Page 83 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

Protection is not measured by the height of the walls surrounding the people you love. It is measured by the freedom they possess to walk beyond those walls without wondering whether home will still be waiting when they return.

Zara rests her head lightly against my shoulder.

The ocean continues its endless conversation with the shore. Soren discovers another shell, and Zara’s parents smile without reservation.

The future stretches ahead of us, uncertain in all the ordinary ways life insists upon, and for the first time in longer than Ican remember, uncertainty no longer resembles an approaching threat.

It resembles possibility.

And I find, with a quiet certainty stronger than any oath I have ever spoken, that this is the only victory I have ever wanted to keep.

“Look at him,” Zara interrupts my reverie. Her voice is something between a whisper and a prayer. She's standing ankle-deep in the surf, one hand shading her eyes, the other pressed flat against her thigh like she's holding herself back. "Just look."

Soren, raw determination in a tiny blue swimsuit, charges towards the incoming tide with the confidence of a man ten times his size. His legs are chubby pistons. He's got his mother's bronze skin and something around the eyes that might be mine, and right now, his arms are outstretched as the water rushes toward him and—

I move before I think. My hands hook under his armpits and I swing him up, up, into the dying gold of the afternoon. He shrieks. That particular shriek that meansagain, again, do it again, and his wet feet kick constellations of saltwater across my chest, across the vines tattooed around my throat.

“Papa!” He grabs at my nose. Misses. Grabs my lip instead.

“Little wolf.” I lower him until our foreheads touch. “You're going to swallow the whole ocean if I don't watch you.”

His answer is a string of syllables that might be words in some language only he speaks.

Over his shoulder, I catch Zara watching us. Her smile has taken over her entire face. It's in the crinkle of her eyes, the way hercheekbones have gone round, the slight part of her lips. She's wearing a white cover-up that the wind keeps pressing against her curves—those hips I know by heart, the soft belly that carried our son, the thighs I've mapped with my tongue more times than I can count.

Something twists in my chest. Something adjacent to pain, but sweeter.

“Put him down before you spoil him rotten,” she calls.

“Too late.” I settle Soren on my shoulders instead, his small fists clutching handfuls of my hair. “The spoiling happened day one.”

Our cabin goes quiet after eight, because Soren is currently tucked into his grandmother’s bed.

Soren fought sleep like it was a personal enemy, but his eyelids betrayed him eventually. We built a nest of blankets on the floor by the fireplace—not that we need a fire, not in this weather, but the crackle of it soothes him. His chest rises and falls in that rhythm I've memorized, the rhythm that still makes me check on him at three in the morning sometimes, just to be sure.

“He’ll be fine tonight, Zara,” Samira reassures her daughter, nearly pushing us both out of the room. “Now go and have some alone time. God knows you both need it.”

I go red in the face as Zara splutters; the bedroom door closes behind us with a click that echoes.

“Well…” I clear my throat.

She giggles. “Mom wasn’t wrong. It’s nice to be alone with you,” she breathes.

When we’re in our room, she leans against the door, the moonlight through the window doing obscene things to theshadows on her collarbone. Her cover-up is gone. Underneath, a simple sundress—yellow, thin-strapped, the kind of thing that slips off one shoulder when she's not paying attention.

She's paying attention now.

“Three days,” I say. My voice comes out rougher than I intend. “Three days I've been watching you.”

“Watching.” Her eyebrow arches. “Is that what we're calling it?”

“Torture. We're calling it torture.”

She laughs, and the sound hits me somewhere below the sternum. "You're so dramatic."

"I'm honest." I close the distance between us in three strides. My hands find her waist. The fabric of her dress is warm from her skin, and underneath it, the shape of her is exactly as I remember—softer in some places, firmer in others, different than before Soren but somehow more. "Three days of your ass in that swimsuit. Your legs. The way you lick salt off your lips."

“You notice a lot.”