Page 44 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

They thought that because she’d been available once—had been a person with no significant structural protection—she was still available.

They were operating on outdated information.

She was Isla Monroe-Golovin. She was the woman who sat across from me at dinner tables and stood at my side in rooms full of dangerous men. She was the one who made floor managers smile, and asked me about the Moscow rivers with genuine interest.

She was mine.

Not in the language Siroc White had used—not the language of ownership, of currency, of a stake to be won, spent, and won again.

She had come to belong to me the way things belong when they’re not owned—when the belonging is mutual and chosen in the accumulation of ordinary moments rather than declared in a single transaction.

She didn’t know all that was coming. I didn’t either—not fully, not yet. There were variables I hadn’t closed and threads I hadn’t traced.

But I knew the outcome I was working toward.

And I had built my entire professional life on the foundational premise that the games I played were games I had already decided to win.

Whoever was circling her, they had made the miscalculation that defined the majority of the failures I’d watched in this world. They had assumed that the object of their interest had no one.

She had someone.

She had me.

Her husband.

I reached over and gently lifted the book from her chest. I settled the throw from the arm of the couch across her without waking her.

She didn’t stir.

Whatever was coming, it would find her covered.

And it would regret the finding.

Because Alexei Golovin does not lose what belongs to him.

Chapter Eleven

Isla

I knew something was wrong before I was fully awake.

It wasn’t a sound that told me; it was the absence of one. The penthouse had a baseline hum that I’d absorbed into my unconscious over two weeks of living inside it: the low frequency of the building’s systems, the distant movement of staff on adjacent floors, the air that circulates through a space that is always, at every hour, occupied and operational. I had stopped hearing it the way you stop hearing your own heartbeat—not because it had disappeared but because it had become part of the background of existing here.

But this morning it was gone.

I lay still for a moment, noting what I could. There was no movement in the corridor outside our suite.

I got up.

Marcus wasn’t at his usual position near the elevator bank. The morning security lead who had been a reliable presence every day since I’d moved to the penthouse was not at his post, and his absence was so contrary to the established pattern that I stood in the corridor for a moment looking at the space where he should have been.

I went back inside and got dressed.

Over an hour later, I had found out different things. The usual morning coffee delivery from Mira had not occurred, which in two weeks had never happened. The staff member I encountered in the corridor near the kitchen—a woman named Petra who handled the twelfth floor’s general maintenance and who had developed the habit of greeting me by name—looked at me like someone who has been told not to say something and is working hard at not saying it.

When I tried to reach Alexei’s direct line through the intercom in the living area, it rang twice and transferred to Dan Malenkov’s voicemail, which I had never been sent to before.

I went to the window.