Page 84 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

“Draw them. I’ll respect them,” I answered, shrugging.

“You don’t go anywhere without close protection. You don’t communicate externally without it being vetted. Any intelligence you develop, any observation you make, comes to me before it goes anywhere else.” He paused. “These are not negotiable.”

“Agreed.”

A look of recognition was evident in his expression.

“All right,” he said.

“Don’t look so pleased about it,” I drawled jokingly, going over to his chair as he shook his head like the resigned parent of an over-energetic child.

I moved his hand from the table and settled into his lap. He brought his other hand around my waist.

“I know you’re thrilled to be working with me,” I whispered.

His chest vibrated with a short laugh. Then he sighed again, pulling me tighter into him.

*****

We stood on the balcony later, after the briefings were done.

If I were in the game, I would be in it. Not as a piece to be moved. Not as leverage to be applied. As a player. With information, instinct, and months of hard-won understanding of how this world worked and what it asked of the people who survived inside it.

I was in it as a partner.

Siroc had sent that photograph to remind me of who I’d been. The woman in the background of her brother’s story, perpetually cleaning up the wreckage, perpetually one step behind someone else’s disaster.

He’d miscalculated.

Because looking out at the city now, I didn’t see that woman anywhere.

I only saw the woman I’d become.

Alexei’s hand found mine on the railing.

We stood there, and the city blazed, and I was done being afraid of any of it.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Alexei

I knew I was ready to end it when I stopped being angry. When I stopped reacting.

Anger, while it sharpened attention and kept the body moving when exhaustion would otherwise slow it in the first stages of conflict, was not a reliable fuel. Because it was also noise, and noise was the enemy of precision.

The morning I sat in the security office and reviewed Siroc's latest intelligence reports was the morning I understood we were in the final phase.

The intelligence had been arriving in pieces for two weeks, each piece slotting into place with the satisfying inevitability of a proof completing itself. Siroc's primary shell company in Nevada had collapsed under the legal pressure—the DA's contact had moved faster than I'd anticipated, which was a welcome variation from the usual pace of institutional mechanisms. Two of his distribution channels had gone dark. Three of his senior operators had stopped appearing in any of the communication intercepts we were monitoring, which meant either they'd gone deeper underground, or they'd cut ties entirely.

Men like Siroc attracted loyalty only when they projected power. The moment the projection faltered, the loyalty recalculated.

He was bleeding from a dozen small wounds simultaneously, none of them individually fatal, all of them collectively consuming resources and attention he needed elsewhere. His war chest was depleting. His organizational depth was thinning. And underneath all of it was the detail that told me the most: his communication cadence had changed. Where he'd once operated with the methodical patience I'd come to respect as his primary strategic asset, he was now moving faster. Reacting. Patching.

Desperate men made loud decisions.

I was counting on it.

*****