Page 62 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride
Timur Sokolov.
He rushes up to us, handing Mikhail a jacket my husband immediately wraps around my shoulders.
His eyes don’t scan the perimeter, or even drift to the burning car even once like Mikhail’s kept doing. His face is artificially disturbed, managed version it always is.
“Timur? I thought Nikolai had given—” Mikhail starts, confused and tired.
And something in me that has been building since that day he watched me narrowly escape death with Gregor finally snaps.
“You told them where we were going,” I scream, pointing my finger in his irritatingly calm face. “You told them the route, the timing. You fucking knew we were picking them up today. You knew the terminal, the exit route, everything. You’ve been feeding them information since the car ambush in New York and probably before that, and tonight you handed them my parents on the exact night I f–finally had them."
He takes it all like he expected me to say all this shit to him, which enrages me even more.
“Mrs. Korovin, I don’t think you know what you’re implying,” he says calmly, raising his palms like he doesn’t want a fight.
But it’s all gone to hell now. Everything’s burnt down, he’s finally won, andstillhe wants to put on this fucking act?
“I watched you, you fucking bastard,” I yell. “I have been watching you since Dubai and filing every single thing I saw. That’s what I fucking do for a job. You alwaysknewhow it would end. I could see it in your stupid smug face. I know you suggested sending someone after me in Greece. I’ve watched you greenlight revisions that were wrong in ways that only make sense if you already knew what was coming. And here you are right now, sixty seconds after a fucking blast that only someone inside this operation would’ve known about, and you weren’t eveninthe fucking loop at all.”
Mikhail is frozen on spot.
His body behind me is rock hard, gaze stuck on Timur.
He already knows.
He must, and he is letting me say everything he’s doubted out loud.
Bit by bit, I watch Timur's mask fall away. First his furrowed brow flattens, jaw tightening, and mouth curling into a cruel line of indifference. It is the only movement his face has made in the entire conversation, the first give in his composure.
“Where are they?” I demand, walking up to him.
He keeps his stubborn silence.
“Timur,” Mikhail thunders, coming up to stand beside me, shoulder to shoulder. “Answer her.”
Timur sighs, like this is all a very big obstacle, and his mouth curls into a cruel smirk.
“Well, you got me,” he admits with faux defeat.
The words are like salt on a burn.
“Sokolov.” Mikhail’s voice is low.
Timur keeps his eyes on me, and in them defiance dances, but something beneath it looks exhausted. The exhaustion of a man who has been managing something enormous for a very long time and has just put it down.
“Why would you do this?” I shout, throat dry. “What the fuck have my parents ever done to you? What has Mikhail done to you? How could you fucking shit where you ate?”
He only stares at me, that cruel smirk on his face.
“My parents were a fucking variable to you? Is that it? Their lives were already in fucking danger. And whatever you told the syndicate, whatever access you gave them tonight, you handed them two people who have been hiding for fifteen years and who were, forty minutes ago, right with me."
His lips part finally.
“Your parents were never going to live quietly. The syndicate was going to find them regardless. I simply—”
“You simply made it easier? You simply made it faster? You timed it for the exact moment they were in the same place as me so that I would watch it happen? Watch me fucking lose them all over again?” I can barely breathe, my throat hurting from how much I’ve been screaming at this indifferent bastard. “Why? What did you fucking get for it that Mikhail already wasn’t giving you? What was worth this?”
“Survival,” he answers simply. “Which is the only thing that has ever mattered in this world, regardless of what Mikhail has decided to believe since you arrived in it.”
