Page 77 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

It always had a quality of controlled severity — clean lines, deliberate security, the feel of a place that had been built to communicate something specific about the people inside it.

But as we arrived this morning, with the additional detail Alexei had clearly called ahead for—I’d watched him on the phone for ten minutes during the last stretch of highway, voice low and clipped— it looked less like a home and more like something else.

A fortress.

The gate team was doubled. I counted them as we came through: six, where there would usually be two, and these were not the usual faces. These were men I recognized from the secondary rotation, the ones Alexei deployed when the operational temperature went up. They checked the car with a thoroughness that was just short of intrusive.

Inside, the lights were on in rooms that were never lit at this hour. Two men in the main hallway. One at the top of the stairs. The kitchen had someone in it I’d never seen, and when I passed the doorway, he looked up with the flat, assessing gaze of someone whose job was specifically to note who was moving and where.

I should have felt safe.

I walked to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, and felt the walls come three feet closer.

This was protection. I knew it was protection. I understood, intellectually, that every additional body in this house was a subtraction from the probability of what had happened on that road happening again. Alexei had built this response in real time from a moving car on a highway, and proportionate and right.

But the knowledge that it was right didn’t stop the walls from moving.

I sat for a while in the quiet, letting the sounds of the house settle around me—low voices, footsteps at intervals, the mechanical click of a door lock engaging automatically somewhere down the hall. The automatic locks were new. Or newly activated. Either way, the sound of them had a quality I felt in my sternum rather than my ears.

Closed. Contained. Protected.

I breathed.

Alexei was downstairs for forty minutes. I used the time to shower, standing under water as hot as I could make it until the pressure behind my ears eased slightly, until the smell of pine and gunpowder rinsed out of my hair and down the drain.

I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and looked at myself for a moment.

Hair wet, face rid of whatever expression I’d been carrying since leaving the cottage. I looked, on the surface, like a woman who had recently showered. Nothing more alarming than that.

I went and sat on the edge of the bed again.

The guilt increased in volume. I couldn’t stop asking, ‘If I weren’t here, would any of this have happened?’

The answer I gave myself was the reminder that Siroc White had been a problem before I entered this world. He had been a problem before I entered this penthouse. I was not the cause of this war.

But I was the pressure point. Siroc wasn’t coming for me because I was strategically significant. He was coming for me because I was the specific place where Alexei Golovin could be made to feel something. And feeling something, in a world where emotional leverage was the most efficient form of warfare, made one vulnerable in a way that no amount of security at the gate could entirely address.

Yes, I was not the fire.

But I was the spark.

The knowledge of the fact that I was the emotional pressure point didn’t feel good. It gnawed at me.

I pressed my fists into the sheets and held that knowledge.

Alexei found me sitting there, fists in the sheets, staring at the middle distance.

He came through the door and stopped when he saw me, making a half-second assessment, and then crossed the room and sat beside me on the edge of the bed. Close enough that his shoulder was against mine. He didn’t touch me beyond that. He didn’t put an arm around me or do any of the things that would have felt like dealing with me.

He just sat. And I appreciated it more than I would have been able to explain.

“I’m afraid,” I said.

He looked at me.

“I mean, not of dying,” I said. “I’m afraid of being the reason you lose everything you’ve built. I’m afraid that Siroc having me as a lever means that every decision you make is going to be compromised by the fact that I exist, and that eventually that’s going to cost you something you can’t recover.”

Alexei was quiet for a moment.