Page 37 of Forced By an Obsessive Bratva Stalker

I sat with the file open for a length of time I couldn’t have accounted for afterward. The cursor blinked on an unanswered search field, the question forming quietly in my unstable mind.

If the connection was real, she hadn’t stumbled into my world by accident at all.

She’d been standing at the edge of it her entire life, without knowing it. The same way I’d apparently been standing at the edge of something with her that I hadn’t yet found the correct name for either.

I didn’t act on it. Not that night.

I closed the file, sat back in my chair, and allowed myself, for the first time in a long time, to feel something closer to uncertainty than to control.

I kept the surveillance running through the night, just as every night before.

But I watched the feed differently now. Less like a man monitoring a threat.

More like a man waiting to find out exactly how deep a thing went, before he had to decide what he was willing to do once he knew.

Who are you, Aria Bennett? I thought to myself. Who are you?

Chapter 13 – Aria

I stepped into the hall in a red dress that hugged me in all the right places. The fabric accentuated my curves and contours, my heels making me look inches taller.

My blond hair wasn’t messy tonight; it was styled into a neat bun on my head, loose strands framing my face. My stilettos clicked against the floor as I moved through the crowd of guests dressed to impress. Men in tailored suits. Women in elegant dresses.

This was the closest I’d gotten to something with an actual public face attached. A gala. A guest list. Real people in a real room, instead of numbers moving between accounts that didn’t exist anywhere except on paper.

I had my buddy Jimmy, a tech genius, get my name on the list of personnel invited to this event. It wasn’t an easy task to pull off. But Jimmy was good at stuff like this. He even got me an invite in case things went south.

Unlike everyone else in this space, I was here with one goal: to gather as much information as I could for my research. On the surface, this gala looked like an annual investment summit of some sort, but I knew better. It was a gathering of wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Every individual in this room was linked to one financial crime or the other, making me the odd one out. My voice of reason had warned me against coming here. But as always, I chose curiosity over reason.

I’d traced one of the shell companies I’d been looking into to its parent organization. Hargrove Capital Partners. I knew if I could get close to a couple of people and ask just the right questions, I’d find the answers I was searching for.

I reached out, helping myself to a glass of champagne from a nearby waiter’s tray. I cradled it for a moment, my eyes scanning the room for the perfect man to approach. Men were easier targets for missions like this because they were easily swayed by a pretty girl.

The plan was to find one, get chatty, and gradually find my way into his head. Shouldn’t be so hard. While I stood there analyzing the crowd, I noticed some of society’s most prominent figures mingling with these devils in suits.

Politicians.

Philanthropists.

Humanitarians.

College professors.

Some A-list celebrities weren’t left out as well. And that opened my eyes to a harsh reality I wasn’t sure I was ready for.

These people would openly condemn corruption and pretend to hate it with every fiber of their being, when in fact, they were in bed with the same people they criticized.

Hypocrites!

I scanned the room for forty minutes before I saw him—someone I least expected to see in a setting like this. The second I spotted him, my entire mental script for the evening rearranged itself without my permission.

Anton Vasylenko.

What was he doing here?

He stood near the far windows in a black suit that fit him the way everything about him seemed to fit—too precisely to be accidental. His dark hair was combed to perfection, those steel-gray eyes cold and observant.