Page 39 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

“I’m not usually like this,” I said.

“I know.”

“I just… storms are… I’m scared of storms. But I’m usually good at taking care of the fear. But tonight… things that happened recently…”

“Siroc’s people abducting you.”

I nodded.

“The sounds in the warehouse.” I looked at my hands. “And the car. The door when they—it’s a stupid association. My brain knows it’s a stupid association.”

“Your brain is running a pattern match,” he said. “It’s not stupid. It’s what brains do with threat data. It just becomes inconvenient when the threat is past, and the pattern keeps running.”

I looked at him. “Does that happen to you?”

There was a pause. The kind that meant the answer existed, and he was deciding whether to give it. “Not with sounds,” he said. “With disorder. With situations I can’t arrange into a logical sequence.” Another pause. “With the feeling of not knowing where a threat is coming from. Knowing it’s there and not being able to locate it.”

“Chaos,” I said.

“Chaos,” he confirmed. “It’s not comfortable.”

He didn’t dress it up—didn’t frame it as a historical anecdote or a professional observation. He just said it.

We were silent as the rain moved against the windows. The storm had settled into its sustained phase—no longer violent, just present, the sky making good on the threat it had opened with and doing it thoroughly.

I sat beside Alexei Golovin on the edge of our bed with the sound of rain filling the spaces between words. I thought about how scary and weirdly romantic it was that he’d come to become someone I could hold on to in such a short period of time.

I leaned in, letting the slight distance between us close, my shoulder against his arm. When he didn’t shift away, I leaned further until my head was against his chest and I could feel the steadiness of him. His arm came around me like the movement had always been the plan.

The thunder came once more, distant now, like an afterthought. I simply breathed against Alexei’s chest and let the sound move through me without taking hold. I felt his heartbeat under my cheek, steady and present.

Outside, the rain ran down the glass in long clean rivulets, and the storm that had seemed enormous twenty minutes ago was already moving past, leaving the air cleaner than before.

Inside, something was growing in the space I’d been keeping carefully empty. An intimacy I hadn’t planned for and could no longer honestly pretend wasn’t there.

It was fragile.

But it also was something that felt, tentatively and terrifyingly, like it might also be strong. And dangerous.

Chapter Ten

Alexei

I woke at 4:17 am and didn’t go back to sleep.

This was not unusual. I had operated on interrupted sleep cycles for most of my adult life. It was the operational reality of running an enterprise that didn’t observe business hours and implied that full nights were a periodic luxury rather than a baseline expectation. I had adapted to this by building systems that extracted maximum utility from the hours available and didn’t mourn the ones that weren’t.

What was unusual was the reason.

I lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling, even though something in me would rather be gazing at the sleeping form of my wife.

She had asked about threat vectors.

Not in those exact words—Isla didn’t use operational language; she used the instinctive civilian equivalents that meant the same things. But hers were the questions of someone building a picture. Not out of curiosity—out of need.

I understood that need. I had built my entire professional life on it.

What I hadn’t decided yet was why she needed it.