Page 72 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

Someone had replaced a component. Recently.

“It’s not transmitting,” Alexei said. He was studying it like someone reading a language they knew fluently. “The lens housing is cracked. But the bracket—” He stopped.

The sentence didn’t need finishing.

Someone had been here. Someone had installed surveillance on this property at some point, and someone had come back to service it. And the crack in the housing meant a gap in the footage, but it didn’t mean the gap was current.

It didn’t mean they hadn’t already seen everything they needed to see.

I became aware of the cold in a way I hadn’t been a moment before. It moved through my jacket and settled against my skin. I stood in the dark at the edge of this property that was supposed to be unknown to everyone, and I felt the peace of the past two days contract sharply, like a fist closing.

This wasn’t a retreat.

A clean location. A place Alexei had chosen because no one knew it existed. A camera that told someone otherwise.

We had been watched. Possibly tracked. And whatever we’d given these days—the conversations, the openness, the slow and careful lowering of every guard I’d spent months constructing—had been visible to someone.

I looked at Alexei. In the moonlight, his face had gone to stone, his expression darkening even more than it did when I told him about what I’d noticed.

“Alexei,” I called.

He turned to look at me.

“How bad is this?”

There was a long pause before he answered.

“Bad enough,” he said.

It was the most honest answer he could have given me, and I both hated and loved him for it in the same breath.

The valley below the cottage was quiet. The trees were quiet. The moon moved behind a cloud, and the dark came down. Somewhere in the same darkness, someone was already deciding what to do with what they knew.

The weight of it hit me like a door swung open into my chest.

We had not escaped anything.

This was a test.

And someone passed.

Chapter Eighteen

Alexei

The camera told me three things in the space of five seconds.

First, someone knew about this location. Not suspected, not guessed—knew, with enough confidence to invest in infrastructure. The bracket was precision-mounted; it was the kind of hardware you sourced from a specific supplier when you wanted a clean installation that would survive a winter in the woods. This was not improvised surveillance. Someone had planned it.

Second, the original installation was old—the housing had been here long enough for moss to colonize the base, which put it at eighteen months minimum, possibly longer. But the bracket was new. Which meant someone had come back. Had stood in this tree line, within a hundred feet of the only place in the world I considered clean, and serviced their equipment with the comfortable precision of someone who did not expect to be caught.

Third, the cracked lens meant a gap in the footage. It did not mean the gap was current. Whatever we’d done here—some portion of it, perhaps all of it—had been observed and recorded somewhere by someone who intended to use it.

I stood in the dark for approximately four seconds after these conclusions. Long enough to feel something that was not quite rage but was adjacent to it, which settled at the base of my sternum and stayed there.

Then I was already moving.

“Isla, Inside,” I said. “Now.”