Page 82 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

He was sitting at a poker table. I could see the green felt, low lighting, the amber warmth of a casino interior that I recognized from a hundred nights I’d spent in rooms like that.

He was smiling at someone off-frame, that particular smile he had when he thought he was the smartest person in the room. When he believed, absolutely, that what he was doing was going to work out.

He’d always believed that. Right up until it didn’t.

I turned the photograph over.

You were always part of the game.

The handwriting was the same neat, unhurried one.

My hands were trembling. I noted this as mere information, not as a verdict. My hands were trembling because my nervous system was responding to a stimulus. That was all it was. That was all I was going to let it be.

My brother.

I loved him. I had also spent years quietly drowning in the wake of his choices, bailing water out of the boat he kept puncturing, and I had never once let myself say that out loud because the dead were supposed to be mourned without the thought of what they’d cost you while they were alive.

I let myself say it now, just inside my own head, in the quiet of the kitchen.

He made terrible choices. He dragged me into them without asking. And I loved him anyway, and his death had broken something in me that had never entirely healed. And Siroc White had looked at that fracture and decided to press on it with both thumbs.

That was what the photograph was. Not a threat. Not a warning in the traditional sense. It was a scalpel, applied to the exact place most likely to make me flinch.

You were always part of the game.

Meaning: you didn’t stumble into this world. You were already in it.

Meaning: the marriage, the Bratva, the danger—none of it was an accident that happened to you. You were a piece on a board you didn’t know you were sitting on.

Meaning: your grief is a weapon, and I’ve just picked it up.

I picked up the photograph and stood.

*****

Alexei was in the study.

He looked up when I came in, seeing my face before he registered the photograph, which told me my face showed something I thought it wasn’t showing.

I put the photograph on the desk between us.

He looked at it and picked it up. Then he wordlessly turned it over and read the back.

His jaw tightened, but his eyes stayed steady. He set the photograph down with the same care he’d picked it up with, and when he looked at me, his expression was totally unreadable.

“It’s your brother in the picture,” he remarked, already knowing he was right.

I nodded quickly, pursing my lips.

“When did this arrive?”

“About twenty minutes ago. Security cleared it.” I sat down across from him.

“He wants me to spiral,” I said, my voice gaining more momentum with every word. “That’s what this is. He wants me to sit alone in a room and ask myself how much of my life was real and how much of it was someone else’s game, and he wants that question to be loud enough that I become useless to you.” I looked at the photograph. “He wants to make me doubt myself. Make me small. Make me a liability.”

Alexei was watching me with focused stillness.

“It’s a good strategy,” I said. “If I were him, I’d probably use it too.”