Page 73 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

Isla didn’t ask questions. She moved ahead of me back to the cottage door, and I swept the perimeter with the flashlight in fast, tight arcs. I was not looking for the camera I’d already found, but for anything it implied. Additional mounts. Fresher hardware. A secondary unit covering the blind spot, the first one created.

I found nothing visible, which meant either the network was clean or whoever installed it was better than I was at hiding things. I didn’t allow myself to assume the former.

Inside, I locked the door and went immediately to the window over the sink, turning off the kitchen light so I could see the yard without being seen from it. Nothing moved. The tree line was dark and still.

Isla was already at the bedroom doorway. “We’re leaving.”

“Yes,” I confirmed, turning from the window.

She disappeared without another word.

I went to the lockbox under the floorboard beneath the bed—the one I’d installed myself, the one I told no one about, not even Mikhail—and took out the second weapon and checked it.

I seated a fresh magazine and tucked it against the small of my back. I kept the first within easy reach on the dresser while I pulled on my jacket and methodically transferred everything from my jacket pockets to my vest.

Phone. Spare magazine. The folded road map I’d been working from because I didn’t trust GPS routing that could be tracked, rerouted, or interrupted.

I was running backward through the mathematics of compromise.

The location had been surveilled. The window for that surveillance was a minimum of eighteen months. I’d been to the cottage three times in that period—twice alone, once with Mikhail after we’d closed the Voronin contract and needed forty-eight hours outside the city to debrief properly. Each visit had been preceded by the same protocol: route variation, no digital trail, no phone activity after the turn-off onto the access road.

Which meant one of two things. Either the surveillance predated my use of the property and had been placed there speculatively—a broad-net operation, someone mapping Golovin assets they didn’t know the purpose of—or someone had followed me here at some point during those three visits without my detection.

I did not enjoy either conclusion. If it was speculative surveillance, Siroc had more resources and more patience than I’d credited him with. If it was a tail I’d missed, I’d made an error significant enough to have killed us both.

I moved to the kitchen to turn off the remaining lights.

“Ready,” Isla said from the hallway.

I turned. She was at the door, bag over one shoulder, jacket on, her face expressing a calm I knew was taking real effort.

Something moved through me that I didn’t have time to name.

“Stay close,” I said. “Behind my left shoulder. If I move, you move. If I stop, you stop. If I tell you to get down—”

“I get down,” she interrupted, nodding. “I know.”

I looked at her for one moment. Then I opened the door.

I took ninety seconds to do a final sweep of the exterior — fast, methodical, the flashlight off and my eyes adjusting to the dark. The yard was clear. The fence line was clear. The access road stretched ahead of us into the trees, disappearing around the first curve, and I stood at the edge of the porch and listened.

Wind. Branches settling. A distant animal sound that was too small and too ordinary to mean anything.

But I didn’t trust it.

“Vehicle,” I said quietly.

We moved to the low, dark SUV I’d driven out of a secondary garage specifically because it was unregistered and untracked. I led her into the passenger side first, keeping my body between her and the tree line until I had the door closed. Then I went around to the driver’s side, staying low, and had the engine running within four seconds of getting in.

There were no lights yet. I pulled out of the cottage’s small clearing in darkness, moving at walking pace, feeling the tires on the gravel through the wheel before I committed to the access road.

“The camera,” Isla said. “How long do you think it had been there?”

“Long enough.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have right now.” I glanced at her. “I’ll know more when I can run the timeline against other variables.”