Page 60 of Forced By an Obsessive Bratva Stalker

She saw them before they reached her.

I watched it happen on the kitchen feed—her head turning sharply toward the hallway, toward the shift of shadow that shouldn’t have been there. The glass slipped from her hand and shattered against the tile a half-second before she moved.

She didn’t scream. I noted it with something that wasn’t quite pride and wasn’t quite alarm. Aria didn’t waste breath on it, and in a split second, she spun toward the knife block on the counter, guided by the same instinct that had put a stick in her hand in an alley months ago.

Yuri reached her first.

He caught her wrist before she closed her fingers around the handle. She turned into him instead of away, driving her elbow back into his ribs with enough force that I heard him grunt even through the feed’s thin audio.

My brows arched in disbelief.

She twisted free for a half-second, made it two steps toward the hallway, and the second man caught her from behind, both arms wrapping around her middle.

With her legs dangling in the air, she drove her head back into his face.

The crack of it carried clearly enough that I straightened in my seat, my hand tightening involuntarily around the edge of the tablet.

He groaned, staggering as blood began to well beneath his nose. Reflexively, his grip loosened just enough for her to wrench an arm free and rake her nails down the side of his face, hard enough to draw blood in four parallel lines.

Wow.

“Get off me!” Her voice came through ragged, furious, cut short as Yuri caught her other arm.

She didn’t stop fighting.

I sat there and watched with something close to disbelief.

Three trained men, men who had handled considerably more dangerous opposition than a twenty-two-year-old woman in a T-shirt, and she made every single one of them work for it.

She twisted, kicked, and connected a knee somewhere that made the second man double over with a strangled curse.

“Fuck!”

She bit down on the hand that tried to cover her mouth, hard enough that her victim swore in Russian and nearly let go entirely.

“Hold her arms, not her mouth,” Yuri snapped at the victim.

The man who’d been hanging back near the doorway, clearly unprepared for the level of resistance currently unfolding in front of him, looked so confused.

I had told them not to hurt her. Watching it unfold, I understood exactly how much that instruction was costing them. Those poor souls. They’d had no idea what they were walking into. I hadn’t either.

She continued to struggle, slashing her fingernails like makeshift claws. Even pinned between two of them, her arms wrenched behind her, she kept resisting, kept twisting her weight, trying for an angle that would let her drive an elbow or a heel into something vulnerable.

“Jesus Christ, stop fighting!” one of the men barked at her in accented English.

“Then fuckin’ get off me!” she snapped back with the same energy.

Her hair had come completely loose, falling across her face. Through it, I could see her eyes: wide, blazing, utterly without the fear I would have expected from anyone else in that position.

She looked like she intended to win.

“Hold her down,” Yuri ordered, breathless. “Before she breaks something else.”

She headbutted the man holding her down, her forehead connecting with his nose. As he groaned in pain, she kicked him in the nuts, forcing him to let go. Aria tried to run, but the second man grabbed her by the foot.

She snatched a piece of broken glass from the kitchen floor and cut him across the cheek. Then kicked him in the face. She was already on her feet, ready to bolt, when Yuri barked at her.

“That’s it, you’re done!”