Page 24 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

A woman materializes at my elbow between one exchange and the next—young, maybe a few years older than me, with sharp cheekbones and an expression that wears boredom like a fashion choice. She glances at me disinterestedly.

“You’re not what anyone was expecting,” she says.

“Which is?” I ask.

Her eyes rove over me. “Someone quieter,” she finally says. “Someone who would stand there and look grateful.”

“Disappointing,” I say pleasantly.

The corner of her mouth twitches. She inclines her head once in something that might be acknowledgment and drifts back into the crowd like a signal that was sent and received.

Mikhail’s hand finds the small of my back—brief, barely there, gone before it registers as anything intentional. But I feel it through the fabric of my dress like a current, and my spine straightens automatically.

The room continues its elegant performance around me, and I stay exactly who I am inside of it.

The note is still in my clutch. The warning is still folded against the lining, its neat, unhurried handwriting sitting quietly in the dark like a question I haven’t answered yet. Whoever sent it wanted it to rattle me badly enough to make me stop.

They don’t know me very well.

I move through the remainder of the reception’s first hour with my eyes doing what they are built to do. The silver-bearded man’s name is Petrov—two separate conversations I overhear within twenty minutes confirm that. He operates primarily from Zurich and his relationship with the Korovin network is financial, which means he is valuable and careful and will never be entirely trusted by anyone in this room, including the people laughing at his jokes.

The woman in the red dress has repositioned herself twice since we arrived, and both times she has chosen a new location that offers a direct sightline to Mikhail without requiring her to visibly track him. That is interesting enough to keep.

The man by the bar has been in quiet conversation with two men I haven’t been able to identify yet. Their table holds three glasses of drinks that none of them are touching.

“You’re doing it again,” Mikhail says at my shoulder, low and even.

“Someone has to,” I tell him.

His reluctant silence is as close to agreement as I have learned he tends to get.

A waiter passes with a tray of champagne flutes; the crystal catches chandelier light in fractured, amber constellations. I follow him for a few steps, Mikhail’s presence disappearing from my side. I take one and hold it without drinking it because drinking will distract me, and I can’t afford to be distracted tonight—not with the note still folded in my clutch.

Suddenly, the lights go out.

One second of silence.

Then the gunfire starts.

Sharp, decisive shots that crack through the darkness. The screaming follows half a second behind, raw and involuntary and rising from too many directions at once to locate individually.

My champagne flute is gone—I don’t remember setting it down, but my hands are free and I am already moving. I drop low, dress be damned, because standing upright in a dark room with activegunfire is a choice that belongs exclusively to people with a death wish.

The marble is cold beneath my palms. Running the room’s layout through my memory, I orient myself by sound—the screaming is moving toward the east wall, which means people are gathering there, which means the exits are being cut off.

I keep low and move toward the nearest pillar, a wide marble column I clocked during the first twenty minutes for exactly this reason. My shoulder slams against the cold stone and I press my back against it, exhaling measured gusts of air.

Bodies are moving in the dark around me—security, identifiable by rapid Russian speech. Civilians are moving differently, the stumbling, uncoordinated movement of people whose instincts are driving them without a destination.

Something breaks somewhere to my left. A table overturning, glass following it in a bright, percussive cascade.

Then the lights come back.

I squint, my eyes getting re-acquainted to the bright lights.

Several tables have been overturned. Two security personnel are on the floor, one moving like he’s managing serious injury, one not moving at all. Near the east wall, a man in a charcoal suit lies in a pool of his blood, and the two people nearest to him are frozen in fear.

Near the bar, of the three men with the untouched drinks, two are gone. The third is still there, slumped against the bar’s edge.