Page 21 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

What was happening to me was not acceptable. I shouldn’t be wanting a longer, realer version of that kiss. I shouldn’t be thinking of what being his wife would be like, for real.

He’s not gentle.

He’s strategic.

Every single thing he does serves a purpose.

But his pulse had been fast.

You couldn’t fake a pulse. Not like that, not at close range, not against someone who was paying attention. The pulse was real, and the darkened eyes were real, and the word yes yesterday had come out without a single moment of assembly.

Oh, God.

He was not just my captor anymore.

He might not have been just my captor from the moment he looked across a poker room at a woman with zip-tied wrists and got to his feet.

That thought was the most dangerous thing in the room, including the situation outside the building, and I sat with it on the cool floor while Las Vegas went about its indifferent business below, and I tried to decide whether the danger made it something to run from or something to look at clearly.

I’d spent years running from dangerous things.

I was over ten floors up with nowhere to run.

Now, running from Siroc White and the whole situation meant running towards something I should be running away from. The temptation by the name of Alexei Golovin.

Alexei

Alexei…

Oh, I’m doomed.

Chapter Six

Alexei

The file on Isla Monroe was over fifteen pages long and told me almost nothing new or useful.

I’d read it twice early this morning. First, in the broad scan I used for initial pattern recognition. Then, line by line, with the attention I used for information that was either very important or very wrong. The second read confirmed what the first had suggested: the file was clean in the intentional way that things are clean when someone has worked to make them that way. Not empty. Clean. Employment records, lease agreements, business registration, tax filings, social media presence curated to the level of professional necessity and no further. A life assembled like that of someone who understood that visibility was a liability.

She’d done it well. Better than most people manage without professional assistance.

The problem was before. Everything before her relocation to Phoenix. A lease in a name that no longer existed. Employment records from an event planning firm that had since closed. A college transcript. A brother, deceased, whose own file was considerably thicker and considerably uglier. Before that, almost nothing. A childhood that existed in bureaucratic records and nowhere else.

Someone had been thorough.

I set the file down and looked out the window at the city. The cleanliness of her record could mean one of three things: she’d scrubbed it herself, which required either resources or expertise she didn’t obviously have; someone had helped her, which introduced a party I hadn’t yet identified; or the original was simply sparse, which was possible but felt, given everything, optimistic. In my world, optimism was a hypothesis you tested before accepting.

Dan arrived five minutes after 7 am.

He came with another folder—thicker than mine, which was either good news or bad news depending on what it contained.

“Good morning, boss,” he greeted.

“Morning.”

He sat across my desk and set the folder between us without opening it.

“The Monroe file,” he said.