Title: What Burns, Remains
Then
The first mark wasn’t hers to choose.
She was six when they held her down. Skin against steel. Smoke curling up her shoulder like incense from hell.
Bratva blood. Branded, not adopted. Useful, not loved.
They didn’t teach her to spell her name. They taught her how to carve one out of someone else’s.
By ten, she was sharper than the blades they gave her. Too sharp.
Her brothers noticed.
They smiled over vodka and muttered about “taking care of it.”
So she ran.
But where do you run when all you know is pain wrapped in loyalty?
She didn’t look for a new life.
She found familiarity—a gang with too many guns and too few rules. They welcomed her with suspicion and lost bets. Until she broke two ribs on a boy twice her size without losing breath.
That got her the second mark.
Every time she switched groups, it was the same dance.
Prove you bleed. Get the brand. Get used.
In her third gang, they decided her skill in deception would bode well, and started having her infiltrate rivals and threats, each time she was branded with a new mark.
And when you leave—if you leave—pray they don’t notice which mark doesn’t belong.
By sixteen, her skin read like a history of failed kingdoms. The kind built on blood. The kind that turned little girls into tools and burned them to prove ownership.
She was eighteen when she finally stopped running.
The last gang tried to keep her the only way they knew how: a man with too much power, too little restraint, and a ring she never asked for.
She disappeared the night before the wedding.
And showed up two months later at a military recruitment office with a forged ID, a sealed file, and a hoodie that never came off—not even in the desert heat.
They asked why she enlisted.
She said, “Structure.”
What she meant was: rules.
What she meant was: an oath no one would brand onto her skin.
Now — TF141 Briefing Room, 07:36 Hours
The mission dossier dropped on the table like a hammer.
“Bratva-adjacent,” Price muttered. “Looks like someone’s trying to resurrect an old line. Might be a surviving Vory cell operating out of Prague.”
{{user}} didn’t blink.
She never did.
But her shoulder twitched—barely. Just enough to make Nikto glance her way.
“Something wrong?” Soap asked.
“No.”
But the shoulder twitched again. A habit. An old one. One {{user}} had never noticed.
Nikto had.
He moved quietly.
And before she could step back, his hand reached out—swift, practiced—and pulled down the neck of her collar just enough to see it.
The Bratva brand.
Fresh enough to still read. Old enough to look like it never faded.
The room shattered.
Roach stood.
Ghost’s eyes narrowed. “That better be a lie.”
Alejandro’s voice was sharp, too fast. “Is that real? Tell me that’s not real.”
Kamarov didn’t speak—just clenched a fist hard enough to crack his knuckles.
Soap took a step back, like distance would help the sick twist in his stomach.
Then someone spotted it—just beneath the Bratva mark.
Another edge. Another crest.
Price’s voice snapped across the silence. “Shirt off.”
She hesitated. That hesitation was her only tell.
But the team was already spiraling.
“You were one of them?” Rodolfo hissed.
“I was a kid,” she said, finally. “That’s all I was ever allowed to be. Until I wasn’t.”
“That's your explanation?” Ghost growled. “Wearing the skin of the people we’ve been trying to erase?”
“I didn’t choose the brands,” she snapped. “I chose not to die when I got them.”
Price’s gaze was ice. “All of them?”
She met his eyes. “You think I carved them myself?”
The shirt came off.
And hell came with it.
Symbols. Languages. Marks that didn’t survive two years in the field without getting you buried in a ditch—or in chains.
And there she stood, breathing evenly.
Not begging forgiveness.
Not explaining what couldn’t be understood.
Just letting the room see what she never wanted them to.
The truth wasn’t that she hid her past.
The truth was that it marked her before she even knew it was meant to be hidden.