Page 32 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

Now, I trusted him.

That wasn’t a part of what I had agreed to. And it had happened anyway, in the gap between one version of my life and whatever this was. And, unlike everything else in the last forty-eight hours, I couldn’t find it in me to be furious about it.

It was a terrifying truth.

Chapter Eight

Alexei

I had trained myself, over many years, not to watch people sleep.

It was a habit I'd identified early as a liability. It was an action that invited a kind of unguarded observation that produced information you hadn't requested and couldn't un-know. People were most legible when they were unconscious.

I knew all this. Which was exactly why I had a policy against it in the first place.

I lay still in the grey pre-dawn of the suite and looked at the ceiling and was aware of Isla Monroe-Golovin, my wife, sleeping beside me. I was aware of her warmth that wasn’t just about temperature. I was aware of the slow, even rhythm of her breathing. Her hair, which was loose against the pillow. I knew this without looking because it was in my peripheral sightline.

Then I looked.

She was facing away from me, one hand curled loosely under her cheek, the expression on her face emptied of the constant active processing that characterized every waking moment I'd observed her in. Just rest. The face she wore when she wasn't wearing anything at all.

Something moved in my chest that I immediately set aside.

I knew it was a weakness. The kind I had spent thirty-five years engineering out of my life—not because I was incapable of it but because I understood its mechanics. Attachment was leverage that ran in both directions. Every person who mattered to you was a vector for pressure. Mikhail had Elena. Viktor had Sofia. I had watched both of my brothers navigate the vulnerability of loving someone in a world that used love as a weapon, had watched them manage it with varying degrees of success, had observed the cost, and concluded that the cost was one I preferred not to pay.

I had not anticipated paying it anyway, in a forty-eight-hour window, via a set of circumstances I would not have constructed if given the choice.

Still… last night was one I won’t be forgetting in a while. It was tender and raw in the most hunger-inducing ways. I looked at her again, at the sunlight that shone on her curves.

She’s beautiful.

And, the most dangerous part was that I wanted a repeat of last night. Countless repeats.

I got up carefully, without waking her, and stood at the window in the early light.

Today, the world would be informed. Not through an announcement—nothing so declarative, nothing that required a press release or an explanation. Through presence. Through the grammar of a man walking into a room with his wife at his side in a world where what you stood next to communicated more than anything you announced with your mouth.

Siroc White would hear about it before noon. He would already know about the ceremony—information traveled at the speed of interest in these circles, and my marriage to a woman he'd brought into my room as a stake would be extremely interesting to a great many people. What he would see today was the confirmation. The public weight of it. The specific message encoded in Isla’s presence at my side.

She is mine. She is covered.

The message required delivery. Today was the delivery.

I dressed quietly, went into my private office, and spent two hours with the intelligence reports that Dan had left on my desk the previous evening—reports I'd been unable to give proper attention to because of a wedding I'd arranged in a single afternoon.

The Siroc White threat assessment had a new dimension this morning. Dan's people had intercepted communication—not content, just pattern—suggesting increased activity in White's network in the last twenty-four hours. Expected. He'd been humiliated twice: once at the poker table, once by the marriage. Men like Siroc White did not metabolize humiliation quietly. They metabolized it into escalation, and the escalation was coming.

I was working through the network maps when my phone lit up with Dan's name.

"Report," I said.

“Congratulations, boss,” he uttered. “How does it feel to be a married man?”

“Same,” I answered automatically. “What’s going on?”

“White made three calls this morning before 6 am, boss. One to his lawyer. One to a contact in the city licensing office. One to someone we haven't identified yet. Encrypted channel. Duration: eleven minutes."

"The licensing office."