Page 10 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

Not a phone call.

“Where am I?”

“Mr. Golovin’s residence.” She paused, and I thought for a moment she might say something else, something outside the careful script she was operating from. Then she moved the coffee cup that didn’t need adjusting and said, “Mr. Golovin will come by this morning. He’ll answer your questions.”

“And if I’d like to leave before Mr. Golovin decides to honor me with his presence?”

The pause this time was longer. “I’d recommend the eggs while they’re warm,” she said finally, and left with the quiet efficiency of someone very good at not answering questions they’d been told not to answer.

I stood in the middle of the room and watched the door close.

Then I sat down, pulled the tray toward me, and ate the eggs, because fury required fuel and I was going to need every scrap of it.

He arrived five minutes after 8 am.

His knock wasn’t loud or tentative. It sounded exactly like the knock of someone aware that they have the authority to simply walk in and is extending the courtesy of announcing themselves simply as a deliberate choice. Three measured raps. Then the handle turned.

Those grey eyes were the first things I recognized from the last—and also first—time I saw him. They looked like nothing could hide from them.

His dark blond hair was immaculate in its styling. His black suit fit the way suits fit when they’ve been made for a specific body by someone who charged accordingly. He wasn’t as tall as I’d registered in the poker room—or rather, the scale of him was the same, but without the surrounding architecture of that space, without the low light and the charged silence and the context of what he’d just done, he was more plainly real. A man. Who was an inch taller than 6 feet, I think. With a face that looked like a completed task.

I was on my feet before I’d consciously decided to stand.

“Where is my phone?”

He closed the door behind him. “Good morning.”

“I’m not doing pleasantries with you.” My voice was doing something I didn’t fully approve of, shaking at the edges in a way that I hoped read as anger rather than fear, even though it was both. “How did you get my things? What am I doing in this building, and how long do you plan to keep me here?”

He crossed to the armchair across from the couch—my couch, the one I’d been sitting on, which made it feel like territorial encroachment even though that was irrational—and sat down with unhurried ease. He rested one ankle over the opposite knee.

He looked at me.

He didn’t speak.

“Don’t do that,” I said.

“What could that be?”

“That. The silence thing. The—” I gestured vaguely at all of him, the stillness, the infuriating composure. “I asked you questions. I’d like answers.”

“You asked four questions in rapid succession,” he pointed out. “I was deciding which to address first.”

“All of them. Address all of them,” I said, going on impatiently. “Who are you? I need to know if you’re planning to sell me again. What exactly did you bring me here for?”

At least two seconds passed before he spoke again.

“You are in a penthouse that belongs to me.” He paused. “You’re safe… now.”

Now.

That means temporarily.

“The length of your stay depends on several factors we haven’t discussed yet,” he added.

“Factors.” The word came out with considerably more edge than I’d aimed for. “I was kidnapped. Last night. By men who zip-tied my wrists and put a bag over my head and drove me to a warehouse, and then—” my voice tightened, and I forced it level—“I was brought to a poker game and bet. Like a chip. Like a thing that belonged to someone.” I watched his face for something—guilt, discomfort, anything—and found nothing I could use. “And then you won me. So I’d like to know what exactly you think you’ve done that makes you better than the men who took me in the first place.”

“I’m not better,” he said. “I’m different. The distinction matters, even if it doesn’t feel like it does right now.”