Page 83 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

“You’re spiraling.”

“No. I’m angry.” I looked up, meeting his eyes. “There’s a difference.”

“He wants to destabilize you. That’s why he has the picture. It’s why he’s using it as a weapon now.”

“I know.”

He tilted his head to the side for a second before stretching his arms toward me. “Come here,” he urged.

I rose before my body asked for my permission, and he pulled me into him, his strong arms around me. I sighed, melting into his embrace.

“He’s already lost,” he said.

Of course, he has.

*****

I thought about Adrian for a long time after I left the study.

Not in the way Siroc intended, not as a wound reopened. I thought about him honestly, the way I’d started to do in the kitchen. My brother had been reckless and charismatic and genuinely funny in the way that people who don’t take anything seriously often are, and he’d borrowed money from people he shouldn’t have and gambled it in rooms he had no business being in.

What I hadn’t known, what the photograph and its neat handwriting confirmed, was that the line he’d crossed had placed me on a board I hadn’t consented to occupying. That my connection to him had been noted and held in reserve by someone patient enough to wait for the moment when it would be most useful.

The marriage to Alexei had made me useful in a specific way. I was the emotional variable. The soft target inside the fortress. And Siroc had photographs going back years, which meant he’d been watching the board long before either of us had moved on it.

You were always part of the game.

I stood at the window of the sitting room, looking at the city below.

I was not a woman who’d been maneuvered.

I was a woman who’d made imperfect, sometimes uninformed, occasionally the wrong decisions—and had arrived somewhere real because of them. My marriage was real. My husband was real. The life I was building in the wreckage of the one I’d planned was genuinely, specifically mine.

Siroc could not take that by mailing me a photograph.

What he’d done instead—what I suspected he had not intended—was remind me exactly how far I’d come.

*****

“I want to be involved,” I told Alexei from the doorway of his study.

There was a pause before he said, “Involved.”

“In whatever you’re doing to move against Siroc. Not as bait, not as a symbol, not as something you’re protecting. As a participant.” I came fully into the room.

Alexei leaned back in his chair and looked at me with an expression that was neither dismissal nor immediate agreement.

“Isla,” he started. “You were part of the former plan because, really, you know how Siroc thinks. But that was when the danger was pretty much contained.”

“I spotted the camera. I told you about the door. I drove the car when you needed me to. I’m not scared of any danger from him.”

He was quiet.

“Siroc wants me isolated,” I continued. “He wants me afraid and sidelined so that I become a liability instead of an asset. That’s the whole point of the photograph. If I disappear into this house and let you manage everything while I try not to fall apart, he wins that piece of it without firing a shot.” I put my hands flat on the desk. “So I need to do the opposite.”

The silence stretched. Somewhere in the house, a door opened and closed, and the security feed on the monitor to Alexei’s left cycled through its rotation.

“There are lines,” he said finally. “Boundaries.”