Page 42 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

Zara’s hand trembles, her breathing becoming frantic. She turns them over in her palm once.

“They’re hers,” she whispers to herself.

Her mother was here, standing in this cabin and wearing these earrings and left them, either deliberately or desperately, in a hollow beneath a shelf that only a person who knew the boat would know to look in.

She left them for someone specific, or she left them because she could not take them and could not make herself leave them for no one.

This is probably what Zara infers from this.

I arrive at a different conclusion.

Samira Khan was here, undoubtedly, but she also left something behind after the network was dismantled. The past I had given up to history is sitting in Zara’s hand in the form of two small gold earrings, worn and entirely, undeniably real.

If Samira Khan was on this boat, then she was alive after the operation. Arman Khan was also likely alive after the operation, which means the story of what happened to them is not the story I have told myself.

The story I have been carrying is the one Zara has been building her entire search against.

The boat shifts beneath us slowly, the water adjusting to maybe a distant vessel’s wake, the tide changing its mind. Zara’s fist closes around the earrings completely.

Her eyes find mine across the dim cabin, alight from the inside.

“They’re alive,” she says with wonder, the words carrying the weight of fifteen years behind them.

And she is right.

She does not yet know how right she is.

But she will.

And for the first time, I know this is not something I am going to be able to control.

Not anymore.

Chapter 15 - Zara

Dubai’s morning isn’t the gray and apologetic light of New York mornings, not the flat fluorescence of newsrooms and late nights and the inside of cars moving through a city that never quite goes dark.

This light fills the room with molten gold, reflected at me by the earrings on the bedside table where I placed them last night on the dark wood surface.

This is the confirmation I was seeking all along. She was here, wearing these against her skin.

My mother was here.

The overwhelming force it arrived with yesterday in the stripped-out cabin is the same force it floods me with today. I lie in the warm morning light and let it wash over me.

She was here. She left these. She was alive.

The door creaks open, revealing Mikhail entering with a tray laden with coffee, fruit, something warm in a covered dish. He sets it on the table near the window.

“You don’t have to—” I begin, getting up.

“I know,” he interrupts.

As I reach for the coffee, he sits in the chair near the window, turned toward the city. Outside, Dubai is already entirely committed to its morning.

We go out mid-morning, and the speed with which he agrees surprises me most.

“All right,” he concedes when I suggest it.