Page 92 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

I didn’t want to go back.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Isla

The light came in differently in the morning—the angle, the way it moved across the ceiling in slow, shifting panels as the curtains stirred. I’d looked at this ceiling on hundreds of mornings and never paid attention to what the light did on it. I paid attention now.

Alexei was asleep beside me.

I lay on my side and watched him for a moment without apology. He had given me a great deal to look at over the past weeks and had rarely been unaware of it. I took this opportunity.

He looked younger when he slept.

I’d fallen in love with both of them, anyway. The machinery and the man inside it.

The acknowledgment was simple yet clear as day.

I loved him.

******

I got up before he woke.

The war was over. Siroc’s name would surface in certain rooms for a while yet, but the war itself was over. The threat had been contained, dismantled, resolved.

And the part that was scaring me, as I emptied my coffee cup, was not any of the things that had scared me before.

It was this. The staying. The choosing, daily, on purpose, with full information and no external pressure, making the choice for me.

Fear I could navigate. Threat I had learned, slowly and expensively, to navigate. But this—ordinary mornings, coffee, the city below, a man sleeping upstairs who had told me last night that loving me was the risk he’d never planned for—this required a different kind of courage than anything the past had asked of me.

*****

He found me on the balcony.

I’d moved out there with my second cup, leaning against the railing. I heard the door behind me and felt the change in the air.

He came to stand beside me. Jacket off, no tie, the version of him that existed before the day put its full demands on. He looked at the city for a moment and then at me.

“You’ve been up a while,” he said.

“Thinking.”

“About.”

“Everything.” I turned to face him, leaning back against the railing. “About what comes after. What we do with it. What I want it to look like.” A pause. “What I need it to look like, which is a different thing.”

He looked at me steadily.

“I love you,” I said.

He blinked like someone had just knocked him over in a way.

“I need you to hear what comes after that,” I said. “Because it matters as much as the first part.”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t want a golden cage.” I held his gaze. “I understand why you built one. I’m not erasing what it cost both of us to get here. But I need you to understand that love doesn’t mean I hand you my autonomy. That staying isn’t the same as surrendering.” I paused. “I want to rebuild the business. I want to have a life that’s mine inside this life we’re building. I want to be your partner, and when I walk into a room, I want it to be because I chose to walk into it, not because it was determined to be safe and acceptable.”