Page 90 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

“You’ve been down here for hours,” he said. “It’s finished. Go upstairs.”

*****

I stood outside the bedroom door for longer than was rational.

This was not hesitation in the operational sense because I was not assessing risk or running contingencies. It was something else, something I didn’t have a familiar word for, a threshold that had nothing to do with the door itself and everything to do with what I intended to do on the other side of it.

I opened the door.

She was awake, sitting on the bed with her knees drawn up, still in the clothes she’d worn to the Voss building. She looked at me when I came in, and the expression on her face was the one I’d spent months trying to name and had finally stopped trying. One of a kind. Made specifically for the space between us.

“It’s done,” I said.

“I know. How do you feel?”

I sat down on the edge of the bed. Looked at my hands for a moment. Then at her.

“Empty,” I said. “Not in a way that troubles me. Just… the absence of it.”

She nodded. She understood absence, what it felt like when a sustained weight was removed.

“You could have died,” I said.

I hadn’t intended to say it that directly. But then I did.

“I know,” she said.

“At the cottage. On the forest road. Tonight.” I looked at her. “Any of those. Any single one of those variables going differently—”

“But they didn’t.”

“They almost did. That’s the calculation I’ve been running since the forest road, and I haven’t been able to stop running it.” I paused. “You almost weren’t here. That is a fact I’m having difficulty filing.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she came to sit in front of me on the bed, close enough that I could see the details of her face in the low light. The steadiness in it.

“I’m here,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Alexei.” She put her hand on my jaw, and I let her. “I’m here.”

Something in my chest that had been compressed for a very long time was released to a degree I felt in my whole body.

I put my hand over hers.

“I need to tell you something,” I said.

“I married you because it solved a problem. I was honest with you about that from the beginning, and I don’t retract it.”

“What are you telling me?”

“That the marriage stopped being a solution somewhere around the third week. Or the second. Or possibly the first—I’m not certain of the exact point, and I have spent significant effort trying to locate it, which is its own indication of how thoroughly you disrupted my methodology.” I looked at her directly because she deserved that. “I didn’t plan to love you. I just… I couldn’t help it.”

Isla’s expression softened.

“You disrupted everything,” I said. “Not the empire. The idea that the strongest position is the one that requires the least from anyone else.” I paused. “I require things from you now. Your safety. Your presence. I require you to continue being in the world. That is a dependency I have no contingency for. It terrifies me. I want you to understand that it terrifies me, and I’m telling you anyway.”

She swallowed.