Page 74 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

She accepted this with a small, compressed nod.

I switched the lights on once we’d made the first curve and the cottage was no longer in our sightline behind us. The road ahead was empty, the trees crowding close on either side, their canopy blocking whatever moonlight had been available in the open yard. The road was just one vehicle wide, the undergrowth occasionally brushing the mirrors.

I ran the math on exit options. The access road rejoined the main forestry route at a junction approximately three kilometers ahead. From there, I had two choices: north toward the highway, which was faster but more predictable, or south along the old logging road, which added forty minutes but kept us off any route a competent intelligence operation would anticipate.

South, then.

I kept the speed measured. Not slow enough to suggest hesitation but not fast enough to lose control on a surface I was navigating in the dark.

Isla sat with her hands folded in her lap, the same still posture she’d adopted in the car coming out of Vegas, and I could feel her awareness of the tree line in the same peripheral way I could always feel whatever she was doing.

The road curved right. I followed it.

Around the curve, approximately two hundred meters ahead, a set of headlights sat stationary across the road.

I had the car stopped and in reverse before conscious thought caught up with the decision. Headlights at that angle meant a vehicle positioned perpendicular to the road, deliberately blocking it, and the spacing between the beams was too wide for anything accidentally parked or mechanically faulty.

“Down,” I said.

Isla immediately dropped below the dashboard, and I had one hand on the wheel and one on the gear selector, calculating reverse speed on a single-lane road in darkness when the first shots came.

They came from the left—the tree line, not the vehicle—which told me the vehicle was a decoy or a secondary element, that the primary attack was the ambush from cover. The sound hit the car in a fast, tight sequence, and I felt the rear window go, glass caving inward in a controlled collapse, and the rear panel absorbed two impacts that the body of the car would not protect against indefinitely.

I got us around the curve before they could adjust their angle.

“Stay down,” I said, not because Isla needed telling but because I needed to hear myself say it.

The reverse arc I’d taken put the curve’s natural banking between us and the shooters. It gave temporary cover—two seconds, maybe three before they moved to reestablish a sightline. I had those seconds.

I got out of the car.

I moved along the outside of the vehicle in a low, fast arc toward the tree line on the right side—the side that hadn’t fired—keeping the car’s body between me and the curve. The first shooter would be repositioned. He’d expect me in the vehicle. He would not expect me on foot and already moving to his flank.

I found a natural hollow between two root systems, dropped into it, and waited.

One second turned into four seconds.

A figure came around the curve low and fast, and I could see from his body positioning that he was good—trained, moving tactically, not the chaotic forward rush of someone hired for numbers rather than skill. He swept right toward the car.

I was already behind him when he reached it.

I didn’t use the gun. The sound would have given away the vector too completely. I came in low and fast, putting him down with the efficiency of someone who’d been trained by men who understood that violence is most effective when it is brief and deliberate. He hit the road. He did not get up.

I took his radio before I moved.

Static, then a voice—two words, a direction—and I had enough from the cadence and the channel to know there were at least two more on the left side.

I went back to the car.

“I need you to drive,” I told Isla, and her head came up from below the dashboard. “Thirty meters. Full speed. Stay low and keep the wheel straight.”

She looked at me, then took a breath and said, “Okay.”

She climbed over the console, and I went back to the tree line on the right, moving parallel to the road, covering the angle the second shooter would have once the car began to move.

The car moved.

They fired—left side, as expected, tracking the vehicle—and I had their muzzle flare positions from the first shots. I moved toward the nearer one with everything dialed down to a single operational frequency: acquire, neutralize, clear.