Page 46 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

“I told you the truth tonight because I didn’t want you finding out from someone else.”

“Aww, how fucking generous of you,” she coos, sugar laced with venom, entirely unlike anything I have heard from her before. “You told me the truth because you were caught. Because that message forced your hand. Don’t stand there and call it generosity.”

She isn’t wrong, and I do not insult either of us by pretending otherwise.

“This is not closure,” she rages, unlike anything I’ve heard coming from her throat—even back when she was my prisoner. “You’ve handed me a maybe wrapped inside a confession, and I am supposed to just fucking stand here and take it, whenyou’rethe fucking root of all my problems.”

“I did not take them from you,” I say carefully.

“You werethere,” her voice cracks straight down the middle on the wordthere, and she does not try to hide it. “You stood in that room with people who decided my parents’ fate, and then you stood in my life for weeks pretending you were just a man who wanted to protect me, and I let myself believe it. I’ll never forgive myself for that. Letting you have the power over me to deciding for me, again, what I was allowed to know.”

She presses the heels of her palms to her eyes, suddenly dropping to the floor in a squat. Her hair falls around her, hiding her face from me completely.

“I want to go back to New York,” she says in a small voice.

“You will, I promise,” I tell her.

She looks at me like the agreement itself is another betrayal. There is nothing I can offer right now that will not be received as exactly the wrong thing as I have learned across the last several minutes.

She disappears into the room and the click of the lock is loud in the silence her wrath has left behind.

She does not come out until it’s time for the flight.

The flight home carries a silence that’s like an open gaping maw.

She sits across the cabin rather than beside me, which she has not done since the first journey from Dubai to New York. Her notebook is closed in her lap. She looks out the window at the dark Atlantic running beneath us in its slow, indifferent expanse; her arms are crossed, and her spine carries none of the loose, present ease it carried on the terrace yesterday morning.

Again, I find it impossible to tear my eyes away from her but this time, for a far worse reason.

She does not look back at me once across the entire duration of the flight. Not when the cabin lights dim, not when the turbulence over the Atlantic rattles the glass beside her and her hand finds the armrest instead of finding mine. I bring her water that she does not drink, because offering anything more right now would be received as another instance of me deciding what she needs without asking her first.

I do not try to close the distance.

That is the part that costs the most, sitting here in the recycled air of a private cabin at thirty-eight thousand feet, watching the woman who turned her hand over beneath mine four nights ago hold herself like a fortress under siege from the inside.

Every instinct I have built across fifteen years of operating in spaces where control is the only currency that matters is telling me to act, to fix, to manage the variable back into alignment.

I do not act.

Because for the first time in longer than I can accurately measure, I understand that the correct move is the absence of one. She needs the space more than she needs my proximity. She needs to be furious without my presence pressing against the edges of it, asking her, even silently, to soften it for my comfort.

So I give her the distance.

And it is the hardest fucking thing I have ever done, sitting four feet away from someone and choosing, deliberately, not to close it.

New York receives us in its gray, lame morning light, the skyline rising through the descending plane in its familiar buildings of glass, and none of it carries the warm, golden permission of the city we just left.

Zara is already standing before the plane has fully stopped, her bag over her shoulder, her posture rebuilt into the professional composure she wears like armor when she does not want to be read.

We disembark in silence.

The car is waiting. She gets in first, and I follow; the space between us in the back seat is no greater than it has ever been in measured distance, but it might as well be the width of an ocean for what it currently contains.

She is two feet away from me.

She has never felt farther.

Chapter 17 - Zara