Page 86 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

She nodded slowly. She didn't push.

But I watched her face move in a way that told me she'd taken the measure of what I wasn't saying and drawn her own approximate conclusions.

She was sharper, sometimes, than even I remembered to account for.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Alexei."

I put my fork down and looked at her properly. "It's close to done," I said. "That's what I can tell you. It's close, and the machinery is in place, and I need you to trust that I'll tell you the rest of it when I can."

She held my gaze. Searching, assessing. Then she nodded, once, with a slowness that meant she was choosing to extend trust rather than being persuaded by anything I'd said.

"Okay," she said. And then, quietly, she added, "Come back from wherever you are. Just for tonight."

I picked my fork back up.

I came back.

*****

I walked the grounds behind the building at midnight.

Old habit, but it felt different now. In the early weeks after the cottage, the perimeter walks had been operational. Tonight, I was walking because my body needed the motion and my mind needed the open air.

I thought about Isla on the balcony, looking at the skyline. The way she'd looked at it as something genuinely extraordinary. All that light, all that noise, all those games running simultaneously. She'd found it beautiful in a way I'd stopped finding anything, and standing beside her, I'd felt the strangeness of seeing something familiar made new by a different pair of eyes.

She did that. Consistently, and apparently without intending to.

I had married her to protect her. That had been the whole calculation. I'd respected her enough to be clear-eyed about it with her.

Somewhere between that clarity and this moment, standing in my property at midnight with the city glowing beyond the wall, the calculation had become something else.

I tried to locate the exact point of transition and couldn't. It hadn't been a single moment. It had been cumulative. The way she'd looked at me the first time, she understood what I was. The way she'd stayed anyway. The way she'd driven the car. The way she'd put the photograph on my desk without falling apart, and told me, with perfect clarity, that she was angry rather than broken.

The way she'd asked to fight beside me rather than be kept behind me.

I had built this empire on a specific premise: that the only reliable foundation was the one you controlled completely.

I had built it well. I still believed the premise.

And I was standing here at midnight, seeing the reality of what I'd allowed Isla Morales to become to me.

The reason.

The reason I was ending this. Not to protect the Golovin name, not to maintain the territory, not to demonstrate to the next Siroc White what the cost of miscalculation looked like.

Because she was inside, and I intended to keep her there. With me.

I turned back toward the house.

*****

I changed in the dressing room without waking her, moving quietly through the dark. Dark suit, no tie. The weapon in its holster, checked and chambered. The earpiece in my left ear, the channel already active, Mikhail's team confirming positions on the other end.

I stood at the bedroom door and looked at her sleeping.