Page 14 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

I hadn’t intended to think about her wrists.

The pulse point is simply where the radial artery runs close to the surface. When I’d caught her mid-stumble and held her steady, my thumb had landed precisely there, and her pulse had been running fast. An indicator of elevated cortisol, elevated heart rate, and the predictable physiological state of someone under sustained stress.

That was all it was.

What it was not was something I needed to spend additional cognitive resources on, and yet I’d returned to it four times since leaving the suite. The way her breathing had changed. The way she hadn’t pulled away for a half-second that was longer than shock.

She’d shoved me. Which was not something people typically did.

People in her situation—frightened, dependent, at a significant power differential—typically acted compliantly or performed defiance as theater, neither of which required actual physical contact. The shove had been unplanned. Spontaneous. It had come from somewhere that wasn’t pretense, which meant it had come from somewhere real.

She was real.

That was the irritating root of it. She moved through a situation designed to reduce her to a function—a stake, a debt payment, a problem to be solved—and she remained resolutely, inconveniently herself. Angry and organized, scanning every room she entered for information. Eating the breakfast anyway because she didn’t need to be reminded of her need for strength. Looking at me not like a man who held her fate, but like a man who had made a decision she disagreed with and was going to be made to account for it.

I had been looked at in many ways by many people.

I could not, at present, think of the last time someone had looked at me like I was answerable to them.

I picked up my jacket. The marriage decision was not something I needed to examine further. The question was execution, which required returning to the suite. Which required another conversation with a woman who found me monstrous and wasn’t entirely wrong about that, and who made me aware of my own pulse, which was not a problem I had anticipated encountering this particular week.

*****

I went back.

She was at the window.

She was not standing casually. She was standing the way someone stands when they’ve been thinking very hard in a confined space, and the window is the only direction that goes somewhere. Arms crossed. Shoulders showing the tension of exhaustion that refuses to become rest. She was in the clothing Mira had brought, which fit her, I noted without permitting myself to note further.

She heard the door and turned. She’d been crying, or close to it. The evidence was subtle—a slight redness at the outer corners of her eyes that her composure hadn’t quite had time to resolve—and she clearly had no intention of acknowledging it, so I didn’t.

“Sit down,” I said.

“I’d rather stand.”

“Then stand.” I crossed to the couch and sat. If she wanted the physical advantage of height, she could have it. It wouldn’t change anything. “I’m going to tell you some things. I’d like you to listen before responding.”

“Is that a request or a command?”

“It’s a preference,” I said. “One that will make the next ten minutes more efficient for both of us.”

Something in her jaw set. But she stayed where she was and looked at me with those bright, furious yet calm blue eyes, and I took that as provisional consent.

I told her about the surveillance. Months of it—the photograph, the escalation, the way Siroc White’s interest in her had calcified from a financial matter into something more personal and therefore more dangerous. I told her what Dan had confirmed about Siroc’s intentions—that there had been no ransom figure, no negotiation endpoint, no version of last night that ended with her walking free in exchange for a payment.

I told her what she was now, in the language of this world: visible. Known. Connected to a name that carried an outstanding claim, in circles where outstanding claims were not abstract.

She listened.

She stood the entire time with her arms crossed and her expression doing things she probably wasn’t aware of—moving through disbelief, recognition, grief that surfaced briefly when I mentioned the surveillance timeline and then was pressed down hard and covered with anger, which I suspected was how she handled most things that hurt her.

When I finished, the room was quiet for a moment.

“So.” Her voice was flat. “I can’t go back.”

“Not safely.”

“And you’ve decided to… what? Keep me here indefinitely?”