Page 81 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

Then I acknowledged that my mind was running in circles and went upstairs.

*****

Isla was awake.

I’d expected her to be asleep—it was past midnight, she’d been through an ordeal that would have flattened most people—but she was sitting up against the headboard with a book open across her lap and the bedside lamp on. She looked at me when I came in with an expression that suddenly made me weak in the knees. Like she was hoping I’d come.

“You should be sleeping,” I said.

“I tried.” She closed the book. “You’ve been down there all night.”

“Most of it.”

I took off my jacket and set my unloaded gun on the nightstand where I could reach it without looking. Old habit, deeply written.

She watched me move through the room without commenting, which I appreciated. She just waited until I’d settled beside her on the bed, and then she turned the lamp off and lay down.

I put my arm around her waist.

She was warm.

I thought about her face in the car. After the blocking vehicle appeared, and before I gave her the instructions. No scream. No dissolution. Just eyes that went very wide and then narrowed into focus, and a body that followed every command I gave it.

I’d carried that image through the entire day without fully considering it. Now, in the dark, I let myself look at it.

She trusted me. It was an informed trust. A chosen one.

It was the heaviest thing anyone had ever handed me.

Heavier than the empire. Heavier than my brother’s trust, which was old and earned and had been tested enough times that I no longer felt its weight.

This was not invisible. This was acute. Present in my chest every time I looked at her.

The cottage had been chosen because of her. The attack had been staged there because she was the point.

Whatever came next—and something was coming, the silence told me that with certainty—it would not be aimed at my operations. It wouldn’t be aimed at my territory, my finances, my infrastructure. All of those things I could defend, rebuild, or replace.

It would be aimed at her.

Chapter Twenty-One

Isla

The package arrived at 9:48 in the morning.

I knew the time because I’d been watching the clock almost lazily when Marcus brought it. I’d been sitting at the kitchen island with cold coffee and the remains of a breakfast I hadn’t really eaten.

Security had already cleared it.

I asked him to set it on the counter. As he left, I looked at it for a moment before I touched it.

It was just brown paper, tied with plain string. My name was in the center, handwritten in a script so neat it looked almost printed.

I untied the string.

Inside the paper was a single photograph. Old enough that the colors had softened and the contrast flattened. I picked it up.

My brother.