Page 2 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

I heard the SUV before I saw it.

It wasn’t the sound that alarmed me at first—there were always vehicles back here, catering trucks, linen services, hotel fleet cars idling while drivers waited on guests. What pulled my attention was the absence of noise after the engine cut. It was a sudden, deliberate quiet. Like the vehicle wasn’t here to carry equipment and was here to find something.

I turned my head.

It was all black, and there were no plates I could read in the low light. Parked close—too close, at an angle that wasn’t accidental.

Everything happened in the space between one breath and the next.

A door. Movement. Two shapes—no, three—and then a hand clamped over my mouth so hard my teeth cut the inside of my cheek, and another arm hooked around my waist like a vice, and my phone left my hand before I’d consciously decided to drop it. I heard it hit the pavement. Heard the crack of the screen.

I threw my elbow back into something solid and felt the grip tighten in response, not loosen. Someone said something in a language I didn’t catch—clipped, low—and then my wrists were being forced together and the zip tie bit into my skin with a swiftness that told me this wasn’t someone’s first time doing this. A bag came down over my head. Dark fabric. It smelled like canvas and something chemical underneath, like cleaning solvent.

Then the car was moving, and I was in it.

Breathe

Isla, breathe.

It was the only useful instruction I had. My heart was pounding violently against my ribs, and my body wanted to shake, but shaking wasn’t going to help me. My hands were bound in front of me.

I noted that the seat beneath me was leather. Cold air conditioning. The men around me smelled like cigarette smoke and something colder, something that didn’t have a name but that my body recognized as danger the way you recognize a dip in temperature before a storm.

Nobody spoke to me; they spoke about me. Not loud or clear enough that I could really make much out of, though.

“He’ll be pleased,” I heard one of the men say in accented English, the accent sitting somewhere Eastern European that I couldn’t place precisely.

Who is ‘he’?

And then another voice, quieter, said, “If she’s who he says she is, the debt’s already half settled.”

Debt.

That single word went deep into me and seemed to detonate. I couldn’t unhear it. I hadn’t heard it spoken in that particular tone in years. Not since when I was a different Isla. Not since I’d wired every dollar I’d saved across three years of working double shifts to an account number I’d never been given a name for. Not since I’d changed my phone number, changed my last name on everything that didn’t require legal documentation, and driven to Las Vegas in a car that barely made it over the state line because I had decided, with absolute conviction, that I was done.

I’d been so sure I was done.

The car ride felt endless in the dark. I stopped trying to track turns after the first few minutes because I had no reference points and the mental effort was burning energy I couldn’t afford to waste. Instead, I focused on breathing and noting the small physical details I could register. The sound of the road surface changing at least twice. The faint, distant throb of music at one point, bass-heavy, before it faded.

Vegas music. We were still in the city.

My feet were still bare. I’d dropped my heels when they took me—or they’d fallen. I couldn’t remember which. The concrete had been warm under my feet. Now there was carpet, and then there wasn’t, and at some point, the car stopped, and I was hauled upright with hands that weren’t rough, exactly, but weren’t careful either. Like moving freight. Like I was a thing that needed not to be damaged, not a person who needed not to be hurt.

The warehouse smelled like damp concrete and machinery that hadn’t been run in a long time.

They pulled the hood off, and the light hit me like a slap—bare industrial fluorescents, the kind that drain the warmth from everything they touch. I blinked, forcing my eyes to adjust, and when they did, I wished briefly that I’d had more time in the dark.

There were five of them that I could count, arranged with casual authority. One was leaning against a support beam with his arms crossed, watching me. One sat on an overturned crate with his phone out, not even looking up. Two flanked the doorway. And one—heavyset, older, with a gold ring on every finger—stood directly in front of me and examined my face like he was checking a receipt against an order.

My wrists were still bound. My back was against a concrete pillar, and there was a chair involved, though I’d fought being sat in it long enough that two of them had needed to convince me. The left side of my face was still warm from where the arm of the chair had connected during the struggle.

Good, something vicious in me thought. At least I made them work for it.

“Calmer now?” The heavyset man had a voice like gravel shifting.

I said nothing.

“Smart girl.” He said it like a compliment, which it wasn’t. “You’ll get explanations when the time comes. For now—” He gestured vaguely, as though the warehouse, the zip ties, and the five armed men were merely administrative details. “You wait.”