Page 12 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

The rage came back then because rage was easier than the alternative. “I would rather take my chances on the street than spend another hour being owned without any freedom of my own.”

He paused at the door.

He had one hand on the frame and his back to me. The pause was long enough that I thought—for just a moment—that something I’d said had actually moved something in him. That somewhere behind that glacial, infuriating competence was a person who felt the weight of what he’d done.

Then he spoke.

“Freedom,” he said, quiet and even, without turning around, “is a luxury you lost the moment you were put on my table.”

The door closed.

I stood in the middle of the room for a long moment, listening to the silence settle around me like sediment. The breakfast tray sat on the coffee table with its empty plates and its single white ranunculus in its small vase, which I was only now registering as absurd—a flower, in all of this, as though beauty were a form of apology.

I made it to the couch on legs that had decided they were done cooperating.

I sat. And the shaking that I had been holding back since I woke up—since the warehouse, if I was being honest, since the loading bay and the zip tie and the hood—moved through me in one long, quiet wave that I didn’t have the energy to stop anymore.

I wasn’t crying. I was shaking, which was different.

Shaking was what happened when you’d been running on adrenaline and fury for twelve hours, and the adrenaline had finally clocked out without warning. It was your body filing a formal complaint against everything that had happened to it and presenting the bill. Shaking was, in my experience, survivable.

What was less survivable was the awareness of him that wouldn’t settle back down.

The smell of his cologne was still faintly on my palms where they’d pressed against his jacket. The way his grip on my wrists had been controlled rather than punishing, precise in a way that felt more alarming than roughness would have. The pause at the door. The line he’d delivered without looking at me, and the way it had landed not just as a threat but as something else—something that understood how much the word freedom cost me personally, which meant he’d been paying more attention than his expression let on.

I pressed my fingers against the mark on my wrists and breathed.

I had survived this far. From the loading bay and the warehouse to the poker room and waking up in a stranger’s penthouse several floors above a city that couldn’t hear me. I had survived twelve hours of being treated as a thing, which was its own kind of damage.

What I hadn’t survived—what I was only beginning to understand I was going to have to survive—was him.

Not his power. Not his rules.

The man himself.

The man who had looked at me like I was a problem he couldn’t categorize. Who had caught me when I shoved him and let go the moment he’d steadied me, as though holding on was a line he’d decided not to cross.

I was in serious trouble.

And for the first time since the loading bay, it had absolutely nothing to do with Siroc White.

Chapter Four

Alexei

The intelligence report took forty minutes to compile.

I knew because I watched the clock on my office wall and tracked the minutes with the deliberate attention I always brought to every data point that mattered.

Forty minutes from the moment I sat down across from Dan and said, “Tell me everything about Isla Monroe,” to the moment he closed the folder and set it on the desk between us and said nothing, which was his way of saying, “This is worse than I expected.”

“Start from the beginning,” I had said.

He had done exactly that.

She’d moved to Las Vegas from Phoenix months after a name change. Built a business quietly, clientele largely through referrals, kept her social presence curated and professional. By all appearances, a woman who had made a decision to leave something behind and had executed that decision with considerable discipline.

“There was something to remember associated with her former name. Maybe with her whole life before she moved,” I said. “And someone remembered.”