Page 26 of Forced By an Obsessive Bratva Stalker

I hesitated for a moment, beating myself up for being so dark and selfish before walking to my car. Slowly, at first, then faster, until I was nearly running by the time I reached it.

I yanked the door open, slid inside, and slammed it shut. My heart was pounding against my ribs as I sat behind the wheel for a long time, fingers closing around it. I

My lips were quivering, my mind reeling with a thousand thoughts.

The incident at Meridian Solutions. The alley. The festival. And now this—a café two blocks from the financial district. A source who’d gone white at the sight of an ordinary-looking man in a dark coat. And a grip on my arm that had pulled me out of danger before I’d even fully understood I was in it.

I should have felt relieved.

What I felt instead, sitting in my car with my hands finally steady on the wheel, was something far more complicated. Gratitude tangled with a creeping, unwelcome suspicion that the same person protecting me from this might also be the reason I needed protection in the first place.

This was the third time in a row that my mystery man happened to be at the right place and at the right time. That told me one thing: Whoever he was, he was following me.

I suspected this before. I thought I was okay with having a guardian angel. But the million-dollar question remained: Why was he following me?

What were his intentions?

Was he the hero I thought he was, or a villain in disguise?

Chapter 10 – Rodion

I watched the café from a parked car across the street, close enough to see the door, far enough that I was simply another tinted windshield among a dozen others on that block.

Daniel Whitfield had been a contained problem for exactly four minutes before he became an uncontained one. I had my men track him down since I learned about the meeting he had with my little journalist.

When Aria walked into that café and sat down across from him, I felt something close to irritation, and beneath the irritation, something dark and sinister. Seeing her around other men always made my blood boil in ways beyond my control.

I watched Yuri enter through the front. Standard procedure—assess, contain, extract the source for a longer conversation elsewhere. I hadn’t ordered anyone to touch her. I’d been explicit about that since the beginning of this situation.

She wasn’t a target. She was a complication. Complications get managed, not eliminated. Yuri, although unsure of what I was doing with her, hadn’t asked what the distinction meant to me. I hadn’t offered to explain it because I didn’t entirely have an explanation that I trusted.

Whitfield panicked faster than Yuri’s presence warranted. That was the problem with frightened men; they made their own danger worse trying to escape it, drawing exactly the kind of attention a quiet exit would have avoided.

And Aria, predictably, impossibly, pushed instead of retreating. I watched her lean forward at the table instead of pulling back, watched her mouth move with another question instead of an apology.

I felt my jaw tighten in a way that had nothing to do with the operation and everything to do with the simple, infuriating fact that she did not know how to be afraid at the right moment.

When Yuri’s second man moved toward the door, I was already out of the car.

The glass crash wasn’t subtle, and it wasn’t supposed to be. I’d put my hand through enough chaos in my life to know exactly how to manufacture three seconds of it. In the noise that followed, I crossed the floor, found her arm, and pulled her exactly as far as the side door before letting go.

While in motion, I savored her signature scent, and it did something to me that I wasn’t ready to label. The feeling of being around her after all this time was more intense than I anticipated.

I wanted to linger in her presence—hell! I wanted to do a lot more than that. But I didn’t.

By the time I was back in the car, my pulse was elevated in a way that four years of disciplined calm should have made impossible.

I sat with my hands on the wheel and did not start the engine for nearly a full minute, running through the inventory of everything that had just gone wrong with my own restraint.

She was unpredictable. That had been true since the first day at Meridian Solutions. What was new, however, was that her unpredictability had stopped registering primarily as a risk to manage and started registering as something I looked forward to.

That distinction mattered. I didn’t like how much it mattered. Yet it did.

I looked out the window of my vehicle, watching her scan the surroundings for the man who’d pulled her out of danger. Seeing her place her palm on the spot I’d gripped, with a small grin playing on her lips, thawed something frozen inside me.

I wasn’t sure what it was. But it felt good.

I started the engine and drove away.