Page 70 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

“It was, more or less, a life force to me. Now, it’s something I gave up.”

“You didn’t give it up,” he said. “It was taken. Those aren’t the same thing.”

Something about the honesty of his tone caught in my throat. I swallowed it and kept walking.

*****

We ate lunch at the kitchen table and argued companionably about nothing important like we’d done several times recently. He thought the path was six kilometers, I thought it was eight, neither of us had a way to check, and neither of us particularly cared.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I thought, ‘This is what people mean when they say domestic bliss.’

The thought was so foreign and fitting at the same time that it made me laugh, briefly, at nothing.

“What?” he asked.

“I just… I never imagined this.” I gestured loosely. “Any of this. I had a version of my life I was building before. I’d mapped it out. I thought I’d get married eventually, but it was abstract. The way you think about retirement—theoretically possible, probably fine, but not something you actually plan toward.”

He set his fork down.

“And then I got married,” I said, “and it was nothing like the abstract.” I looked at him. “It’s more frightening. And more real. And I can’t decide if those two things are connected or just coincidental.”

He was quiet for a moment before he said, “I never thought I deserved it.”

“Marriage?”

“Peace.” He said the word like he was still getting used to the sound, or maybe the weight, of it. “The kind of life that doesn’t require constant management of damage. I understood the structure of a Bratva marriage — the function, the strategic necessity. I’d seen other men treat it that way. And I’ve seen my brothers treat it the other way. But I’m not Mikhail or Viktor.” There was a pause. “I didn’t think it would become something I’d want to protect for different reasons.”

“Different reasons,” I said carefully.

He looked at me directly. “You know what I mean, Isla.”

I did. Because I could feel it, too.

“I know,” I said.

The afternoon light began to slant.

I washed the dishes while Alexei sat at the kitchen table with a physical map he’d unfolded—paper, no satellite, the way he insisted on operating when he wanted to be unreadable—and I watched him work in the reflection of the window over the sink.

I was living a kind of life that was not what I’d planned and was also, undeniably, mine.

At the realization, I felt something settle inside me, quiet and heavy and not entirely comfortable, like a stone finding its place.

This was certainty. Not safety. Certainty.

I’d started to learn the difference.

*****

I stopped moving when I noticed the door.

I’d gone to the small room at the back of the cottage—a utility space, barely larger than a closet—to look for more firewood. The door had been latched when I’d passed it earlier; I remembered the latch, a simple iron bar, because I’d noted it.

Now it was slightly ajar.

I stood in the hallway for a moment, looking at the gap. It was about two centimeters. The wood swelling with the cold was a possible explanation. A draft from somewhere could be another. There were a dozen entirely reasonable explanations lined up neatly in my mind.

So I latched it again and kept moving.