Dark Prince: A Dark Bratva Academy Romance, page 1
Dark Prince
A Dark Bratva Academy Romance
Jagger Cole
Dark Prince
Jagger Cole © 2021
All rights reserved.
Cover by Plan 9 Book Design | Photography by Jamie Booth | Modeling by Andrew England
Editing by MJ Edits | Proofing by Jessie Stafford, Teshia Elborne
This is a literary work of fiction. Any names, places, or incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Similarities or resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or events or establishments, are solely coincidental.
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No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without prior written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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The unauthorized reproduction, transmission, or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal and a violation of US copyright law.
Created with Vellum
Contents
Dark Prince
Playlist
A Special Present
Trigger Warning
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Epilogue
Coming Soon
Savage Heir Preview
Paying The Bratva’s Debt Preview
Also by Jagger Cole
About the Author
Dark Prince
This is not a fairytale.
There’s no glass slipper, only shards. Prince Charming is the villain, and happily ever afters are a myth.
Except now, I need to construct one.
Me, the fake princess, with a make-believe happily never after, to the anti-Prince Charming himself.
Coldly beautiful, brutally ruthless, and heir to a criminal empire. Misha Tsavakov hates me, but he’ll be my fabricated prince, for a price:
All of me.
I belong to him now. No limits. No mercy. And no kiss before midnight to end this curse. No kissing at all, actually.
The deeper we get, the darker and more twisted this maze of thorns becomes. There’s no way out. But the harder I fight, the more it might be that I don’t want a way out.
Real or not, there’s one thing about fairytales that no one ever warns you about:
When you put on glass slippers, you’d better tread carefully.
Or you’ll bleed.
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This standalone, extra angsty Bratva academy romance is guaranteed to leave your kindle steaming. Step into the viper’s nest of Oxford Hills Academy and meet the Savage Heirs of Bratva kings and oligarchs.
Absolutely no cheating, no cliffhanger, and a happy ever after.
Playlist
Joke’s On You - Charlotte Lawrence
Smile - Wolf Alice
Gold - Chet Faker
Hush - The Marías
Bullet With Butterfly Wings - The Smashing Pumpkins
Play With Fire (feat. Yacht Money) - Sam Tinnesz
State Lines - Novo Amor
Vertigo - Alice Merton
Contaminated - BANKS
Shrike - Hozier
Please Don’t Leave Just Yet - Holly Humberstone
The Night We Met (feat Phoebe Bridgers) - Lord Huron
The Angel of 8th Ave. - Gang of Youths
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Search “Jagger Cole” on Spotify to find this and other book playlists!
A Special Present
The Jagger Cole fans-only newsletter is the first place to hear about new releases, giveaways, and more! Sign up today to grab a free copy of Mr Big - an extra hot billionaire romance not available anywhere else!
Trigger Warning
This book contains graphic descriptions of past trauma and abuse. While these scenes were written to create a more vivid, in-depth story, they may be triggering to some readers.
Prologue
The world burns.
The heat of the massive flames in front of me blow over me like hellish waves. My skin throbs with it. My nostrils and eyes burn with the smoke. Sweat drips down the ink and scars covering my body as the heat purges the demons and the devils from my black heart.
My hands, sticky with blood, clench to fists. My lips pull back in a death-mask grin as the scorching black smoke billows over me. But I don’t blink. I don’t step back or shy away from the burn. Today, I don’t flinch. I watch, and I breathe in the destruction. This is cathartic. This is therapy.
This is vengeance for more wrongs than I can count.
Timbers crack and splinter in showers of sparks. The roof begins to sag and cave. I imagine this pyre to the torments of my youth as a solitary flicker of death in the blackness of this night, with me its sole witness.
I glance down to the gold-plated lighter, warm against my palm. My eyes drag across the engraved initials before I look up into the roaring flames. A toss of my hand, and that too goes into the fire it created—into the past where it belongs.
Full circle. Ouroboros. The snake devouring its own tail.
A wall caves, and suddenly a whole section of the huge, sprawling mansion collapses onto itself in a dizzying shower of sparks and swirling embers.
One more nail in the coffin. Another shovel of dirt into the grave.
But this is not a mourning. This is not a farewell. This is a purge. This is cutting out the poison. A course correction of a life, more than ten years in the making.
When I inhale black acrid smoke that burns and sears its way into my lungs, I exhale freedom. When I stare into the roaring inferno, I see her.
