Page 17 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

The word kept arriving. It would simply appear between one thought and the next, dropping into the silence.

I pressed my palms flat against the mattress and looked at the ceiling, running the logic again, which was a mistake I kept making. The logic was the problem. If the logic were obviously flawed, I could dismiss it cleanly. But the logic wasn’t obviously flawed. The logic was annoyingly coherent. It made sense, technically.

Someone had been watching me hand out programs at galas, watching me argue with florists, watching me become the person I’d fought to become—and I hadn’t known. I’d been living in a snow globe. Thinking the glass meant safety.

It hadn’t.

Which meant that whatever I’d been doing wasn’t working. Which meant that my instinct—leave, run, rebuild, repeat—had a structural flaw that another round of leaving and running wasn’t going to fix. Which meant that the infuriating, cold-blooded, impossibly arrogant man who had won me had a point. And that was the part that scared me even more than Siroc White.

I hated that.

“You can hate every part of it,” he’d said. “That changes nothing about the conclusion.”

I hated that part of me understood his logic.

I punched the pillow. It didn’t help.

Around 3 am I gave up on the bed entirely and moved to the window. Las Vegas, even this early in the morning, is not a city at rest. I’d always found something honest about that. The Strip didn’t pretend. It was exactly what it was, and you went in knowing, which meant the losses were yours.

I thought about Adrian again.

I thought about the charm that could fill a room, that had filled every room he’d ever walked into for as long as I could remember, that had made him the person everyone wanted at their table. The way he’d borrowed money with such genuine conviction that he’d pay it back that you believed him even when the evidence was stacking against the thesis.

And now I was standing barefoot at a window twelve floors above the city where I’d rebuilt myself, and a man I’d met hours ago had told me he intended to marry me for my own protection, and the worst part—the very worst, most unacceptable part—was that Adrian would have thought this was extremely funny. He would have laughed until he cried. He would have said something like, “Only you, Isla, only you could accidentally stumble into the one criminal in Las Vegas who has a code of ethics.”

I pressed my forehead against the glass.

Jokes on who exactly, Adrian?

Me or you?

I stayed at the window until the sky started to change.

Mira arrived at 7:25 am with breakfast for two. Two place settings, two coffee cups, the signs of an occasion that expects company. I looked at the tray and then at Mira. She returned my gaze with the composed neutrality that I was beginning to understand was simply her signature expression, her permanent professional frequency, not a specific response to me.

“He’s coming down,” I remarked.

“Mr. Golovin will join you at 7:30.” She set the tray on the dining table—a table I hadn’t used yet, larger than necessary for one person, which now made sense as a design choice. “There’s fresh orange juice. The eggs are a different preparation today—he requested something lighter.”

“He requested.” I heard myself say before I chuckled lightly. “He requested a specific egg preparation.”

“Scrambled with herbs. He thought you might prefer it.”

I sat down at the table and looked at the eggs, feeling the exhaustion of a sleepless night wash over me.

“Mira.”

“Yes?”

“Do you—” I stopped. What was I going to ask her?

Do you think this is insane?

Do you think he’s a monster?

Do you think I should run?

None of those were questions she could answer, or would.