Page 5 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

He made a sound that suggested he found this both predictable and faintly depressing. Dmitri had never fully accepted that the point of this operation was not stimulation. He was almost thirty and still moved through the world like a man convinced the best thing that could happen to him was a situation no one had anticipated. One day that conviction would cost him considerably. My older brothers and I had been saying so for years, and yet, we had reached a comfortable equilibrium around the subject.

“Siroc White’s outside,” he said, and the casual delivery didn’t fool me for a second.

I turned my glass slightly in my hand. One rotation. “He wasn’t on the list.”

“He wasn’t.”

Siroc White operated a competing gambling syndicate with less discipline, more brutality, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between power and force. He had been attempting to encroach on Golovin territory for the better part of two years through a combination of bribery, intimidation, and the occasional legal maneuver that his lawyers found clever and mine found embarrassing. He was persistent in the way that cockroaches were persistent—not intelligent, but extremely difficult to fully eliminate without making a mess.

I didn’t like messes.

“Tell Gregor to let him in,” I said.

Dmitri’s eyebrow lifted slightly. “You want him in here.”

“I want him where I can see him.” I set my Scotch down on the nearest surface and adjusted my left cufflink, which didn’t need adjusting. “Whatever he’s come to do, he’ll do it regardless. I prefer to watch.”

Dmitri looked at me for a moment, and then he moved toward the door without further comment. I picked up my glass again, took a seat, and waited.

The door opened three minutes later.

Siroc White walked the way men walk when they want a room to notice them—too much shoulder, too much pace, what I called the theatre of a man who has confused attention with respect. He was large in a way that suggested wealth had replaced the muscle he’d probably had in his thirties, and he dressed expensively in that way that always looked slightly wrong. Gold rings, three on one hand. He caught my gaze from across the room and smiled with all his teeth.

Then I saw who was beside him, and everything in me went very, very still.

A woman.

She was clearly not fragile, but compact, the kind of build that suggested energy rather than delicacy. Honey-blonde hair that had been neat at some earlier point in the evening and was now partially loose, partially chaotic. She was wearing a silk blouse in some pale color that was torn at the shoulder, and her feet were bare. Her wrists were bound in front of her with what looked like a zip tie.

She was scanning the room with the fast, comprehensive focus of someone trying to build a picture of their situation as quickly as possible. Not the blank-eyed terror of someone who had already given up. Something else. Something that looked like someone still running problem-solving calculations against odds that didn’t deserve to be calculated against.

Her eyes moved across the room in a sweep that ended, after several seconds, on me.

I didn’t look away. I don’t look away. But something happened in that moment of eye contact. Something about the novel feeling of discovering her eyes. A kind of heat passed between us—a sharpness, a flare of something that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with wrongness. The absolute categorical wrongness of what I was looking at. A bound woman standing in my room next to Siroc White, moving with the casual confidence of someone who had not expected to be challenged.

He had miscalculated.

I stood and crossed the room at a pace that communicated nothing—no urgency, no anger, nothing that could be read as destabilization. That was the first discipline. Whatever you felt, you wore a different face, and the face you wore was always the face of a man who had anticipated this, who found it mildly interesting, who was not yet required to exert himself.

“Siroc.” I stopped at a distance that was polite without being warm. “You weren’t on my schedule.”

“Spontaneous visits between colleagues.” He spread his hands, all that gold catching the amber light. “Isn’t that friendship?”

“We’re not friends.”

He laughed, signaling that he already knew that and didn’t care. “I’m here for business. Not for or against you.”

My gaze moved to the woman again—deliberately, so he understood I wasn’t pretending not to notice. “Release her.”

“Ah.” Siroc’s smile shifted into something more settled, more pleased with itself. The smile of a man who’d anticipated this objection and had prepared for it. “Eventually, I will. Just not yet, you see.”

He walked towards the table and took a seat. I watched as one of his men forced the lady to stand by the table like a prize on display.

It was clear to anyone who had eyes. Siroc was using her as collateral. Something flared in my chest. She was out of place here. She didn’t belong. And, looking at her pale skin and terrified eyes, she knew it too.

I walked toward Siroc.

“In case you didn’t get what I meant the first time. You can’t have her here. I won’t allow it.”