Page 35 of The Bratva Stalker and His Pregnant Bride

“Your safety is more important,” Samuel growls, his blue eyes flashing with a dangerous, protective fury. He steps even closer, his large hands coming up to grip my shoulders. The sheer warmth and solidity of his touch is the only thing keeping me grounded. “No more secrets, Ashley. No more playing executive defense. If someone is watching this house, if someone is looking at you or my son, they are already dead.”

He looks toward the living room where the quiet sounds of Ethan’s cartoons are playing, his protective instincts flaring to a fever pitch. He looks back down at me, his eyes locked onto mine with an unshakeable, lethal promise.

“You should have told me the very first time they reached out,” he says, his voice flat, hard, and entirely devoid of mercy. “But I’m here now. I’m going to find out who the fuck this is. And I’m going to make them pay.”

Chapter 18 – Samuel

Three days. Three days of turning this city upside down, and I have nothing but a fistful of smoke to show for it.

I stand in the center of my study, the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the grey harbor. On the mahogany desk behind me, three separate secure laptops hum, their screens glowing with active terminal streams, cellular tower logs, and encrypted databases.

I’ve mobilized every resource at my disposal. Kaplan has been working forty-eight hours straight, running the blocked ten-digit number through our private network, tapping into local telecommunication backbones, and pulling every scrap of digital footprint he can find. We didn’t just look for a name; we looked for the hardware signature, the routing nodes, the exact coordinates of the cell tower that pinged when that distorted voice crawled through Ashley’s speaker.

And yet, the trail is frustratingly, impossibly incomplete.

“Nothing, Boss,” Kaplan’s voice grates through the speakerphone on my desk. “The burner was routing through five different spoofed VPNs, bouncing from servers in Zurich to Montreal before hitting the local exchange. And the voice modulation? It’s a commercial-grade, real-time AI synthesizer running off an encrypted dark web protocol. Whoever did this didn’t just buy a cheap burner at a gas station. They planned this. They have technical awareness, and they know how we trace people.”

I grip the back of my leather chair, my knuckles turning white. “I don’t care what it takes, Kaplan. Dig deeper. Check the physical surveillance around her neighborhood. Look for any vehicles idling on her street over the last week. Run every plate.”

“We’re already on it,” Kaplan replies, his tone heavy with the same grim realization settling in my gut. “But whoever this is…they aren’t acting impulsively, Samuel. They’re calculated. They’re watching, and they’re waiting.”

The line cuts, leaving me alone with the quiet hum of the servers.

A cold, dangerous fury claws at my chest. A reckless stalker is easy to deal with—you find them, you break them, you bury them. But a ghost? A ghost with technical precision and the patience to watch my son from the shadows? That is a different kind of threat. It means they are waiting for a specific moment. It means they’re close.

I look at the map of the city pinned to my wall, my mind running through every enemy the Rusnak name has made over the last decade. Is it a rival family? A disgruntled associate? Or someone closer? Or is this person completely unrelated to my name?

The lack of clarity is a suffocating weight, heightening a protective instinct in me that is rapidly turning feral. I can’t protect Ethan and Ashley from a threat I can’t see.

Before I can lose myself deeper in the dark, my personal phone buzzes violently against the mahogany wood of my desk.

I snatch it up instantly. Ashley’s name flashes on the screen.

I swipe the screen, pressing it to my ear, my voice deep and instantly alert. “Ashley. Tell me you’re safe.”

“Samuel,” her voice cracks, and the sheer, unadulterated terror in that single syllable makes my heart stop dead in my chest.

She isn’t tight or controlled. She is hyperventilating, her breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps as if she’s drowning.

“Ashley, breathe. Talk to me,” I command, my body instantly locking into a state of high alert.

“He’s…he’s gone, Samuel,” she chokes out, a sob breaking through her words. “I went to pick him up. They…they said someone else already came. They said it was a scheduled pickup. Samuel, they took him. Ethan is gone. Someone took our baby!”

The world goes completely black for a fraction of a second. A cold, violent shockwave rips through my veins, freezing the blood in my body. Our son. Someone bypassed security. Someone laid their hands on my boy.

When my vision clears, a red, blinding fury takes its place. The civilized, corporate mask I’ve worn for years doesn’t just slip—it shatters into a million pieces. The beast is out of the cage.

“Stay exactly where you are. I’m coming to you,” I say, my voice dropping to a low, lethal octave that is terrifyingly calm. “I will find him, Ashley. I swear to you on my life. I’m coming.”

“I’m home. The school told me to go home. They didn’t want bad press.”

“What the fuck? I’m coming!”

I slam the phone down and roar for Kaplan.

The heavy doors to my study burst open before I even finish his name. Kaplan takes one look at my face and stops dead. He’s known me for ten years; he knows that look means someone is about to die.

“Lock down the city,” I growl, my voice vibrating with a quiet, feral rage. “Deploy every soldier we have on the payroll. I want checkpoints on every major exit out of the state. Tap into the city’s traffic camera feed—I want eyes on every street surrounding Ethan’s daycare from the last two hours. Call the port authorities, lock down the private airfields. If a single boat or plane leaves this city, I’ll personally flay the captains alive.”