Page 56 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

The sound she makes—oh,God, the sound. The noise of coming home after being lost for longer than you wanted to admit. Her body yields around me, tight and hot and so familiar, and I have to stop for a moment just to keep from losing myself completely.

My forehead drops to hers. We breathe the same air.

“Okay?” I manage.

“Okay.” Her voice cracks on the word. “More than okay. Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”

I move in slow, deep strokes that grind my pelvis against hers, and she wraps her legs around my waist, pulling me closer, deeper, until there’s no space left between us at all. The rhythm we find is tidal—a push and pull that matches the rise and fall of her chest against mine. Each thrust is a word I couldn’t say, each gasp from her lips an answer I thought I’d never hear again.

Her nails drag down my back. The sting is grounding, sharp, a counterpoint to the velvet heat that grips me with every stroke.

“Mikhail,” she whimpers, salvation and complain alike.

My hand finds hers. Our fingers lace together above her head, and I press her into the floor with my body, with my hips, with everything I am. The lamp flickers once—bad wiring we keep meaning to fix—and I watch her eyes catch the stutter of light.

She’s close. I can feel it in the way she tightens around me, in the shallow pants that escape her parted lips, in the way her free hand grips my shoulder like she’s afraid I’ll disappear.

“Let go, baby,” I whisper against her ear. “I’ve got you. Let go.”

Her body arches. Her mouth opens in a silent cry, and then she shatters around me—pulsing, gripping, pulling me deeper as the pleasure rips through her. Her eyes never leave mine. Not for a second. She lets me see all of it—the undoing, the reconstruction, the raw vulnerability she’s been hiding behind that blue scarf and that sharp tongue.

Watching her come undone beneath me is the most intimate thing I’ve ever witnessed, and I’ve seen this woman naked many times.

My own release builds at the base of my spine—a pressure I’ve been holding back, trying to stretch this moment into something eternal. But she clenches around me again, a final aftershock, and I’m gone. I bury my face in the curve of her neck, my hips stuttering, and spill into her with a groan that feels like it’s been torn from somewhere deeper than my chest.

For a long moment, neither of us moves.

Our breathing gradually slows. Her legs stay locked around my waist, and my weight stays pressed against her, the floor hard beneath us.

In this single suspended breath of a moment, there’s only her heartbeat against my chest. Her fingers still tangled in my hair. Her lips brushing the ink at my throat.

“Be with me,” she whispers. “Even when this catches up to us. Don’t disappear.”

I lift my head. The vines tattooed around my neck shift as I swallow, and I hold her gaze for three full heartbeats before I speak.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

She falls asleep wrapped up in me, her breathing becoming slow.

Right now her trust is simple.

I don’t know the truth about her parents. The people who followed her to Greece are still somewhere in the world. The fracture I created in what exists between us has been crossed tonight but not sealed, because sealing it is not a single evening’s work.

But she came back.

She crossed an ocean and came back anyway, and she walked through that door and she came to me.

Chapter 21 - Zara

The photographs, spread across the study desk in overlapping rows, stare back at me, organized by the three recurring background environments.

The rough stone interior, the coastal-adjacent exterior shots, and what may be a covered outdoor space—a terrace or courtyard—that appears in eleven of the forty-three images consistently.

Each photograph has a number penciled on its back in my handwriting and a corresponding entry in the notebook that catalogs every little detail—light angle, vegetation, material, visible horizon line, the quality and color of the sky.

Here is what I know: they are somewhere Mediterranean. The sunlight and plants tell me so. The stone construction belongs to a time older than the mid-century, belonging to a place that existed before tourism found it. The coastal horizon visible in four of the exterior shots shows a specific curvature that, when I overlay it against nautical charts of the Aegean and the Adriatic, gives me certain coordinates.

Greece was one of them.