Page 33 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

I’ve taken extra care to make it not look like something extravagant.

The elevator engages its ascent at quarter past seven. Pouring two glasses of water, I stand by the kitchen counter when he comes through the door.

The sound of his steps echoing against the marble disappears. I hear him set down whatever he was carrying, then nothing.

“You did this…?”

“I did,” I confirm, and turn around with both glasses and set one on the table in the position that will be his and keep one in my own hand, meeting his eyes across the room steadily, He looks at the table, the candles, the food laid out carefully.

Something lights up his face—brief, unguarded, the shadow of something he reclaims quickly but not before I have caught it.

He sits down without saying anything else. His hands plate the food while I light the candles. We eat for several minutes before I say what I arranged this dinner to say.

“After the attack,” I begin, setting my fork down, looking at him directly. “And before that, when I—when I told you about growing up, you didn’t try to manage it or make it smaller or redirect it into something more comfortable. You just stayed. And I need you to know that I noticed. That it mattered.”

It’s all quiet except for the city’s low, constant hum beyond the glass.

Mikhail sets down his spoon. He looks at me for a moment, dark eyes alight with an emotion I’ve been seeing glimpses of recently.

“You don’t need to thank me,” he says gently. “It was not a duty.”

The air turns softer, like everything has turned into molten wax.

We keep talking—and this is the thing I have not experienced before with him. We have exchanged information, yes. We have negotiated and challenged and tested each other much of the time.

But this is different, quieter and more vulnerable than we’ve ever been.

He tells me, in the spare way he talks, that he grew up understanding loyalty before he understood almost anything else. It was the first moral category, the thing that came before and above and beneath everything.

It’s in his eyes that he truly believes it, and something tells me he is examining it now, possibly for the first time in a long time.

We move onto journalism, where it all began for me. About understanding that the only power available to a person with no family, no money, and no anchor in the world is the power of knowing things, and knowing what to do with them.

He listens with his fingers steepled beneath his chin, attention unabashedly on me.

The evening moves around us slowly, and somewhere between the dinner and its aftermath, between the conversation and its silences, the distance across the table begins to feel restrictive.

His right hand reaches for the edge of my hand, two fingers resting against the back of my knuckles lightly.

In answer, I turn my hand over beneath his.

The candles burn on, and the city holds its breath below us; the thing that has been building between us finally begs us to acknowledge it.

Mikhail’s left hand sets his fork down on the plate with a soft clink, and the sound ricochets through me like a stone skipped across still water.

“You’re not eating anymore,” he observes lowly.

“I’m watching you.”

The candle between us gutters in some invisible draft, and the shadows crawl up the ink on his throat. Vines. They curl around the column of his neck, disappearing beneath the collar of his shirt, and I’ve spent the last forty minutes remembering where they end and where they begin.

“Watching me?”

“Yeah. Just you.”

His dark eyes—nearly black in this light—flicker with something I can’t name. His hair is a mess, pushed back from his forehead like he’s been running his hands through it all day. There’s the slightest ridge of a scar above his left eyebrow I haven’t asked about yet.

Mikhail pushes his chair back, hand withdrawing from mine.