Page 7 of Ruthless Bratva's Forced Virgin
“Right now, I don’t feel hunted; I feel chosen,” she remarked, her voice almost a whisper.
Afterward, when her breathing had finally steadied into sleep and the suite was silent, I sat at the edge of the bed for a long time, looking at nothing.
I had made a mistake. The realization came upon me immediately, completely, and without the comfort of deniability. The question was what this mistake would cost.
Pulling the covers higher over her beautiful back, I stood up from the bed and dialed a number.
Viktor picked up on the second ring.
“Mikhail.” His voice was rough with sleep but already alert.
“I need a detail on the Meridian. Suite fourteen. Civilian. Female. She is not to be followed, not to be approached, not to be made aware she is being watched. She leaves when she chooses and she is not impeded.” I paused. “She is also not to be harmed.”
There was a beat of silence. Viktor was many things, and one of them was perceptive enough not to ask questions I didn’t want to answer at five in the morning.
“Understood. How long?”
“Until I say otherwise.”
“Done.”
I ended the call.
Leaving was the safest thing to do, for the both of us.
So I left an envelope on the kitchen counter—enough to cover the debt payment she’d mentioned, enough for two months of rent, more than enough to constitute a problem if she thought too hard about where it came from and what it implied. I left it anyway, because the alternative was leaving her with nothing except my inexplicable restraint and a bruised wrist with other injuries, and that seemed insufficient.
I dressed in the dark. I did not dare look at her before I left. I knew myself well enough to know that looking was a risk I could not presently afford.
The car was waiting on the street below.
As I sat in the back and looked at the city going grey, I thought back to the girl I was leaving behind. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t know that walking away from her wouldn’t be as easy I wanted it to be.
The loan sharks would not stop, that was also a given.
Someone definitely orchestrated it.
The ‘who’ and ‘why’ was mine to find out.
Chapter Three — Elena
The trick to surviving something you couldn’t explain was to stop trying to explain it.
That was the conclusion I’d arrived at somewhere around day four, when I’d finally stopped lying awake reconstructing the night in detail and started treating it instead as a thing that had simply happened. Something you walked away from and did not revisit.
He was a traveler, some sexy businessman who was passing through Vegas and wouldn’t have any reason to be here again. That was what I chose to believe.
It worked… mostly.
I went to rehearsals. I hit every mark. I smiled at the right angles under the lights, came home, and did not think about grey eyes or a voice that landed in the chest like something weighted.
The envelope was the problem.
The damn envelope.
I hadn’t touched it. I’d put it at the back of my sock drawer under a folded sweater, and I hadn’t opened it again after the first morning. I hadn’t touched it because touching it meant deciding what it meant, and I wasn’t ready to decide that. Whether it was kindness or payment or something I didn’t have a clean word for—each option led somewhere I’d rather not look in. So I left it under the sweater, went to work, and I told myself I was fine.
Sofia didn’t believe me. Sofia never believed me when I said I was fine, which was one of her most useful and most aggravating qualities.
