Page 11 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

“That is genuinely one of the most arrogant things I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s accurate. Which is better than modest.”

I crossed the room toward him before I had a strategy for why, moving on the fuel of something that was beyond anger—something older and more exhausted, the feeling of being at the absolute end of one’s capacity for other people deciding things about you. “You sat down across from a man who had a bound woman standing next to him, and you made a deal. You didn’t call the police. You didn’t—”

“The police would have accomplished nothing.” His voice didn’t change. “The men who took you don’t leave evidence. The charges that would have been filed—if any—would have taken months to move through a system that Siroc White has spent considerable resources compromising. You would have been released from police custody and taken again within a week.”

That stopped me. Not because I was convinced, but because the specificity of it landed differently than a vague deflection would have. He said it the way someone says a thing they have personal evidence for. Not a theory. A pattern.

“That doesn’t give you the right—”

“No,” he agreed, and I blinked, because I’d been braced for an argument and agreement was harder to fight. “It doesn’t. Very little in this situation involves anyone’s rights.” He looked up at me with those eyes that I now saw were actually blue-grey. “You were put on a table in my room. Men in that room saw your face. Learned your connection to an outstanding debt. That information is now in circulation in circles that don’t forget things and don’t honor requests to leave someone alone.” He held my gaze. “If you walk out of this building today, you will be taken again. Probably within seventy-two hours. And whoever takes you next will not have my particular objection to how women are treated.”

The silence that followed was different.

“You’re trying to frighten me,” I said. But my voice had lost some of its levelness.

“I’m telling you what is true.” He stood then, which shifted the geometry of the room because he was close to the same height standing as he’d seemed sitting, which shouldn’t have been surprising and somehow was. “I don’t need to frighten you. The situation is frightening enough without embellishment.”

We were three feet apart.

I hadn’t planned to close the distance further. I was mid-sentence, building toward the next point in the argument, and I took a half-step without calculating it, and then we were closer than we’d been, close enough that I could smell his cologne—dark and precise, cedar and something underneath it that was just him, and that had absolutely no business being what my brain decided to notice right now. My chest was almost against the lapel of his jacket.

He didn’t step back.

“You decided my fate,” I said, and my voice came out quieter than I’d intended, scrubbed of its armor. “Without asking me. Without even speaking to me. You sat down at that table and you—” Something cracked at the edges of the sentence, and I shoved it down hard. “I am a person. I am not a problem you solved.”

Something in his jaw shifted.

“I know that,” he said.

“Then act like it.”

I pushed him.

Both hands, flat against his chest, a shove that had far more behind it than physical force—twelve hours of fear and the fury of being reduced to a bargaining chip by people who had never once considered what that cost the person being bargained with. I felt the solid wall of him under my palms for one startled second, and then his hands were around my wrists—not hard, not painful, just fast and controlled—and he stepped into the movement rather than away from it, which meant that instead of creating distance I had somehow created the opposite.

He’d pulled me forward to stop me from stumbling.

We were—

Close.

The closest we’d been. Our faces were inches apart. I could feel the warmth of him through the fabric of his suit, and his grip on my wrists was firm but careful, and I was aware with the full, mortifying clarity of an exhausted and terrified woman who had not slept enough that my breath had done something embarrassing—a stutter, small but audible, the kind that happens when the body registers something the mind isn’t ready to address.

His face was inches from mine.

For one completely unreasonable second, the anger drained out of me entirely and was replaced by something I had no framework for, something that had no business existing in this room between these two people under these circumstances. Something that noticed the grey in his blue eyes and the controlled tension of his expression and the way he wasn’t looking away. Then, for another reckless second, I thought he was going to kiss me.

He released my wrists and stepped back in one smooth motion.

The distance returned like a cold front.

He straightened his jacket—both hands, precise, the automatic re-armoring of a man who had just been briefly and visibly off-balance and had no intention of leaving evidence of it. “Eat,” he said. His voice was the same as it had been. Controlled. Deliberate. If the last thirty seconds had cost him anything, I couldn’t find where. “Sleep if you can. Stay in the suite.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then you don’t.” He moved toward the door. “But the building is staffed around the clock. You won’t reach the street.”