Page 25 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

And standing across the wreckage of the evening, surrounded by his own security personnel and absolutely unmoved in the way that only he can be—composed, upright, dangerous—is Mikhail.

His eyes find mine across the room. In the space of that contact, in the precise, quiet weight of it, I realize. This is what it costs. This is the currency his world runs on. This is what I’ve stepped into.

The note in my clutch shifts its weight in the silence.

Stop looking for them. You won’t like what you find.

Standing in a room where people are dead and the chandeliers are still burning their amber light across the wreckage like nothing has changed, I understand for the first time that whatever I have been wading through for the past weeks, whatever I thought I understood about the depth and scale of what my parents disappeared into, I had not yet seen the bottom of it.

The bottom, it turns out, is way further down than I had allowed myself to believe.

Chapter 8 - Mikhail

Something has settled into the air since we returned to the penthouse, like a room that smells and feels different after lightning has moved through it.

I have changed out of the jacket. The shirt beneath it is still dark. I stand at the window with a glass I haven’t taken a sip from, watching the city burn its lights against the dark with complete indifference to everything occurring above it.

Zara is on the couch behind me, changed out of the dress she’d been wearing. She hasn’t spoken since the car, which is unusual enough on its own. She is not a person who defaults to silence under pressure; she defaults to questions, to motion. Her quiet right now has weight in it, processing something she hasn’t yet decided how to carry.

I turn from the window.

“Who are you looking for?” I ask.

She looks up. The question lands differently than she expected. I can see the adjustment move through her, the slight recalibration of a person who had braced for something else. She had been expecting the operational conversation, the security debrief, the controlled post-incident protocol. Instead I have given her this, and the directness of it has briefly interrupted the script she was running.

She holds my gaze for a long moment that neither of us fills.

“I got a note,” she starts, keeping her voice level and her hands still in her lap. She tells me about the anonymous envelope that arrived at her apartment three months ago, the handwriting she couldn’t trace, the sentence inside it that changed everything she believed about her own history.

They may still be alive.

“Those words,” she says, “started a fire in me I cannot quell.”

She tells me about growing up in foster care, tone as neutral as can be, as though daring the information to make her smaller than she is. She tells me about the story she had been given about her parents—a car accident, a tragedy, the clean narrative of a closed door—and how the letter had cracked that story open at the foundation and left her standing in the rubble of everything she had built on top of it.

“Their names,” I ask once the dust has settled.

“Arman and Samira Khan.”

Something twinges in the depths of my mind. I keep my face as expressionless as possible.

Arman Khan.

The name is deliberately buried in my memory, surfacing through the layers of years and operations and decisions made when survival was all that mattered.

The name belongs to a different time. A different version of this world and of my place inside it.

A financial network that threaded itself through three continents and six criminal organizations and had, for a period of several years in the early part of the last decade, represented one of the most sophisticated money-movement schemes the Korovin Bratva had ever encountered.

Arman Khan had built part of that scheme.

He had not built it alone. His wife, Samira, had managed the encryption layer that made the network functionally invisible to anyone without intimate knowledge of its construction.They had been extraordinarily capable, and extraordinarily dangerous, because the people they had made enemies of in the course of their work constituted a list long and powerful enough to act as a ticking time bomb.

The operation that dismantled the network had not been clean. The Korovin Bratva’s involvement had been specific; we had not built the network, but we were present at its dismantling, and I had been responsible for parts of its execution.

After it was over, Arman and Samira Khan had disappeared.

No confirmation.