Page 44 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

I read it again.

Why your husband has never let you look too closely.

Mikhail has been beside me all this time, present, strategic, and offering to help by choosing to come with me to Dubai, choosing to search the boat, standing in the cabin while I held my mother’s earrings in my hand.

Present for all of it.

You will not forgive him for it.

He’s holding a different phone to his ear, papers spread across the counter when I stalk to the kitchenette.

I erase the distance between us and hold out my phone, screen forward, the message facing him. His eyes fall from me to thescreen, a furrow present in his brow as he reads what’s on the screen.

His lips fall into a flat line, throat bobbing slightly.

He knows what it means.

He’s decidedly not reacting. I know him well enough to decode his tells.

“What does it mean?” I demand sharply, knuckles white around the screen. “Mikhail, what does thismean?”

Chapter 16 - Mikhail

“Mikhail, what does this mean?”

Zara stands three feet from me with her phone held between us, her eye twitching as she glares at me, her temper rising like a storm that hasn’t broken yet.

I have stood exactly like this before—before operations and confrontations.

It’s fucking overis what my brain yells at me.

There is no way I can put this off for any longer. I can see it in the set of her jaw, in the tremors that are racing through her.

The message on her screen was sent by someone knowing exactly what it would do. I put the burner phone down on top of the documents.

“You might wanna sit down,” I say as calmly as possible.

She obviously doesn’t sit, only raising an impatient brow. I didn’t genuinely expect her to.

“Twelve years ago, there was a financial network operating across six criminal organizations. It moved capital through three continents using offshore accounts that made it functionally invisible to anyone who didn’t have intimate knowledge of its internal logic,” I start. “Your parents built a significant portion of that network. Your father designed the routing system while your mother managed the encryption layer that kept it sealed.”

“Thanks, Mr. Obvious. What does that have to do with this fucking text?”

“I was part of the operation that dismantled it,” I exhale in one breath.

Whatever she had expected me to say was not this.

I expected tears and anger and fury, a screaming match, maybe even a few hits to the face. Instead, she’s stunned into silence.

“You knew,” she pushes out, hollow.

“I knew who they were,” I clarify. “I knew their names the night you told me. In the penthouse, when you said them across the room.”

The sheer shock that renders her speechless freezes me into my spot as well. I can’t approach her, can’t hold her, and it’s all my own doing. Her face tells me she’s replaying the night she broke, the candles, the boat, her hand finding her mother’s earrings in the hollow beneath the shelf, all of it.

All of it.

All of it with this knowledge burning deep in my chest for weeks, doing its damage like a parasite eating away at me.