Page 65 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

“And if something breaks open?”

“I’ll handle it from there.”

I ended the call before he could say anything else.

Isla was standing at the window of our bedroom when I came back in, looking through the glass as if what she saw was a painting she hadn’t decided whether she liked.

“Hey,” she uttered, turning around. “You’re never here around this time. Is everything okay?”

“All is fine. We’re going somewhere. Pack light. We leave in forty minutes.”

“How long?” she asked, raising a brow but still not giving any form of the expressive reaction I was expecting.

“I don’t know yet.”

She nodded and moved toward the closet.

I watched her go. Something about the absence of complaint settled something in my chest and disturbed it in equal measure.

*****

We were on the road in the next forty minutes. I took the back route out, the one that looped through the industrial corridor before threading north, watching my mirrors with focused patience from over twenty years of moving through hostile terrain. Nothing followed us.

Isla sat beside me wordlessly, looking out the window.

The city faded out gradually behind the glass—signs dissolving into highway lamps, then into the muted wash of distant neighborhoods, then into trees and nothing at all.

Isla shifted, making my eyes dart towards her almost subconsciously. She now sat with her knees angled toward me, and her hands folded in her lap, watching the road ahead. I could feel her awareness of me without looking directly at her, just the way one feels heat from something one is not touching.

“You knew this was coming,” she said eventually.

“I had indicators.”

“And you waited.”

“I was confirming them.” I glanced at her briefly. “I don’t move on instinct. I move on certainty.”

She was quiet again. Then she asked, “Siroc?”

“Yes.”

She seemed to absorb that. The trees had started, dark shapes crowding the road on either side, and I watched her relax in increments —

After several minutes, the changes in her- so subtle I’d have missed them if I hadn’t been mindful of her since the moment I’d decided she mattered- became evident to me. The tightness around her eyes eased. Her hands loosened in her lap. Each mile between us and the city seemed to return something to her, some version of herself the city had been slowly eroding.

“You’re breathing differently,” I told her.

She looked at me. “Am I?”

“Slower. Easier.” I kept my eyes on the road. “The city was suffocating you.”

She didn’t deny it. “I didn’t realize how much until just now.”

I understood that. There were things you only recognized once you’d put distance between yourself and them — damage worked that way, and pressure worked that way, and so did want. You didn’t always know how badly you needed something until you could finally feel its absence. And that single thought made me wonder how long it had been since that night on our balcony. It had only been a few days in the actual sense. But it felt like a month ago.

*****

The cottage sat at the end of a private access road that wasn’t on any map I hadn’t personally had altered. It was set back into the tree line. It featured a stone foundation, timber frame, and a wide porch that looked out over a shallow valley that caught fog in the mornings. I’d bought it eight years ago under a name I’d since retired, paid cash through two intermediaries, and told no one but Mikhail it existed. There was no staff. No standing security detail. No satellite uplink, no cameras beyond what I’d installed myself on the perimeter.