Page 76 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

That was the part that followed me, not the ambush itself. Ambushes I could handle, had handled, would handle again without significant difficulty. What I could not as easily handle was the evidence that Siroc White was operating at a strategic depth I had underestimated. That he had either the resources or the intelligence to predict my movements before I made them.

That he had found the one place in the world I had considered inviolable, and had quietly put eyes on it, and had waited.

The man was not reacting to me anymore. He was thinking past me. Planning past me. Moving pieces I hadn’t yet identified across a board I hadn’t fully mapped.

The message was clear:

You are not untouchable.

You are not hidden.

We are closer than you think.

I drove faster, the main road opening ahead of us, the city’s glow beginning to build at the horizon.

Beside me, Isla’s hand was still around my sleeve. I didn’t tell her to let go. I didn’t want her to.

The next move would not come from cover. I understood that with the same certainty I understood my own capabilities and my own limitations. Cover was a tool of the preliminary phase—the phase designed to exhaust, destabilize, and isolate. We had moved past that phase tonight.

The next move would be direct. The next move would be intended to end it.

Chapter Nineteen

Isla

The gunfire lived in my ears long after it stopped.

Not exactly the ringing; it was more like a pressure that wouldn’t resolve, a frequency permanently added to the silence, so that every quiet moment on the drive back carried the ghost of that sound underneath it. The crack of the first shot. The rear window shattering. Alexei got out of the car in the dark and went toward it with certainty.

I didn’t let myself think about that part too directly. I filed it away behind glass, the way you’d handle something fragile that you needed to look at later.

I now sat with my knees drawn up and my shoulder against the cold of the passenger window as I watched the dark outside unreel into the highway.

I replayed the sequence with the compulsive, involuntary precision of a mind that had decided it needed to understand what had just happened before it would agree to process anything else.

The blocking vehicle. The way Alexei had seen it and already moved before I’d registered what I was looking at. I’d gone down. I hadn’t decided to; my body had simply responded to the certainty in his voice.

Then the car moved around me, his hand off the wheel. He had gone into those trees on foot and in the dark and come back whole, and the three men who’d been waiting in them had not.

I didn’t ask him to confirm that. I already knew.

What I kept returning to was the moment just before the first shot, when the headlights had appeared across the road, and Alexei’s entire body had changed. Not visibly. Not in any way someone who hadn’t been paying close attention would have caught. But I had been paying close attention for long enough now to be sure what I’d felt from him in that half-second was not fear.

It was recognition.

He’d seen it coming. Not this specifically, but the general possibility of it. The fact of it. He’d known, on some level, since the camera, that we were not going to leave the woods the way we’d arrived in them.

He’d known, and he’d loaded me into the car anyway, and he’d driven, and when it happened, he’d handled it.

I pressed my forehead harder against the cold window glass and breathed.

This wasn’t a warning. I’d understood that the moment the shots started. Warnings were designed to be survived. What had been waiting for us on that road had been designed for a different outcome.

It was a promise.

*****

The penthouse looked different at 2 am.