Page 93 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

He didn’t move.

“I love you,” I said again. “And I’m not leaving. And those two things are true at the same time.”

Then he reached out and took my coffee cup from my hand and set it on the railing beside us. He took both of my hands, looking at them briefly before he looked back at my face.

“I don’t want to own your life,” he said. “I want to share it.”

The words were simple.

He held my gaze.

“And if you ever chose to leave,” he said, and his jaw tightened slightly, “I would let you go. Even though it’ll ruin me, I would let you go.”

I looked at him.

Never did I imagine this kind of response.

“I’m not leaving,” I said.

He nodded.

“Because I want to build something real in the middle of all of this. And I want to build it with you.”

He was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that wasn’t absence.

Then he brought my hands up and pressed his mouth to my knuckles.

“Then we build it,” he said.

We stayed on the balcony. We stood at the railing shoulder to shoulder, his arm finding its way around my waist at some point without either of us marking the moment it happened.

I thought about the first time I’d stood on this balcony.

What I was standing in now was not survival. It was something built on top of it, constructed from the materials the past weeks had provided. Some of those materials were ugly. Some of them were formed from things I couldn’t have predicted and wouldn’t have asked for.

But what they’d made was solid.

We stayed until the sun had fully cleared the buildings across the city. Stayed until the coffee went cold and the city noise had built to its daytime pitch, and a notification on Alexei’s phone broke the silence—which he silenced without looking at, which told me everything about where we’d arrived.

Eventually we’d go inside. Eventually, the day would make its demands.

But not yet.

He had not caged me. I had not softened him into something more manageable. We had simply, slowly made each other more completely what we already were.

I turned my face toward him, and he was already looking at me, and neither of us said anything, because there was nothing left that required saying.

We had survived the game.

And we had chosen each other anyway.

That was the whole of it.

That was enough.

Epilogue

Isla