Page 47 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

“Okay,” I whispered.

*****

The note was under the door when I came back to our suite.

I saw it before I saw anything else. It was a rectangle of cream paper on the threshold, partially concealed by the edge of the door when it swung open. It was painfully clear to me that whoever put it there knew I’d be the one to see it. It was for me.

I picked it up.

The paper was expensive-looking and heavyweight, the kind used for formal correspondence. It was folded once. No envelope. No name on the outside.

I unfolded it.

‘Everything costs eventually.’

My hands were shaking before I’d finished reading it.

Not because of the words, exactly. Not because of the threat encoded in them, which was a real threat. But because of the tone. The voice.

I knew that voice.

Siroc White’s.

Siroc White’s language was motivated by the simple, brutal arithmetic of unpaid debts and public humiliation. It was the language of someone who understood that the maximum impact of threatening communication wasn’t in what it said but in the receiver’s process of recognizing it.

I had told myself that this voice was gone.

Clearly, I was wrong.

I folded the note and put it in my pocket. I went inside, timing my breathing in and out to calm my body.

I can’t tell Alexei.

The thought decision was clear and almost automatic. My brain tried to find the argument against it and found several. And I looked at each of them and set them aside anyway.

Because there was what I knew that I had not yet given Alexei: the full version of Adrian’s history and the actual people he’d been connected to.

And if I brought them to Alexei now—before I understood what it meant, before I’d had the chance to assess what I was dealing with—I was handing him incomplete information and watching him build a strategy around a picture that was missing its most important element.

Or that was what I told myself.

My brother’s choices had grown this particular weed, and I had watered it with four years of running and pretending it had died, and if it was now threatening to break the surface inside Alexei’s life, it was mine to manage first. Mine to understand. Mine to face before I made it anyone else’s problem.

I went to the window.

Tonight was Siroc White’s move.

I was sure of it. And the guilt it doused me in wasn’t simple.

Siroc White was attacking the Golovins. That was real, and it was escalating, and it was connected to me in the way I’d confirmed this morning in the conference room.

Me.

Not as leverage against Alexei. As a separate target, with a separate agenda, from someone who had a separate reason.

I straightened.

I had been a woman in a warehouse three weeks ago. Zip-tied wrists, someone’s hood over my head, overwhelmed with the terror of being reduced to a commodity in someone else’s transaction. I had survived that. I had survived the poker room.