
His name is Luca. He's Morozov's second. He ordered water.
He found me in four hours.
He said: tell me what you need. Not what he had to offer. What I needed. Like the difference mattered.
It did. Nobody had asked me that in three years.
He also arranged for my cat to be collected from Prague overnight and flown to Chicago. Her name is Kafka. She's small, grey, opinionated, and apparently now a Chicago resident.
So am I.
The building I've walked into is nothing like the arrangement I left. No locked doors. No managed silences. People here ask what you need before they offer you things, and the man who brought me here has been holding a thread since a restaurant in Bratislava three years ago — a night I remember too, though I didn't know he was there.
But Dvorak is still building. What he's building is bigger than any of us understood. And I have three years of his architecture in my head — every meeting, every name, every transaction — and I am done being furniture in other people's rooms.
I'm paying attention now.
Kept is a dark Bratva romance featuring a guarded heroine rediscovering herself after years of coercion, a warm and devastatingly patient hero who asks what she needs before he offers anything, and a grey cat named Kafka who supervises every significant decision. Interconnected standalone — can be read without Book One, but best enjoyed in order. HEA guaranteed.
Content warnings: past coercion, dark themes, morally grey characters, violence, mature sexual content 18+
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