Page 32 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

Tonight it won’t fly though.

I stay in my place, watching her bites get bigger and faster. I should probably leave her be. She’s safe and eating. Nothing will happen to her.

I don’t move.

Once she’s finished, she sits with her legs folded beneath her, rubbing her eyes with her knuckles. She leans back, asking for a new glass of water. I fetch her a glass from the kitchen, feeling an uncomfortable itch at the back of my neck at having left her alone.

When I come back, barely over a minute later, she’s still on the couch, mouth slightly parted open as she snuffles in sleep.

I put down the glass, carefully sliding my hands beneath her knees and behind her shoulder, taking great care to not jostle her left arm as I lift her slowly. She’s drowsy enough that she doesn’t even wake once. Her head lolls to my chest, brown strands slipping from her bun to line her face.

Something pulses in my chest, equal parts pain and equal parts tender.

Her breathing remains slow and even as I carry her to my room, laying her on top of my bed.

I tuck her hair back behind her ear, watching her face as she snuggles into the covers with a small hum.

Protection is a parameter, a function. What I’m doing, having her in my room, doesn’t have anything to do with protecting her.

This is something that has grown inside me without permission. It has been growing since the alley in Dubai, since the Dubai penthouse, since the first time she held her position when I released her wrist.

She has never been afraid of me, which is both profoundly inconvenient and entirely compelling.

This knot inside me has been growing through every confrontation, every negotiation, every time I’m inside her, or about to be.

She stirs slightly, her injured arm resting carefully.

She is looking for her parents because it is the truth she needs, the answer that the eight-year-old girl with the notebooks decided she was owed and has never stopped believing she would find. It is not something she is capable of abandoning.

She will find it, or she will spend herself entirely in the pursuit of it.

What she will find, when she finds it, contains my name.

And sitting in the quiet dark, her scent mingling with my own, I also come face to face with a part of me that I would not have been able to locate a month ago, something that the man I was before this woman entered my life would not have thought possible.

I will do whatever it takes to keep her.

Whateverit takes, even if it means destroying the truth and her world to keep her by my side.

Chapter 11 - Zara

It has been four days since the attack.

Four days of waking up to find the bandaging on my arm replaced, clean and precise, while I was asleep because Mikhail does not ask to do things. Somewhere in the past week, I have stopped finding him exhausting.

Four days of a different quiet between us, the charged combative electricity replaced by something lower and more complex.

On the fourth morning, sitting at the kitchen counter with my notebook open and the city performing its gray, mid-morning routine below the glass, I decide I am done letting it all happen to me passively, done observing the change.

That is the habit of a journalist and the defense mechanism of a girl who spent most of her life thinking that the safest relationship with any situation is an analytical one.

It has served me well, but from now on, I have a feeling it no longer will.

I close the notebook and start making calls.

By seven that evening, the penthouse dining table, which has only been used for operational documents and tactical maps, has been transformed.

The food came from a restaurant four blocks away. Three candles, tall and simple, sit unlit beside the Tupperware. The overhead lighting is dimmed to the level that makes the city outside the glass look close and warm.