Page 36 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

We climb together, slow and then not slow, and when I finally break it’s with his name on my lips and his fingers laced through mine. He follows moments later, a guttural sound ripping from his throat, and I feel the heat of him spill inside me like an offering.

Silence.

We lie tangled in the sheets, our bodies still humming, and Mikhail’s thumb traces lazy circles on my hip. His face is buriedin my hair. It’s only some time before his thumb goes stationary, his breathing deep below my head.

The last time I felt anything like this, I was twenty years old and sitting in a park in Brooklyn in October with my first paid byline in my hand; the feeling had lasted approximately eleven minutes before I had started thinking about the next story.

My phone lights up on the bedside table.

The screen illuminates the room in a brief, cold wash of blue-white. Sneaking my hand out, I reach towards the screen, barely managing to grasp it. The notification sits on the screen in a preview that shows enough to read without unlocking it.

You are digging in graves that were sealed for good reason. The next warning will not arrive by message.

My body jerks up, phone now close to my face, the screen bright against the dark.

The number is unregistered, untraceable, a door with no handle on the outside.

Graves that were sealed for good reason.

Sealed.

Whatever my parents disappeared into was not a closed chapter. It was a locked room with people still inside it, and I have been standing outside it with a notebook and a disregard for warning signs.

Somewhere on the other side of that door, there is a person who has now decided that I am a problem they long ago should’ve dealt with.

The phone screen dims and goes dark in my hand. I sit in the dark with it, and the warmth that was in this room twentyseconds ago belongs to a different version of this night that I cannot go back to.

Chapter 12 - Mikhail

The study on the penthouse’s eastern side is the only unaffected room.

Every other space in this penthouse has, over the past weeks, proof of her existence littered all over: the kitchen where she leaves her notebook open on the counter, the living room where she folds herself into the corner of the couch with her legs beneath her, the dining table that held candles two nights ago.

Nikolai is already seated when I enter, impeccably arranged as always—composed, dressed in muted colors. His eyes are boring holes in the table when I come in, which means he is thinking.

Across from him, Anton sits, jittery. He is here because I asked for both of them.

I close the door and take my seat, lips parting to address what I have been keeping in for weeks, the thing that has been sitting in my chest like coal since the night she told me her parents’ names.

“Zara Khan’s parents,” I say, “were not civilians.”

The financial network that Arman and Samira Khan built and maintained across the early years of the last decade, the shell designations, the offshore accounts that made their system functionally invisible until it wasn’t—I let them know all of it.

The network reached across six criminal organizations and three continents, making the Khans invaluable and extraordinarily dangerous because their knowledge was a weapon pointed in every direction at once, including back at themselves.

Then I tell them about the operation.

Anton’s knee stops shaking. Nikolai’s mouth tightens.

“She doesn’t know,” Nikolai presumes.

“No.”

The two men choose their next words, knowing that they will do something they cannot undo once said.

Nikolai breaks the silence first, leaning forward slightly, his forearms resting on the table. His jaw clenches once before he says genially, “Tell her—not eventually. Do not wait for when it becomes impossible not to. Do it now, before she finds it another way, and shewillfind it another way, Mikhail—you know exactly who she is and what she does. You know what it will look like if she finds out from anyone but you.”

“It will ruin everything. She is still in danger. The Irish syndicate is still active. Her investigation is still drawing fire from sources we have not fully identified. This is not the moment to ruin the only functional trust we have managed to build.”