Page 38 of Ruthless Bratva's Forced Virgin
I saw Elena register the room when she entered. The calibration of it–the informality, the absence of the manor’s usual operational elegance–moving through her expression. Something eased in her. Not dramatically. The slight loosening of the tension at her jaw that I had learned to watch for.
“Mariya made borscht,” she said.
“I asked her to.”
She looked at me, squinting her eyes. “You asked her specifically for borscht.”
“I asked her for something warm and uncomplicated. She decided the rest.”
Elena sat and I sat across from her and the evening had the specific quality of something that had been arranged with intention and was succeeding in concealing its intention beneath its simplicity, which was the best outcome for the intention.
She ate, and I watched her eat and felt something I was now past pretending was not satisfaction.
“Viktor’s second,” she said at some point in the meal. “Gregor. He was watching the east entrance during the storm. I saw him from the upstairs corridor.”
“He moved from the west rotation three days ago. I adjusted the coverage after the ambush.”
She nodded, absorbing this. She had been mapping the security arrangements with the quiet systematic attention of someone who had decided that understanding her environment was more useful than being managed through it. I had been watching this process with something that I identified, after consideration, as respect.
“The gap in the northeast quadrant,” she said. “Between the camera on the garden wall and the one at the kitchen entrance. It would be approximately forty feet.”
I set my fork down.
She met my eyes.
“I noticed it my second day,” she said evenly. “I’m not telling you anything your team doesn’t already know. I just… I pay attention.”
“I know you do,” I said.
Which was the truth.
“Is it actually a gap or is it covered by something I can’t see?”
“Covered,” I said. “Ground sensor. Installed before your arrival.”
Something moved through her expression. “You thought of it.”
“I think of most things.” There was a brief silence, and then, because the evening was the kind of evening it was and the library had been the kind of night it had been and I was apparently no longer the kind of man who maintained operational distance at a dinner table, I added, “Not all things.”
She looked at me steadily. “What do you miss?”
“Very little,” I said. “But not nothing.”
The honesty of it landed between us. She received it with the steady eyes and said nothing for a moment, and then she picked up her wine and looked at it as she spoke.
“I used to think that level of control sounded exhausting.”
“And now?”
“Now I think it sounds like the only way you know how to feel safe.”
She said it without judgment.
I looked at her across the small table.
“And you?” I questioned. “What makes you feel safe?”
She considered this with visible seriousness. “Knowing what’s coming,” she said finally. “Or–not knowing, but having the information that would let me prepare. The uncertainty is worse than the difficult thing, mostly.” She paused. “And—” She stopped.
