Page 69 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

“Monroe-Golovin,” I corrected quickly. Not like that did anything to the soft explosion in my chest at the sound of the name rolling off his lips.

“Same thing,” he replied, an easy smile that I wouldn’t say he was aware of crossing his lips.

We listened to the conversation of the birds, which we couldn’t parse anyway, in the absence of ours.

*****

He made coffee. I stood on the porch in a cardigan I’d found hanging by the door—one of his, oversized and smelling of cedar. The first time I’d worn his clothing, I’d been looking through the few clothes I brought when I saw the white shirt that hung idle. I had taken it off the hanger just to find out if his clothes smelled like cedar or if it was just his skin. Then I ended up wearing it because the material was soft and thick, the smell of cedar on it was nice, and it was an action that came easily. This time, however, I wore his cardigan because I liked the thought of it.

I held the mug in both hands as I watched the valley below us burn off its fog.

The world looked different in daylight. It looked larger. The trees ran further than I’d realized, deep and dark green, the kind of density that swallowed sound. Beyond the ridge, a thin strip of sky had gone pale orange at its lowest edge, and I watched it lighten by increments until it was simply blue.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d watched the sky.

Alexei came to stand beside me, his own mug in hand, and we didn’t speak for a long stretch. Of course, he didn’t treat silence as a problem to solve. Rather than fill it, he occupied it, like a room he was comfortable in.

“I want to walk the tree line,” I told him. “Before it gets too bright.”

He looked at me. “Why before it gets bright?”

“The light is better for… ” I stopped, realizing how it sounded. “I’ve been sketching. In my head. Ideas for events.” I shook my head slightly. “Habits.”

“Sketching ideas,” he repeated.

“It’s what I do. Did. What I,” I uttered, chuckling. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters.” He said it simply, like a fact he was reporting rather than a comfort he was offering. “Show me.”

I didn’t have my actual sketchbook, so I found a notepad in one of the kitchen drawers, the kind with the wire spiral and the faint blue lines, and I carried it with me into the woods while Alexei walked a measured ten feet to my left, doing his own silent measuring of the terrain.

The light through the pines was extraordinary. It fell in long shafts, broken by branches into something fractured and intentional, the way light inside cathedrals was fractured and intentional. I stopped walking and just stood in it for a moment.

A winter wedding.

Ceremony outdoors, right here, the altar framed by these trees.

White fabric between the trunks, no flowers. Just the light and the evergreen and the cold making breath visible.

I sketched it in fast, loose lines. Proportions, not details. The way the space was intended to be used.

When I looked up, Alexei was watching me with an expression I couldn’t entirely read — something careful and intent.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.” He looked away, back to the trees. “Keep going.”

I did. We walked the ridge path from the morning before, and I filled three pages with impressions—a dinner concept using these stone outcroppings as natural table settings, a retreat layout that used the valley’s natural sightlines, a ceremony arch built from stripped timber—that I’d never build because none of these clients existed and none of these events would happen. But my hands needed to move and my mind needed somewhere to put itself that wasn’t contingency planning and threat assessment.

Alexei walked beside me through all of it, never commenting on the sketches, never hurrying me. Once, when I stopped to study a particular angle of light between two trees, he stopped with me and waited without any visible impatience, which was its own small miracle.

“You’re good at it,” he said finally, as we turned back toward the cottage.

“Duh, it’s my job,” I answered playfully, chuckling.

Then I sighed and said, “It was.”

He looked at me sidelong. “Was.”