Page 54 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

Brown eyes land on me, bags heavy beneath them. She simply stands in the doorway for a moment. The distance between us feels wider than ever.

Then she steps inside towards me, and I wrap my arms around her before I even decide to do so. Her face smushes against my chest, an aching cry leaving her throat, like something held under enormous pressure for a very long time finally exploding.

My arms curl tighter around her, and I press my nose against the top of her head, breathing her scent in.

The same scent that has haunted my nights and my days since she left me.

Her tears wet my shirt and her sobs grow louder. Through it all, her nails pierce through my back, not letting me go. We curl on the floor together, and I wrap her up in my arms the best I can.

Once she’s able to put together words, they spill from her like water does from a leaky faucet: Greece, the photographs and the sixteen hours of analysis, the stone and the roofline, all nothing but a fake match.

“I can’t believe—I can’t believe it was all a fucking lie,” is what rips out of her throat, heart-shattering and wet.

Then she tells me about the men on the coastal road, the market, and the scarf from that woman, and the taxi to the airport.

“On the plane,” she mumbles, “is when it all finally hit me; I was being used as bait. An experiment done for someone else’s benefit. Someone used my parents as bait to move me where I needed to be moved. The shit that truly gets to me is that I can’t even tell anymore what’s a real lead and what’s not. That’s the only thing I had as a journalist, as Zara Khan.”

“I am sorry,” I sigh truthfully. “For my part in what happened to your family. For knowing and waiting. I am sorry.”

She breathes quietly against my chest for a minute, not saying anything in return to placate me.

“I’m no longer staying on that. I have been so focused on finding them,” she says, low and exhausted, “so focused on whether they were alive, whether they were reachable, whether I could get to them, that I haven’t let myself ask the other thing.”

Her hands close around the fabric of my shirt again, her voice vibrating against my sternum as she speaks.

“How could they leave me?” She blabbers, raw and broken, the breaking of something that has been sealed for fifteen years. “They had a daughter. They had an eight-year-old daughter and they chose—whatever it was, whatever the danger—they chose to not come back. They chose to let me grow up believing they were dead, to let me go through everything alone, every year of not belonging anywhere, and they were alive. They werealive, Mikhail. They were alive, living in Greece or wherever the fuck they actually are, and I was eight years old and they never cameback.”

There is nothing I can offer her. No condolences that would work, no placation or false lies. I don’t have pieces of the answer.

In her vulnerable voice, I hear the eight-year-old who asked this same question to herself every night before she slept and every morning after she woke up.

Running my fingers through her tangled strands, I press my hand against the back of her head to bring her head closer.

How.

I don’t have the answer.

So I stay.

In my arms, the grip on my shirt does not loosen, and her breathing against my chest is erratic, after years of holding herself through the worst of it.

She reaches for me, her fingers trembling when they touch my face. She holds it with the same care as she held the earrings on the boat, cradling me like she’s afraid she’d never get to hold me after this.

I don’t move. The floor is hard beneath my knees, the air still thick with everything she screamed into my chest ten minutes ago—the grief, the exhaustion, everything she’s been hiding behind those mysterious eyes for weeks.

My shirt is still damp from her tears. The tattooed vines curling up my throat feel tight, like they’re constricting around the breath I haven’t taken since she pulled back and looked at me with those brown eyes, red-rimmed and raw.

Zara’s fingertips trace the ridge of my jaw slowly, as if she’s memorizing bone.

“Mikhail,” she whispers, and my name in her mouth sounds like an apology and a question wrapped into one syllable.

The blue scarf around her neck has come loose—one end trailing over her collarbone, the knot barely holding. I want to fix it—no, I want to pull it off entirely.

My hands stay at her back, supporting her, because I don’t trust myself yet. Not so soon after watching her unravel. Not after catching her when she finally fell.

Her thumb brushes the corner of my mouth.

I exhale through my nose—sharp, unsteady. She hasn’t touched me like this since—