Page 71 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

But the feeling followed me.

It wasn’t exactly paranoia. This was something more animal than that. Something that bypassed the reasoning part of the brain entirely and went straight to the part that knew, before thought arrived, that something in the environment had shifted.

I told myself it was residual anxiety. The city was bleeding out of my nervous system slowly, presenting itself as a phantom threat.

I almost convinced myself.

It was during our afternoon walk, which was shorter than the morning’s, just around the eastern edge of the cottage grounds, that I got the confirmation I’d been silently hoping against.

That was when I saw it.

We were following the low fence that marked the property boundary, the tree line twenty feet to our left, and I was watching the light when I noticed that something caught the light wrong.

It was a glint. Metal or glass. Tucked against a tree trunk, partially obscured by the lower branches, angled in a way that was too deliberate for it to be anything I’d dropped and forgotten.

I kept walking. I didn’t stop, didn’t point, didn’t give it anything visible.

But it sat in my chest for the rest of the walk like a swallowed stone.

*****

Alexei built the fire higher again that evening. I sat on the floor in front of it, my knees drawn up. I tried to be present in the warmth of the room, the comfortable silence, and the glass of wine he’d put in my hand. I lasted approximately forty minutes before I set the glass down.

“I need to tell you something.”

He looked up from the map he’d been studying.

“Earlier, this morning, I found the door open. The same door I was pretty sure I’d latched. But I know it could have been something about the wood or any other cause. Maybe I really didn’t latch the door like I thought I did.”

He kept looking, like he knew I was not done.

“But for most of the afternoon, I’ve had this strange sensation. Like we’re being watched. Like, you know, something is coming that we’ve not seen yet.”

I expected him to tell me I was imagining it, that it was just my stressed mind playing tricks on me. But he didn’t.

I swallowed before telling him, “Then, on our walk, I spotted a glint of some… I don’t know if it’s glass or metal. It didn’t look random.”

“Where exactly near the fence?”

“Northeast edge. Maybe ten, twelve feet into the tree line. There was a double trunk, two pines grown close enough to look like one from this distance.”

He was already moving, pulling his jacket from the hook by the door, handing me mine.

“We go together,” he said.

I nodded, knowing I would have protested if he’d planned to leave me inside.

The cold outside was sharp, and the sky above the pines was now a deep ink blue. Alexei carried a flashlight but didn’t switch it on. We moved by the ambient light of a three-quarter moon, which was more than enough to find the fence line and follow it.

I found the double trunk first. My own landmarks, my own memory.

Alexei moved past me without a word and crouched at the base of the nearest tree, brushing aside a low branch with his forearm. The beam of his flashlight came on briefly, angled low and narrow.

I heard him exhale.

He stepped back, and I came forward, and I looked at what he’d found.

It was a camera housing. It was old enough that moss had begun to grow at its base, but the mounting bracket was new, with the metal bright and not corroded where the old housing connected to it.