Page 30 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

“I’m terrified,” I said, my voice lower than intended.

“I know.”

“Not of you. Of—” I gestured at the room. “Of how fast this moved. Of not knowing what any of it means. How much I don’t hate being here, which makes no sense, and I’m aware it makes no sense.”

“I’m not unafraid,” he said.

I looked at him directly.

“I find that hard to believe,” I said, chuckling despite myself.

His look was steady, like my reaction didn’t make what he said any less factual. I asked, “Of what?”

“Of what it means that I agreed to this for reasons I’d prepared,” he said, “and then discovered somewhere in the middle of it that the reasons were…” He stopped. “Insufficient. As a complete explanation.”

What?

The silence between us was different from the others. It was not hostile, strategic, or charged with the electricity of an argument waiting to begin.

“Alexei,” I breathed.

His name in my mouth was still unfamiliar. I had avoided using it, I realized. Using it felt like something I hadn’t been ready to give.

“What… what do you mean? What happens now?” I questioned.

He looked at me with those blue-grey eyes that had given away exactly nothing since the moment I’d first found them across a poker room. Then, quietly, in a way that felt like the removal of something he’d been carrying, he said, “I don’t know.”

Three words. The most honest thing he’d said to me.

I crossed the distance between us, aware of him watching me the way he watched everything—with that complete, focused attention that made you feel like the only data point in the room.

I reached out and touched his jaw, my fingers against the faint shadow of stubble that hadn’t been there yesterday, a touch that was asking a question rather than stating an intention.

He went very still.

“I told you,” I said quietly. “You don’t get to decide what I want.”

He reached up and covered my hand with his. Not to move it, to hold it there. His thumb traced the inside of my wrist, exactly where the zip tie mark had faded to a thin pink line, and the touch was so careful that something at the back of my throat tightened.

“Isla.” My name in his mouth sounded… tender.

“I’m choosing,” I said. “I need you to understand that. Not because I’m afraid. Not because I don’t have options,” then with an eye roll and a lower tone, I added, “even though I practically don’t.”

His eyes squinted together in a way that implied nothing but laughter. The thought that I’d elicited that from him filled me with some sort of pride that made me smile.

“But I’m choosing; that’s the point.”

His eyes seemed to search mine for a second. Then his lips claimed mine.

When he kissed me this time, it wasn’t accidental. It was careful. Controlled in the way his voice was controlled—not cold, but deliberate, as if he was applying the same focus to this that he applied to everything that mattered to him. His hand found the side of my face and tilted it, and he kissed me like he was learning something he intended to know thoroughly.

I kissed him back. And that seemed to trigger something in him that marked the end of the ‘careful’ part. My hands found the front of his shirt, and his arm came around my waist, the warmth of him hitting me. The kiss soon became something that had been building since the first morning when he’d walked into the room with his controlled face, his scrambled eggs requested to a lighter specification, and that mistake of a kiss.

His hands moved from my waist and lifted me. And then he was carrying me towards the bed, and my legs were wrapped around his waist. Then, in another minute, we were stripping each other of our clothing, and I was on my back at the center of the massive bed.

He knelt up and, just as he was about to speak, I told him, “If I weren’t sure, I wouldn’t be in this bed right now.”

He looked at me for a heated second like he was trying to see if I meant what I’d just said.