Page 64 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

Again, Alexei was watching me with full, blatant attention.

Resisting the heat his look suddenly started in me, I went on, “Siroc sees women as scenery. He talks in front of them. He explains himself to them the way people explain themselves to furniture—not for the furniture’s benefit but because it’s easier to think out loud to something that isn’t keeping score.”

Alexei set down his pen.

“I have been trying,” he said carefully, “since the night in the library, to understand what I was doing when I kept you at the edges of this. I’ve been framing it as protection, and it is protection, in part. But I think the more accurate explanation is that I’ve been trying to keep something I value away from whatever threatens it, which is a reasonable impulse applied incorrectly.” He paused. “You’re not something to be kept away from the threat.”

“No,” I said.

“You’re someone who has been dealing with the threat longer than I have.” He looked at the chip. “And whose understanding of it is more direct than mine?”

“Hm. That, I am,” I answered, unable to keep from smiling.

“Then I’ve been operating with incomplete data by choice,” he said. “Which is the kind of error I don’t make twice.”

Dan knocked twice and came back in at the signal, resuming his position at the edge of the desk with the tablet, his expression carefully neutral.

“The summit timing,” I said, turning back to Alexei. “You’ll want to control the window between when Siroc hears about it and when it occurs. Enough time for his intelligence to confirm the details, not enough time for him to build a counter-strategy.”

“Four days,” he said.

“Four days,” I agreed.

We got to work.

The legal pad filled, the tablet screen changed, and Dan made calls in the corner in a low voice. Alexei and I built the structure of something that had started to feel less like a defense and more like an ending.

At some point, Mira appeared with coffee and left without interrupting.

I asked questions and offered corrections, and they listened.

I looked at the chip in my hand.

A.M.

Adrian Monroe, who had been charming and destructive. Who had loved me in his imperfect way and had talked to the wrong people because he trusted everyone and understood no one. Who had died on a highway in Phoenix and left me with a debt I hadn’t incurred, a name I’d had to change, and a life I’d built from scratch because the alternative was letting what he’d done be the last word on what I was.

It wasn’t the last word.

This time, I was not afraid of what my past had done.

I was ready to fight what it made me into.

Chapter Sixteen

Alexei

The decision didn’t cost me sleep. That was the thing about me and clarity. I’d been watching the patterns shift for three days: a contact who went quiet, a channel that suddenly ran dry, a car I’d seen parked on Fremont that I recognized from a face I’d buried two years ago. Individually, they were nothing. Together, they were a map.

Siroc wasn’t trying to hit us. Not yet. He was tightening the radius, slow and methodical, the way you’d boil something alive — enough patience that the thing in the water never realized it was dying until the surface started to bubble. He was feeding on information, building a picture, waiting until he had enough to make one clean, precise strike.

And Isla was the point he’d aim for. I knew it the way I knew my own heartbeat.

I told Mikhail first. He didn’t argue, only asked where, and when I gave him the location, he was quiet for a moment — long enough that I understood what the silence meant.

You’ve never taken anyone there.

“Keep it clean on your end, brother,” I said instead of answering him. “Rotate the vehicles. Don’t reach out unless something breaks open.”