Page 73 of Forced By an Obsessive Bratva Stalker

“What’s your name?” I asked her. Not just because I was curious, but also because she seemed like someone whose help could come in handy later.

“Yelena,” she replied, wearing a courteous smile.

“I’m Aria.”

Yelena nodded, then avoided eye contact before exiting the room.

Earlier, I’d overheard her talking with two other maids about one of them possibly being pregnant. Yelena had said she had a couple of pregnancy strips in the cupboard in her room.

It was the closest thing to an accurate pregnancy test I could get under the radar. That’s why I thought her help would come in handy later. I knew I was definitely going to need her assistance.

I’d missed my period by two days now, and although it had been overshot by a few days several times in the past, I was almost certain this time was different. He came inside me twice, and I wasn’t on birth control both times. There was no way I wasn’t pregnant.

However, I’d have to get that strip later tonight and test my urine early tomorrow morning.

I wasn’t sure how I was going to get it from her. But I was going to figure something out.

At a table in the library, surrounded by towering shelves and the smell of old paper, I sat in silence, eyes fixed on my laptop screen.

I went through my research files, rebuilding the threads he’d deleted, filling the gaps from memory and from the photographs still archived in a cloud account routed through a server he apparently hadn’t thought to check.

I worked through the restored files for a long time before I found the thing I hadn’t been looking for.

It started with a name in a subsidiary record: a financial advisory group listed as a silent structural contributor to one of the older offshore entities in Rodion’s network. It predated the current holding architecture by nearly two decades.

The group itself had been dissolved, its records scattered across three different jurisdictions, the way things only get scattered when someone works deliberately to make them difficult to find.

I found them anyway, because finding things that didn’t want to be found was, at its core, the only skill I had ever fully trusted myself to possess.

Meridian Strategic Advisory Group. Not the freight company—a different Meridian entirely, older, cleaner on the surface, the kind of firm that described itself as a “boutique international compliance consultancy” in language designed to make eyes slide past it without catching.

I cross-referenced the firm against every database I could access, working backward through dissolved entity records and old regulatory filings. It took a lot of work, but I found the contributor list.

It was buried in an annex to a 2003 restructuring agreement, a supplementary disclosure that would have meant nothing to anyone without the specific context I’d spent months building.

Twelve names, listed as strategic advisors to the restructuring framework. Academics, economists, former regulatory officials.

The eleventh name on the list was Bennett, Charles A.

I sat very still for a long moment, the library around me going slightly unreal at its edges.

That was my father’s name. Exactly the same arrangement on paper. I had to dig a bit more for photos of the man with this name. And to my shock, the person I found was indeed my father.

My heart sank into my stomach, my palms sweaty all of a sudden. What the hell was Dad doing with men like this?

Charles Bennett, my old man, had spent my entire childhood commuting to an office I’d never been allowed to visit. He always used to talk about his work in the smoothed-over language of a man practiced at describing things without describing them.

How was this possible?

I read the document twice. Three times. Not because I didn’t understand it, but because understanding it required a different version of my father than the one I’d had since I was born. Not to mention, my brain kept sliding off the replacement the way water slides off glass.

From what I gathered, his role hadn’t been operational. The document was careful about that—his name appeared in the advisory column rather than the execution column, the legal framework design rather than the actual movement of money.

He hadn’t laundered anything. He hadn’t committed a crime I could identify in anything I was reading.

But what he’d done—what the entire advisory group had done, deliberately—was build the legal architecture that allowed a subsequent regulatory action to freeze and expose a series of offshore pipelines that had been running quietly for years.

Bratva-controlled pipelines.