Page 71 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

The two figures sit restrained together, bound at their wrists and ankles. The single overhead fixture is the only light shone upon them.

Arman stumbles to his feet despite the restraints, positioning himself in front of his wife in a knee jerk motion, before he even knows it’s his daughter and her husband. Samira, behind him, perks up woozily in her chair, and her eyes—dark, sharp, and exactly like her daughter's—land on me the moment I come through the door.

She drinks her fill of Zara, then of me.

“We need to move,” I announce, crossing to Arman first. He’s the closest, standing. With my knife, I swipe at the binding at his wrists, and it gives in two cuts, then the ankle restraints. Samira is next, and Zara helps me as well, snapping out of her daze.

“Zara!” Samira exclaims weakly, wrapping her daughter in her shaking arms, the way she should have done when her eyes first landed on her daughter after all these years.

“Mom, you’re fine, right? Dad? How did they—” Zara hiccups, her shoulders shaking.

Arman also joins in, embracing his girls, but he closes his eyes only for a moment, nodding when he looks back at me.

Just a moment,he seems to convey.

“Let’s go, girls,” Arman croaks, tapping his wife’s forearm.

“The compound is being ravaged,” I assert. “We are going out the way we came in. You stay between us at all times; you move when we move, you stop when we stop. Can you both walk?”

Arman and Samira look like they’ve aged twice as fast since I last saw them but they both nod with the same determination I see regularly in Zara’s eyes.

“Yes,” he says, self-pity absent from his tone. This is where Zara's resilience came from.

“Good,” she says. “Then stay close.”

There’s noise of shuffling feet and a scuffle from the corridor before I reach the door. The syndicate has pushed its personnel, from the perimeter, inside.

The trap must have been designed with exactly this plan: flood the courtyard with their men to neutralize the entry team, then move into the building to catch us red-handed.

It makes sense, which is even more irritating that I didn’t predict it.

The door creaks as I push it open slightly to peek out.

There are two guards moving toward us from the eastern end, almost on us already.

Zara slams the door open right as my hand on my gun tightens, and her elbow strikes against the nearer man's jaw sharply. The man’s body thuds into the wall.

The second man comes down when I put two bullets between his eyes, not one second wasted.

Zara’s eyes are bright and alive, running on adrenaline, looking like she’s done something that she did not know she was capable of.

“You've been practicing,” I murmur appreciatively.

“I've had motivation,” she chirps, winking at me again.

Behind us, Arman watches his daughter with a complicated mixture of both grief and pride, but we don’t have time to dwell on that.

Luckily, there’s no other casualties, and we slip outside as smoothly as we came in.

The courtyard is a different situation than the one we left only a few minutes ago.

Nikolai's secondary team has pressed in from the southern position, exactly as directed, and the syndicate personnel who were occupying the compound's inner perimeter are now being choked from two directions, no longer at an advantage.

My four-person entry team has held the outbuilding position and is pushing forward as the secondary pressure gives them room.

It’s still far from over. Nothing is over before it actually is, and that’s the only rule of combat.

Zara's parents follow us like shadows, far more efficient at it than Zara was, through the courtyard. Arman and Samira are in the center, Zara on Samira's left with her hand on her mother's arm, me running the exterior of the formation as her eyes dart around to record and predict every single movement in the compound.