Page 30 of Ruthless Bratva's Forced Virgin
So, I had said yes.
The first thing they had asked for was simple. Confirmation of presence—if he was at the casino on a specific evening. I had confirmed it. The question had already been publicly answerable from the casino’s promotional schedule, and I had told myself this, had turned it over until it was smooth, until the edges were gone and I could hold it without it cutting.
But then things progressed.
Last night had happened.
Mikhail had come home with an injury I hadn’t seen until I walked in on him shedding his shirt. The sight of the bandage had shaken something in me. Even as he tried to shrug it off and avoid my questions, I felt pain that was not physical.
I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth.
The tap was still running. The water was cold now, the hot exhausted, and the bathroom was the temperature of the manor’s stone walls which was always slightly cooler than the heated rooms.
Mikhail.
He had been protecting me.
The marriage, the comprehensive security infrastructure, the timeline laid out across his desk in the careful shorthand of a man who had been working the problem since the beginning, all had been built around the singular objective of keeping me alive. He had absorbed the cost of it. Had taken a wound for it, last night, on a road outside Las Vegas, because someone had taken the information I’d provided and used it to put men with guns on a route.
I set the burner phone on the edge of the sink, just looking at it.
The call I had just made had given them nothing specific. A confirmation that I was present, that I was functional, that I had not stopped cooperating. Nothing operational. But the calls before this one had been bricks, each small, each building something against him.
There was no version of this in which I was not responsible for what had happened last night.
I had told myself so many things. That each ask was small, that I had said no to the asks that would cause direct harm, that I had been coerced rather than recruited, that coercion was a category that changed the moral accounting.
All of that was true. The coercion was real. The fear was real. I had not wanted any of this, had not gone looking for it, had notunderstood in the beginning what the structure I was agreeing to enter actually was.
And last night had still happened.
I had been sitting in the category of the betrayer without his knowledge. I sat in the cold and I thought about what happened to people like me in this world.
I was going to stop.
Not just from fear of the consequences but because I couldn’t anymore. I was tired of it. It was beginning to put me in agony and I couldn’t bear it.
I picked up the burner phone.
I would not make another call on this phone. Whatever came from that, I would face when it arrived. And if Mikhail’s finding out came before their punishment, I’d take whatever came from that, too.
Chapter Ten–Mikhail
Due to my injury, I was operating at approximately 85% of full function, which I had managed significant operations on before,and which I considered acceptable.
What I considered less acceptable was the state of my thinking.
I was not clear. That was the honest assessment, and I applied it to myself with the same rigor I applied to everything else. The attack, the timeline, the interior leak—these were problems I could sequence and address, and my mind was doing this, running the familiar operations of threat assessment and response planning with the automatic fluency of long practice. That part was functioning.
The other part, the part that kept interrupting the assessment with a different frequency, returning to a different subject, was not performing with the same discipline.
I was thinking about Elena.
I was thinking about the way she had looked at me last night. The quality of her attention. The questions she had asked, precise and clarifying, the questions of someone who wanted to understand rather than perform understanding. The moment at the end when I had registered the lateness of the hour and the state of her face and had told her to sleep.
I wasn’t the sentimental type but even I could admit to myself that she was changing something in me. That her presence was beginning to mean something stronger in my life.
I had sat in the office for another four hours after the ambush before deciding to head back to the manor.
