Page 30 of Forced By an Obsessive Bratva Stalker

“Then we should get along fine.” She checked her phone, made a small sound of mild irritation at whatever she saw there, and began gathering her things with the brisk efficiency of someone whose schedule had just reasserted itself over whatever this had been. “I have a class. Mr. Vasylenko.”

“Miss Bennett.” I inclined my head slightly, the smallest formal gesture, and watched her register it, file it, decide what to do with it.

“I’m sure I’ll see you around,” she said, in a tone that made it unclear whether it was a polite parting phrase or a genuine, considered prediction.

Given everything I’d already arranged to ensure was true, it was, of course, the latter—though she had no way of knowing that yet. And I had every intention of keeping it that way for as long as I could manage it.

She walked out without looking back once, and I sat there for several minutes after the door closed behind her. My coffee was cold, the fabricated folder still open on the table, doing the thing I had not allowed myself to do in longer than I could comfortably account for.

I was smiling. Not the practiced expression I deployed in negotiations, not the thin, calculated curve I used to unsettle men across boardroom tables. An actual, unguarded smile, the kind I hadn’t felt arrive on my own face without my permission in years. It took me a long moment to understand what had put it there.

She hadn’t been afraid of me.

Every calculation I’d built my life around assumed fear as a constant—fear in my enemies, fear in my allies, fear as the baseline currency that made my world function the way it was supposed to function.

Aria Bennett had sat across from a stranger she half-suspected of laundering money, made a joke about it to his face, and left the conversation looking faintly pleased with herself rather than rattled.

That should have concerned me considerably more than it pleased me.

It pleased me anyway, and on the drive back to the office, I found myself already constructing the next reason I might need to see her again—not for the network, not for risk containment, not for any of the justifications I’d been quietly running for weeks now like a man checking a fence line that didn’t need checking.

Simply because I wanted to.

I let myself have that thought, fully, for the length of one red light.

Then I put it away, the way I put away everything that didn’t serve a purpose I could defend to anyone who might ask—and drove the rest of the way in silence, no longer entirely sure I believed in my own filing system anymore.

Chapter 11 – Aria

I didn’t sleep that night, not really.

I lay there for a while pretending to, then gave up around two and sat on the floor of my room with my laptop, my notebook, and the small digital recorder I’d had running in my bag during the entire café conversation.

This was a habit Iris had once called paranoid, and I’d called prepared, and which had never once, until now, felt this immediately vindicated.

I played it back from the beginning.

Daniel’s voice came through thin and tinny, nervous in a way that hadn’t fully registered while I was sitting across from him, too focused on the content of what he was saying to notice the shake underneath it.

I let it run.

The café noise.

The clink of his cup against the saucer.

My own voice, calm, too calm, asking him where the three accounts fed into.

There’s a parent structure. A holding entity that owns pieces of all three.

I paused it there and wrote that down again, even though I already had it from memory, because writing it twice felt like building something solid out of something that kept threatening to slip.

I let it keep running.

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—

The recording cut to noise after that. The crash. The shouting. My own ragged breathing, picked up clearly by the mic still running in my bag, while I was being pulled sideways through a side door I hadn’t known existed.

I went back further than that, though, to a part I’d nearly let slide past me the first time, distracted as I’d been by everything else happening in that café. Before the crash. Before Daniel had spotted the man in the dark coat. Earlier in the conversation, when he’d still felt safe enough to talk freely.