Page 94 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

Two Years Later…

I woke before the alarm, before the city, before even the pale suggestion of dawn had begun to soften the dark beyond the windows.

In the early weeks of our marriage, I’d woken early out of vigilance. Now I woke early because the quiet was mine. After all, I’d learned to love the feel of the penthouse before the phones and the reports.

I turned onto my side and watched Alexei sleep.

He was on his back, one arm crossed over his chest, the other extended toward me—his hand resting at my waist with a loose, unconscious grip that would tighten the moment I tried to move away from it. His hand always found me, every time, without waking, without any indication of conscious awareness—just the reach, the find, the hold.

The man who had once seen emotional dependency as a structural liability now reached for me in his sleep. I found this privately extraordinary and had never told him so, because some observations were worth keeping.

The world had not softened. I’d understood from the beginning that it wouldn’t.

But we did.

I had taken the skills I’d developed over a decade and pointed them at something that was entirely and only mine: My luxury event planning company. Totally independent of his business.

Alexei had written the initial check and never again. This was, I’d come to understand, one of his primary love languages—the gesture made once, completely, without conditions or ongoing reference. He respected the boundary between what was his and what was mine, and he never conflated the two unless I invited the overlap.

My clients didn’t know who I was married to. Most of them didn’t know my history. They knew the quality of my events. They knew what a room felt like when I arranged it.

‘Immaculate,’ someone had written in a review I’d found cited in a trade publication. ‘Emotional. Impossible to replicate.’

*****

That evening, we sat on the balcony as the city transitioned into night.

I’d brought wine I didn’t pour, and Alexei sat beside me with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled and the stillness he’d developed over the past two years—as a man who had put down a weight he’d been carrying for so long he’d stopped noticing it, and had discovered that his posture was different without it.

I turned the glass in my hands.

I’d been holding this for three weeks. It was the careful handling of something so significant that you wanted to bring it to the right moment rather than simply the nearest one.

The city blazed below us.

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

He looked at me, giving me that full, undivided attention that still, after two years, moved something in his chest.

“I’m pregnant.”

The silence that followed was unlike any silence I’d heard from him.

He didn’t move. His eyes stayed on mine.

Then, slowly, he leaned forward and pressed his forehead to mine, and I felt the long, complete release of a breath held at some depth I hadn’t known he was holding.

We stayed like that. His forehead against mine, his hands coming up to frame my face, and the city below us blazing.

“Fuck, I’m terrified,” he admitted finally, the breaking of his voice making my chest constrict. “And grateful.”

“I know.”

“I don’t have a framework for this. I don’t know how to protect something this significant.”

“Yes, you do,” I argued, smiling at him. “You’ve been doing it for two years.”

He pulled back enough to look at me.