Page 58 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

I turned to face the city too, creating the parallel angle of two people looking at the same thing. “When I understood what Siroc had actually done—the full picture, the hunting rather than the stumbling, the patient construction of a move that used you as its center. The response to that isn’t the removal of the central element. It’s defense of it.”

“That’s strategically rational.”

“Yes.” I looked at her. “It’s also true for reasons that aren’t strategic.”

Then she turned from the railing and found my face with those eyes that had been reading me since the poker room and had gotten so much better at it.

“Why are you still here?” she asked, her voice lower. “You could have… there was an easier version of this where you managed the exposure, dissolved the marriage, relocated me somewhere White couldn’t reach and called it protection. Why isn’t that the version you chose?”

I looked at her for a moment.

“Because you aren’t the problem,” I said.

She blinked.

“You’ve been framing yourself as the complication,” I said. “The variable that introduced danger into a stable system. The liability I should be calculating the removal of.” I kept my gaze on her. “You’re not the problem. You’re what I’m solving for.”

Something moved in her expression. Something I’d learned meant I’d said something that touched her inside.

“Siroc crossed a line,” I said. “The moment he put his hands on your life—before the poker room, before the surveillance, when he first decided you were something he could use—he crossed a line that has nothing to do with territorial encroachment or empire protection or any framing that would make this an operational matter.” I held her gaze. “This is personal. What he did to you is personal. And I have not, in thirty-five years, allowed personal violations to go unaddressed.”

“You’re going to destroy him,” she said.

“I’m going to dismantle him,” I said. “That is more complete and considerably less visible than destroying.”

She looked at me with what looked like relief and fear at the same time. Then she nodded. Then she turned back to the railing.

“I was so afraid,” she said quietly. “For six years. Managing it—keeping it below the surface, not letting it become the main focus—but always there. Always… ” She pressed her hands flat on the railing. “I’m so tired of being afraid.”

I looked at the side of her face. The line of her jaw, the loose strand of hair that had come free from whatever she’d put it up in, the way the city light caught her soft and weary expression.

I reached out, not urgently but deliberately. My hand found the curve of her shoulder and turned her by degrees until she was facing me. She came easily, without the resistance that had characterized the early days.

She looked up at me.

“You don’t have to be afraid. That has changed.” I held her gaze. “You were managing it alone because there was no other available structure. The structure is different now.”

“You,” she said.

“Us,” I said.

The word had arrived in our vocabulary at some point and had stayed. I had started deploying it without deciding to and had noticed only in retrospect. It had happened naturally.

She looked at me for a long moment with the full, undivided attention of someone who had decided to see something clearly.

Then she reached up and put her hand against my jaw, and I stilled under it the way I had the first time she’d done it.

I kissed her with the intent I’d had since the library. It was not the accidental brush of the kitchen or the careful negotiation of the wedding night.

She made a sound against my mouth that undid about four layers of whatever remained of my professional composure in one efficient movement. In a minute, her hands were in my jacket, and she was pressing forward fully, and I pulled her closer because that was the only available direction in my head, and the city below us was irrelevant.

This was not about escape. Not escape from the situation, not forgetting the threat, the complication, or the six years of patient operation.

This was the opposite of forgetting. This was us choosing something amid the complexity, of saying: This matters to us.

She pulled back far enough to breathe, her hands still in my jacket, her forehead almost against mine.

“You’re still doing it,” she said.