Page 3 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

They are faster than I can outrun, and the cold realization slips its slimy fingers down my spine.

My throat bobs drily. I know what comes next.

I’ve always known that this is how my story might end.

Before the man can advance towards me, he drops hard and fast and without sound, exactly like how it happens in nightmares. The second body thuds to the ground before I’ve processed the first. Then the third.

My neck jerks and—

Dark hair lies messily atop piercing eyes, creeping vines crawling over his throat, emerging from the neckline of his black undershirt. His jacket sits entirely undisturbed, not a single button out of place. His height only adds to his stature.

His lips are in a flat line, nothing to be seen behind those dark eyes.

I know that face.

Mikhail Korovin stands in the narrow throat of the alley. In Alina’s life, he was a constant, present force, never quite in the center of any room but never truly absent from it either.

Those same eyes watch me now.

My body heats up with a feeling I have never felt before. It’s fear, apprehension, anxiety, and something far darker curling poisonously beneath my belly.

He steps forward, closing the space.

My body has frozen. All alarms blare in my head toget the fuck out of therebut—

But what stops me now is not instinct.

He will not hurt me. Not right now. Not tonight.

Chapter 2 - Mikhail

The penthouse is in a commercially unremarkable building—a tower like the thirty others visible from any fixed point in this city, glass-fronted and deliberately anonymous like all expensive things sometimes choose to be.

The elevator requires a key and a rotating code. The door at the top requires a second sequence. The man stationed in the corridor outside requires recognition, and receives it without a word exchanged.

She won’t notice any of it, of course.

People unaccustomed to this life rarely do.

The main room is clean, spare, well-lit to remove shadows from the corners. There are two exits beyond the primary entrance, reinforced glass on every exterior panel. The city sits below us in its gold and indifferent sprawl, towers lit against the dark like columns of fire that have agreed to behave.

Her jet black hair sits in a loose ponytail, strands tangled with the amount of manhandling she’s endured. Her brown eyes, wide and expressive—the first thing I noticed about her—are even wider, thick lashes sweeping shadows over her ruddy cheeks.

She stops in the center of the room as the door swings shut behind us.

The silence lasts three seconds before she turns around.

“Who authorized you to follow me?”

Like I expected, there is no exhale of relief that most people cannot suppress in the immediate aftermath of what I just saved her from. Not even the shaking that tends to arrive a fewminutes behind adrenaline, when the body finally catches up with what just happened to it.

Just an insolent eyebrow raised, tone direct and hot.

The blazer she was wearing when I pulled her out of that alley has one shoulder seam slightly stretched from where she hit the wall.

A few people treat surrender as a language they will never be fluent in. I have met a handful of them in my life. They are always difficult, and always the ones left alive among the spineless.

Standing still, she straightens her shoulders.