Page 35 of Forced By an Obsessive Bratva Stalker

For that, the man had my respect.

Yuri was right to question what I was doing because even I didn’t know the actual fuck was wrong with me.

If Aria were someone else, the situation would’ve been taken care of from day one. But there was something about her that was different. Something that kept pulling me to her like fuckin’ steel to a magnet.

And the worst part was that I liked it. I liked the feeling of being drawn to her. It was as intriguing as it was unsettling.

I cracked my fingers and decided to delve into the documents on my table. On the first page of Yuri’s report, he’d written:

“Subject continued research overnight. Active until approximately 5 a.m. Searches included charity event archives, business registries, and a cross-reference of R.T. Confidence level: moderate to high that subject has identified initials.”

I read it twice, my brows furrowing with amusement and a hint of concern. She really was smarter than I gave her credit for. And now I was starting to wonder whether revealing myself was such a good idea after all. Even under a false identity.

In the silence, I sat with the kind of focus that arrived right before a decision I needed to make correctly the first time.

From what I gathered, she had R.T.

She had a gala photograph, blurred enough to be useless in any court but apparently clear enough to make a connection she trusted.

She didn’t have Anton Vasylenko yet. Yuri’s notes confirmed that much—no searches on the consulting firm. Yet. No flags on the fabricated website. Yet. Nothing to suggest she’d connected the stranger from the coffee shop to the name now circled in her notebook.

Knowing her, that gap wouldn’t last.

I had two paths available to me, and I turned them over with an unhurried precision. I could stop her now—remove the threat cleanly, as my lieutenant proposed. If any other variable had gotten this close to the structure in fifteen years of building it, it would have been taken care of by now.

Yuri was already waiting for that instruction. All I needed to do was say the words, and it would be done.

But I didn’t have any interest in “cleaning up” this mess. None whatsoever. Instead, I decided to keep playing this little game with her.

I tightened the leash, rerouting two of her sources within the hour.

The first was simple—a compliance contact at a regional bank who’d been flagged in her search history as a likely next call. This was someone who could plausibly confirm the holding structure if pressed the right way.

A single conversation, conducted by a man who did not exist outside of that conversation, ensured the contact would suddenly find himself unavailable for the foreseeable future. He’d be called away to handle a family matter that had not, until that morning, existed.

The second required more care. A university archive she’d been quietly trying to access—older corporate filings, the kind that predated digital records and required an institutional override to view in full.

I had the override revoked under a procedural pretext, a routine compliance review that would resolve itself in exactly the amount of time required to make the timing look unrelated to her specific request.

She would notice both.

She noticed everything.

But she would experience them as obstacles, ordinary administrative friction, rather than as a hand reaching directly into her life and rearranging it.

That was the entire architecture of what I’d built around her by now. Not a wall. A maze with no visible walls at all, simply doors that closed a half-second before she reached them.

I told myself this was containment. But was it really just containment, or was there something more?

***

I knew deep down that Yuri was right when he suggested that keeping my distance was better than getting involved directly. However, that force that always pulled me to her wouldn’t let me.

That afternoon, I left my office and tracked her to the university. She’d worn the jacket I’d placed a tracking device on the other night in the alley, which made her location much easier to pinpoint.

I didn’t go as myself. Too risky. I didn’t go as Anton Vasylenko either. Nor did I go as her mystery guardian angel.

The plan was simple: stay close enough to observe, the way I’d been doing for days now. Except I made less effort than usual to stay at a distance that would have satisfied my own rules from a week ago.