Page 60 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

I rested my forehead against hers.

“He’ll come for you again,” I said quietly. “And when he does, I will end him.”

A deep sigh was the response she gave me.

Siroc White believed he was winning.

He believed it because he had delivered a federal raid and a narrative. He believed it because men like Siroc measured winning by noise, and he had produced considerable noise.

I held her, and planned, and did not look away.

Chapter Fifteen

Isla

I woke up, and the fear was still there, the same fear that had been running beneath everything for six years, and what was different about this particular morning was not the absence of it.

What was different was that it was no longer in charge.

I had been retreating for years. Phoenix to Las Vegas. Monroe-Vega to Monroe. One life left behind, another built carefully on top of the wreckage, and underneath both of them, the exhausting vigilance of accepting that the running is permanent.

Not because the threat was resolved—it wasn’t. Siroc White was still out there with his spectacle and his federal mechanisms. The threat was entirely real and entirely unresolved.

But I had told the truth in the library, and Alexei had said us like it was simply accurate rather than aspirational. And one night I’d learnt what it felt like to put some of the weight down.

I didn’t want to pick it back up.

While the fear was still there, something else had replaced helplessness. That something else was resolve.

And it was strong.

I got up and made coffee, standing at the window in the early morning.

I thought about Siroc White.

I’d been thinking about him, actually, since the night in the library confession. I had spent the last three weeks being the subject of assessments, plans, and strategic calculations—and I had accepted that as the necessary condition of my situation.

But I knew something Alexei’s intelligence network couldn’t tell him.

I knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end of Siroc White’s particular brand of obsession. I had been in the warehouse. I had been in the poker room, had stood near his shoulder while he smiled at Alexei with all those gold rings catching the light. I had seen the way he looked at the table, at the room, at me—not as people, but as components in a narrative he was telling himself about his own importance. I had watched him lose and watched what losing did to him.

I knew Siroc White in a way that didn’t appear in any intelligence report.

That knowledge was worth something.

I was going to make it worth something.

*****

Marcus walked towards me in the main living room with a small box. I just knew it was a package. One that wasn’t from Alexei.

I brought my legs down from where they’d been tucked beneath me on the sofa.

“You have a package, ma’am,” he said, dropping the package on the table in front of me.

“Thank you.”

“It’s been checked. It’s clean,” he informed.