Page 8 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

Marriage, in this world, was a declaration with teeth. It changed what you were willing to do and what cost you were willing to accept. No one touched a Golovin wife without triggering a response that no one in their right mind wanted to trigger. It was, functionally, the most comprehensive protection available to a civilian woman who had made the catastrophic error of becoming visible in the wrong circles.

I stepped into the elevator.

The logic was impeccable; I noted with functional detachment.

There was only one word for what she represented, now that she was in my building, under my protection, and likely to remain so indefinitely.

The word was variable.

I had spent thirty-five years constructing a life with the minimum number of uncontrolled variables. A variable was a liability. A variable was a gap in the system where outcomes became unpredictable. Variables were the specific thing I had built every defense in my life to minimize, because my father had taught me—demonstrated, repeatedly—what happened to men who let too many things go uncontrolled.

She was already a variable.

The elevator reached twelve, and the doors opened onto a quiet corridor.

I stood there for a moment, hand loosely against the door frame, turning the evening over in my mind. The truth was simple, and I was not in the habit of flinching from simple truths: I had won her.

She was here. The world that she had apparently been hiding from had found her anyway, and it would keep finding her until she had something around her that was stronger.

I could be that.

What it would cost me was the question I hadn’t finished answering yet. Not in money, the financial component was irrelevant. In something else. In the controlled order of my life, which had been built to function without the kind of attachment that created leverage. It was an order I valued so much.

And already, I could not fully predict what happened next.

I stepped out of the elevator, and the doors closed behind me. I walked toward the guest suite at the end of the corridor with a steady pace, like that of a man walking toward a decision he’d already made.

Winning her had been the simplest part of the evening.

Everything after this would be considerably more complicated.

Chapter Three

Isla

For a few seconds, I didn’t know where I was.

Seconds of that morning blankness where the body is awake, and the mind hasn’t caught up yet, where the world is just light and texture. I perceived the faint smell of something expensive like cedar. I spent those seconds looking at a ceiling that was the wrong ceiling, pale, smooth, and too high, framed on one side by floor-to-ceiling windows that were full of city light even though the sky behind it was still the greyish purple of early morning.

And then everything came back at once.

I sat up so fast that the room tilted. My hands flew to my wrists before I was fully conscious of reaching for them. The zip tie was gone, and what remained was a red mark, a thin abraded stripe of skin that stung when I pressed it, which I pressed anyway because the pain was useful. The pain was real. It was something I could return to when I needed proof that last night had actually happened.

It had happened.

The abduction, the warehouse, the casino. The man with cold grey eyes who had won me.

Oh, God.

I was in a room I didn’t recognize. In a bed I hadn’t chosen. In a city I could see but not reach.

I swung my legs off the bed and stood before the room finished tilting, bare feet sinking into carpet so thick it was almost disorienting—the kind of carpet that absorbed sound, which made the room feel sealed from the outside world like a snow globe. My silk blouse was gone. Someone had changed me into—I looked down—soft grey loungewear, expensive, the kind with no visible brand because the brand was the quality itself. It fit, which was more unsettling than if it hadn’t.

Someone had dressed me while I slept.

The thought moved through me, and I shoved it somewhere I could deal with later, because standing in the middle of an unfamiliar room and counting violations I couldn’t currently fix wasn’t going to help me. What was going to help me was information.

I started moving.