Page 23 of Forced By an Obsessive Bratva Stalker

“I can be quick,” I replied faster than my brain could register how awkward the words sounded.

He squinted ever so slightly, as though he found my response rather weird. And it was because it came out wrong.

I cleared my throat to fill the silence.

Daniel’s eyes moved past my shoulder toward the door, then back to me, then back to the door again. A habit forming in real time. “I, um…I shouldn’t be here at all.”

“What?” I raised my brows in surprise.

“I can’t be seen with you. I really can’t do this.” He glanced around.

“Daniel, you reached out to me, remember,” I tried jogging his memory, unable to understand his sudden withdrawal from our agreement.

“I know what I did.” He said it like an accusation against himself.

I watched him wrap both hands around the coffee cup without drinking from it, like the warmth was the only thing he actually wanted from it.

“Look, if anyone finds out I talked to you, I don’t have a job. I might not have a lot more than that.”

“I understand. I really do.”

“Do you?” he snapped. “Because you’re literally asking me to set my life and career on fire so you can write about the smoke.”

My brows arched in disbelief. “You keep forgetting you reached out to me.”

“Yeah, and I regret that now.”

“Listen to me, Danny—can I call you Danny?”

A pause.

He nodded subtly.

“We’re here already, and I know that deep down in your heart you know you’re doing the right thing by exposing these criminals.”

His throat bobbled as he swallowed hard, his eyes still scanning the café interior.

“As I said in my email, I’m gonna keep you anonymous,” I said. “Off the record. Everything. You have my word.”

He tapped his feet rapidly on the floor, then let out a long exhale like he’d been holding it since he walked in.

Then Daniel reached into his jacket and slid a folded sheet of paper across the table, face-down, the gesture quick and practiced. “Just read it and give it back. No pictures.”

I unfolded it under the table, in my lap, glancing down at it in short, controlled increments rather than one long stare that might catch a passing glance.

Account numbers.

Routing codes.

Three offshore entities I didn’t recognize by name, though the structure underneath them I recognized immediately, because I’d been staring at variations of this exact shape for two months.

“These three.” I kept my voice flat, clinical, the tone I used when I needed information more than I needed to look surprised by it. “They route through the same intermediary bank in Cyprus.”

His eyes widened slightly. “You already knew that?”

“I suspected it. I didn’t have account numbers.” I looked up at him. “Where do these three feed into?”

He hesitated. His thumb moved over the rim of the coffee cup, back and forth, a small anxious motion. “There’s uh…there’s a parent structure. A holding entity that owns pieces of all three.” He swallowed. “I’ve only seen fragments of it—compliance isn’t supposed to see the whole picture, that’s sort of the point of how it’s built—but the fragments I have all point toward the same—”