Page 45 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

“You stood there,” she growls, slamming the phone down on the counter harshly. “You stood in that boat cabin and you watched me find those earrings. You watched me hold them. You knew what they meant and you saidnothing.”

Both her hands tear into her hair. She turns away from me and for three seconds her back is to me. Her shoulders rise and fall as she fights to gain control over herself.

“I told you about being eight years old.” The words come out broken at the edges as her volume rises. “I sat in that room and I told you about the foster homes and the notebooks and never belonging anywhere and y-you fucking held me. You held me while I talked about the wound of my parents’ absence I had been carrying my whole life and you already fucking knew. You already knew what happened to them and you saidnothing!"

Her voice has gone shrill, fingers pulling into her hair again.

“Dubai.” She laughs brokenly, the sound like glass against ceramic. “You got on a plane with me. You fucking searched that boat. You were standing right there when I found her earrings.” Her voice fractures on the last word, a clean break that she does not try to hide—the most devastating sound I have heard in a very long time. “You watched me hold them. You watched me understand that she was alive and you stood there and you said nothing. Fuckingnothing, Korovin.”

“Zara—”

“Donotsay my fucking name,” she seethes poisonously, eyes blazing wetly. Her body shakes, fury and devastation alike running through her. “Do not say my name like that right now. Don’t give me the quiet voice. Don’t give me more of the bullshit you have been giving me while you were sitting on this.”

She crosses the room toward me and stops three feet away; the distance is both nothing and enormous, a space that contains everything that has been built between us and everything that has just been detonated inside it.

“I trusted you,” she spits at me. “I don’t trust people. I built my entire life around not trusting people because every person I trusted when I was a child left, or was taken, or decided I wasn’t worth the permanence. And I trusted you. I don’t know when I decided to trust you, I don’t know exactly when it happened, but I did, and you were standing there the entire time with your hands full of the one thing I have been looking for my whole life, and you chose—you fucking chose—to keep it.”

I cannot give her a justification that holds.

“Why?” she nearly screams at me. It is just the raw, open wound of someone who wants to understand.

“Because I didn’t know what it would do to you,” I manage hoarsely. “The investigation was already drawing fire and I didn’t trust that giving you the full picture would allow you to make safe decisions. Because—because I was afraid of what it would do to us.”

In those eyes that I have grown so familiar with, I see that beyond the fury, there is something that is much worse: a kind of grief that comes with constant disappointments and let-downs.

“Do you know where they are?” She asks, her teeth gritted.

“No,” I admit honestly.

She closes her eyes for one second before opening them. “Did you look?”

“After the operation, there were efforts to trace them. Considerable resources were used to locate any evidence of where they had gone or what had happened. We found nothing. No trace or physical evidence. There were powerful people looking and they found nothing either.” I hold her gaze and I force out these words: “In my world, that means one thing. I believed your parents were dead. I have believed that for twelve years.”

The room sits in absolute silence for a long moment.

Zara collapses under the weight of the grief of what was lost and the anger from what I lied to her about, and the impossible, persisting hope of the earrings she found.

Her fingers curl around the burner phone I had kept on the counter and she hurls it against the wall with a loud wail. Her nails tear documents into pieces. I don’t stop her. I can’t.

The truth is finally in the room and it has done exactly what I knew it would do. I am standing in the aftermath of it, andit turns out that knowing something will destroy someone does not, when it arrives, feel any different from not having known.

It still takes everything apart.

“You said you believed it,” she heaves, standing in the destruction. “Past tense. Do you still?”

I debate on giving her the easier answer. I know what the easier answer would cost me and what it would buy. I do not make it.

“Yeah,” I mutter. “To some extent, I still do.”

That gets her to pause. Whatever was holding her together finishes coming apart now, and what replaces it is not grief anymore—grief has a softness to it somewhere, even at its worst, a quality of mourning that bends rather than cuts.

Her words are delivered with the most poison she can muster.

“To some extent.” She repeats it mockingly. “Twelve years of silence, a dead boat in the middle of nowhere, my mother’s earrings sitting in the next room, and you still think they’re dead. So what was today? What was any of it? Was I just—” Her voice cracks but she refuses to let the break stop her. “Was I just some stupid bitch you were managing while you waited to see how much more you could lie to me before it became a problem?”

“Zara, I—no, that is not what this is.”

“Then tell me what the fuck it is!” She crosses the distance between us in two sharp steps, all up in my face, nothing of the woman who turned her hand over beneath mine at a candlelit table four nights ago. “Because from where I am standing, I grieved a closed door for fifteen years, and then you let me believe for one single day that the door might be open, knowing the entire time that you don’t actually believe it is. You gave mehope with one hand while you were already telling yourself it was a lie with the other.”