The instrument of my torture and the breaker of my chains. The finger that pulled the trigger, and the soft touch that brought me back. My hell and my salvation.
I raise my eyes to the sky, watching the embers of my past rise into the night. A hissed curse and a whispered goodbye. For my father. For my mother. For my devils and my demons. For the girl who started it all, and who brought it all crashing down.
This is for me. But it’s also for her—her, for whom I’ll burn down mansions. Kingdoms. Empires.
The world.
Let it all burn.
But it’ll never be enough.
So I stand here alone, consumed by the fire of my making. A lord of ash. An emperor of destruction. A dark prince. A solitary lion, gazing into the night.
May the dead and damned hear me fucking roar.
1
I almost choke at the burn of the tequila as it slips down my throat. My eyes water as they squeeze shut. But I breath in through the nose and keep my head high before I open them again.
I’ve lost count of what number drink that is. That should be a bad sign. But actually, me even being here at all is a biggest red flag. The blaring neon sign that screams “trouble;” “danger.”
“Crazy girl with her back against the wall on the loose. Watch the fuck out.”
I barely ever drink. And even then, it’s a glass of wine at a nice dinner. Not wine coolers, keg beer, and a handful of tequila shots at a school party. That this is, in fact, my first ever school party at all is only more fuel on the fire.
When I finally clear the tequila burn from my throat, I look around at the party raging around me. Music pounds through the lavish mansion like we’re in a club, complete with a swirling, grinding crowd of dancers. Clearly, I’m in the minority here in terms of newbie status at parties like this.
Across the room, three guys—all star players on the OHA football team—cheer as two girls make out in front of them. A group in the living room are snorting what is clearly cocaine off a mirror across the coffee table.
Through the double doors out to the pool area, a topless girl is astride a guy’s lap in the hot tub, clearly screwing him.
Pure hedonism. Like I’m in the middle of a freaking Roman orgy.
To say that I—book-nerd, doesn’t drink, doesn’t do drugs, doesn’t screw in hot tubs me—am out of my element here is the understatement of the century.
Two girls talking animatedly at the kitchen counter across from me suddenly look up. It’s as if they’ve just noticed me for the first time even though I’ve been standing here for ten minutes drinking alone. The first, a pretty girl named Cora Laurent, wrinkles her nose, like my mere presence here offends her.
But I’m used to that look. In fact, I’ve dealt with that look for more than a year now here at Oxford Hills Academy. Those looks are constant reminders of two things: I am not like these people. And I do not belong here.
Last year, when I firs
But I got over it. I don’t need people like this to like me. And I don’t need to be like people like them. In fact, I’d rather be nothing like them.
Cora sneers at me before turning to her friend, a vile, snobby bitch named Ainsley Hendershire, heiress to a multi-billion-dollar grocery store chain here in the UK. She’s just like Cora: beautiful on the outside, poison on the inside.
“Oh my God, Princess Diaries, what are you even doing here?”
And of course, the ever-present nickname. Last year, it got to me. Being new and having zero friends didn’t exactly help. But that was a year ago me. Now-me just rolls my eyes.
But I mean seriously, come up with a better fucking nickname.
Princess Diaries. Like the stupid movie. Three years ago, I was a nobody. I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in North London with my schoolteacher mother, working two jobs myself on top of my top marks at school so we could keep the lights on.
Then, my mother won a single ticket on a cruise in a raffle that changed her whole life. And mine. Except, she never even went on the cruise. She fell overboard in port, got rescued by a handsome guy on a yacht, and it turned out, that guy was the King of the small Bavarian country of Luxlordia.
A year later, they were married, and I was officially a princess. Except, in the eyes of the snobby elites who fill this school, I was never a “real” one. I was a fraud. A phony. A usurper who’d tricked her way into their hallowed halls.
As far as I’m concerned, though, the Cora Laurents and the Ainsley Hendershires of the world can go sit on their thumbs.
“What are you doing here, Princess Diaries?” Ainsley sneers.
To be fair, it’s a great question. Drinking is not my thing. Parties are not my thing. And drinking at parties here, at the most notorious, hedonistic place on the OHA campus? That’s a double whammy.
I shouldn’t be here at all. But tonight, I’ve decided to stop caring about what I should and should not do. Or rather, I’ve hit my breaking point with doing as I “ought to.”
