Page 4 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

“Answer me, Mikhail,” she demands, lips curling.

“Sit down,” I order.

The look she gives me could strip a coat of paint down to bare metal. She does not sit down, eyes set on me like a devious laser.

I cross to the far end of the room and pour two glasses of water. Setting them on the table, I know she won’t touch either. My eyes don’t stray from her as I bring the rim up to my mouth, taking a quick sip.

“You’re being hunted,” I grunt. “What remains of the Irish Syndicate after the Moretti collapse has placed your name on a very specific category of list. You should know by now it’s not surveillance.”

Her eyelashes flutter apprehensively, not a single ounce of fear in that petite frame of hers.

“Because of the Moretti coverage,” she adds expectantly.

“Partly.” I set the glass down. “You pulled their shit into public record that had been protected for a decade: names,accounts, routing codes. You handed the right people enough to start pulling threads that were never meant to be found. The syndicate is not the only organization that took notice of you; they just simply decided to act on it. Your name is stained now.”

“How do you know any of this?”

There it is.

“I’ve been watching you.”

Her lips part, a myriad of emotions tumbling over her expressive face: disbelief, shock, fear, disgust—all colors of the same hue.

“Excuseme?”

“Six weeks,” I deliver flatly. “I have been monitoring your movements since you began pursuing the Moretti angle—tracking your source contacts, intercepting communications that were routed toward you. You had two active threats in New York that you are not aware of because I redirected them before they reached you.”

She stares at me, throat bobbing.

“You hadnoright,” she states, voice shaking in either fury or fear. “You entered my life without my consent.” She takes a step toward me as if to intimidate me.Cute. “You tracked my movements, intercepted my work, made decisions about my safety that I never asked you to make. In what fucking world is that protection? It’s control.”

“I did do that,” I agree.

The agreement throws her. She probably expected justification, deflection, or resistance. I only peer deep into those chocolate eyes as I take a step closer, towering over her.

“Because without it, you would already be dead. You would have been a paragraph. Just a name and an age and a brief account of what was found and where, and the story you are chasing would have died in the same moment you did.”

My voice is nothing more than a silken murmur, but her jaw clenches like she’s holding back a terrorizing scream. She still does not step back, doesn’t take her eyes off me.

That is the thing about her I noted in week one and have not been able to stop noting since. She receives hard information the way stone receives rain—lets it run across the surface without cracking, processing it somewhere I cannot see, which is pretty annoying.

“So you decided,” she grits, slow and careful, “without asking. Without once considering that I had the right to know about the danger I was in so I could make my own choices about how to respond to it.”

“You would have continued regardless.”

“That is not the point.”

“It is the only point that matters.”

She takes another step, closing the little distance left between us. She smells like the city outside, heat and something hedonistically floral. Those brown eyes are darker than they appear in surveillance photographs, and they are sharper, not letting go of mine.

“I don’t need a handler,” she says poisonously, her chest rising and falling in barely suppressed rage.

She looks… very sexy when she’s mad.

“You need to be alive. That’s all I’m concerned with.”

The silence that follows is not an argument finding its end. I can nearly feel something sizzle between us, a small spark that can very easily turn into an all-consuming flame if I’m not careful. By the changing color in her cheeks, I can tell she feels it too.