Page 60 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

Then Zara sees them.

Grief pours over her, and every other emotion she’s possibly ever felt—all of them flit over her face at a terrifying speed. She’s never been the one to mask her expressions like I am, and this time, the sight leaves me gutted.

The four steps between them disappear in the blink of an eye, fifteen years of distance that was once so enormous has now become nothing in an airport arrivals terminal with strangers moving past them on all sides.

Zara’s lips part, but no words come out.

And how could they? There must be too many of them stacked behind years of having had no one to say them to.

“Zara,” Samira croaks, and the sound of her daughter’s name in her voice carries the weight of every time she must have kept it hidden in her throat—or maybe remembered it privately, in a closed room.

Her eyes are wet, whole body frozen like she’s waiting for permission she has yet to receive.

Arman ages before my very eyes, the cost of a decision he has decided to live with finally bearing its full weight on his shoulders. I understand from looking at his face, he’s never made peace with it, regardless of whatever needed to be done.

“Why did you leave?” Zara pushes out, her voice full of cracks and completely raw. It does not come out angry like I expected it to. It is the raw, undefended one, the eight-year-old’s version, and it is the most unguarded I have heard her voice.

Arman frowns painfully. “Because staying would have had you buried before your ninth birthday.” His voice is deep and resonant, but it carries pain. “The people who were our enemies did not care if they hurt the families of their targets. Leaving you—giving you a life we were not in—was the only protection we had left to offer.”

“You should have told me,” Zara insists, now louder.

“We know,” Samira placates weakly, her voice shouldering the grief of living a life she had never wanted.

Standing slightly behind Zara, I only observe the three, gaze constantly sweeping over the exits.

“I think we should keep it moving, baby,” I lean down to mutter in her ear.

She gives no reaction to my suggestion, and I think she’s going to ignore it completely before she takes the first step away from the circle. The Khans look at me for a moment, calculation evident in their eyes before they latch back onto their daughter, who is now making considerable distance between us.

The terminal thins around us as we move toward the exit, the crowd parting the way water parts around something it doesn’t recognize as belonging to it.

I keep the formation I built in my head before the flight ever landed—Zara at the center, her parents flanking her like something recovered and fragile, me at the perimeter where I have always existed in relation to her, positioned to be invisible until I am not.

The car is waiting where I ordered it to. Grigori holds the door and does not make eye contact with any of us.

Zara gets in first, followed by her mother, then her father, and I take the seat facing them because I want to watch the road and her at the same time.

The car pulls into traffic and the silence continues, palpable and taut. Four people who have run out of words.

“You said leaving was protection,” Zara cuts through the tight silence like a blade unsheathed, her gaze locked on her mother, not her father this time. “So why now? Why see me now? What changed?”

Samira’s hands fold together in her lap, knuckles pale. “The Irish found the old records before we did. We didn’t come back into your life to invite you back into this life, Zara. We let it happen because the danger was already coming for you, whether we spoke or not. We thought—we thought you deserved to hear it from us instead of from a stranger with a gun.”

“That’s your answer? That’s a lame fucking justification,” Zara scoffs. “You don’t get to disappear for fifteen years and then claim it asprotection.”

Arman’s dark eyes flit from his daughter, then to me. I know what that look means, how much to divulge and if it’s safe to do so in the first place.

“He kept us from doing something reckless,” Arman offers. “Your husband.”

Zara’s face scrunches in confusion.

“When the surveillance confirmed we were compromised, our instinct was to run again and disappear before anyone could use us against you a second time. It’s the only strategy we’ve ever trusted." His eyes stay on mine, the shine of gratitude buried under a careful mask. “Korovin’s people talked us out of it. Madethe case that another disappearance would only prove to you that we were never capable of staying. That we needed to be found instead of foundout.”

“He gave us the room to make the right decision instead of the fast one,” Samira adds, quiet. “I don’t know what we would have without him.”

The car takes the coastal curve toward the city, water on our left flat and dark as poured metal, the road ahead cutting through scrub pine that leans away from the wind like something flinching in advance of a blow.

Zara’s eyes land on me, a laser piercing through skin and bones. Slowly, her face softens by a degree I would not have been able to measure a month ago.