Obviously, my mother being a queen and living in an actual, honest-to-God castle, and me being at the most prestigious school in the world is leagues better than eating three-day-old mac and cheese on the sofa that doubles as your mother’s bed. And even thinking these thoughts makes me feel so ungrateful I want to slap myself.
But the truth is, I’ve put up with a lot the last year or two. I liked my old life. I liked the friends I had in that shitty high-rise apartment. I liked the dirty park I used to play in because we didn’t have a TV or Wi-Fi. I liked my crappy old school that still had maps with “USSR” on them.
But I left that life. I left my friends, and the places I knew. I got thrust into a life of finishing classes, and ballroom dancing lessons—all while being pushed into a snooty, elitist school that might as well be a writhing viper’s den of snakes.
I’m in the news now. Tabloids critique my choice in fucking leggings when I go shopping. And if the world of Oxford Hills wasn’t enough of a snake pit, there’s the absolute madness of the Game-of-Thrones-style drama that goes on behind the scenes of my mother and stepfather’s court.
Who’s sleeping with who. Who’s “with” the King, and who’s “with” the parliament his uncle oversees that shares power.
And who is the new princess marrying, because it’s her royal duty to do so, and not doing it may cause the collapse of the entire government of Luxlordia.
Yep.
That’s why I’m here, in the last place I should be, getting drunk. Because as of today, I have officially hit my breaking point.
His name is Frederick. He’s technically a prince of Denmark, and my “arrangement” to marry him is part of a grandiose plan to bring Luxlordia into the new modern world.
And I want fuck-all to do with that.
I left my old life. I left my old friends. I put up with the lessons on which forks to use for which kind of fucking salad. I put up with the etiquette classes and the lessons to make myself more “ladylike.” I put up with the wankers who fill this school and the shitty nickname that follows me like a storm cloud.
I’m drawing the line at arranged marriages, though.
No. Hell-goddamn-no.
I sneer back at Ainsley. “I’m here to… to…”
Right, I’m drunk. I’m actually drunker than drunk. Ainsley is blurry. And I’m always fantastic at biting comebacks. Except I can’t seem to form a single sentence right now.
“Nice comeback,” Cora laughs coldly. “You don’t belong here, Diaries. Run along now.”
“Yeah, well, go… fuck a duck,” I mumble at their backs as they leave. Yeah, biting comebacks are a no right now. But I can still glare daggers at their backs as they saunter away into the party.
But even drunk me knows they’re right. I don’t belong here. Not at OHA, that is. I mean here.
Lordship Manor.
The epicenter of the viper’s nest of Oxford Hills. Home to three kings.
They have a few names, actually. The kings of the school. The dark princes. The savage heirs. In a school filled with the sons and daughters of royalty, billionaires, and world leaders, the three of them stand apart.
Ilya Volkov, Lukas Komarov, and Misha Tsavakov; three dark heirs to the Russian mafia. The Bratva, as it’s called. And that’s not making culturally insensitive assumptions because they’re Russian. They’re literally the heirs to Bratva kings.
And they rule this school like three Emperor Neros.
Even where they live is like nothing else on campus. If your mother or father is a President, or a Fortune 500 trillionaire, or a King or Queen? You live in the same cottage quads as everyone else. I mean, they’re nice cottages, like something out of Harry Potter. But still.
If you’re one of the three Bratva princes, however? You live here, in Lordship Manor; a sprawling, glamorous English manor house complete with grounds, an interior worthy of Architectural Digest, a pool, a hot tub, and an endless stream of partying that would put a Rolling Stones tour to shame.
Three of them. Each of them different. But each of them dark, smirking, rich as sin, and ridiculously gorgeous.
I scowl at myself. I don’t even know why I said that. There’s nothing handsome about smirking, smug, tattooed, muscled…
I shake my head and close one eye as I pour myself another shot of tequila.
First, there’s Ilya; heir to the Volkov Bratva that his uncle runs. Historically, his reputation is that of a complete asshole and venomous snake. Actually, his nickname here is The Wolf—both for his last name’s meaning, and for the way he prowls this school like an alpha predator.
Except as of late, the wolf has found his match—in my best friend and roommate, Tenley. Ilya is still very much Ilya, but the savageness has been tempered just a touch. In fact, his absence from this party since he and Tenley are visiting his uncle at the moment has a noticeable dimming effect on the debauchery.
Well, or it would if the other two weren’t picking up the slack.
