Page 2 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride
His eyes find me and then move away smoothly.
I know the difference between paranoia and pattern recognition. I have spent five years building my career on that exact distinction.
I keep walking, pulling out my phone. Elena picks up on the second ring.
“Tell me something good,” I murmur in lieu of a greeting, because I cannot say what I actually mean—tell me I’m not walking toward something I won’t walk away from.
“I’m midway through a financial compliance audit,” she replies instantly. Elena Vasquez does not do small talk any more than I do, which is why we have always understood each other without much ceremony. "I don’t have something good.”
The stone that drops into my stomach has weight and edges.
“The trails you’ve been following are not cold. They’re buried. There is a meaningful difference. Cold trails go dead because people stop maintaining them. These were—” She pauses uncharacteristically. “Purposefully closed. Someone sealed these records. This is not the work of someone hiding money, but someone hiding people.”
My footsteps don’t slow. I make sure my pace is even, my face neutral. “What else?”
“Your name.” The words land like a door shutting in a quiet room. “It’s appearing in inquiry threads it has no legitimate business being in. After the Moretti coverage—Zara, you putenough of their operations into public record that anyone with access to the right databases can triangulate your involvement. You handed them a face to attach to the disruption.”
“I was doing my job.”
“Yes, and now people who have very strong opinions about that job know exactly who you are, where you’ve been recently, and—” The pause returns, smaller this time. “Where you’re likely going.”
The city is a shimmering blur of white walls and glass towers, the gold of late afternoon catching everything at once.
“Come home,” Elena pleads, quiet and exact. “Let me work the financial angle from here. The paper trail doesn’t require you to be physically present in Dubai.”
“Yes, it does.”
“Zara—”
“My parents might be alive, Elena.”
The silence that follows is pregnant with everything she has decided not to say, every caution she knows I will not receive the way she intends it. When she speaks again, her voice has gone softer. “Be careful.”
The call ends, and the same car whizzes past me for the second time. It is dark and unremarkable, windows tinted. It moves too slowly for traffic and too steadily for a driver who is lost.
I don’t turn my head to glance at it, tracking it in the reflection of a shopfront window. Its glass reflects the street behind me in a slightly curved, distorted version of itself, like the city seen through the eyes of someone deep in a fever.
The man from the corner is no longer at the corner.
Reflexively, I take a turn I hadn’t planned because the street ahead is too open, exposed, too straight a line for someone who is being followed to walk down.
The street narrows as the towers disappear behind me. The more I walk, the older, quieter version of this city comes out to greet me—the version that existed before the glass and ambition.
The quiet here is eerie. Fewer people mean fewer witnesses, and it sinks in, approximately thirty seconds after making the turn, that I have walked exactly where they wanted me to walk.
Suddenly, bodies materialize from doorways and recessed thresholds—three of them at minimum, possibly four. They move with unhurried confidence, well-versed in closing off a space from multiple angles until the person inside it runs out of options.
These are not amateurs.
My stride transforms into a run before I can even curse myself out.
Cutting hard on a diagonal toward the closing gap between two of them that has not yet fully shut, I pump my legs even faster.
Thank fuck I wore these boots today.
My heart pounds faster, sweat beading at my hairline, adrenaline burning everything in my vision.
A hand clamps around my arm. I wrench free, but I spin into the wall, shoulder striking stone, and the world stutters sideways for one nauseating beat.
