Page 26 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
What I had not expected was her turning her face into my chest.
She simply leaned, and her face pressed against the lapel of my jacket. Then I felt the shudder move through her. The vibration of her body was the release of something held too long, the quivering of a person who has spent forty-five minutes making themselves small enough to contain and is finally in a context where containing is not required.
I put my arm around her. I was not aware of making a decision. My arm moved, and she was against my side. Her breath was coming in the unsteady rhythm of someone crying silently, which Sofia did—even this, the crying, was quiet, managed, inward. No loud sound. Just the shaking, the wet warmth against the fabric of my jacket, and her hand gripping a fistful of my shirt with a force that had nothing to do with composure.
I kept my eyes ahead.
My jaw was tight enough to ache. The quiet fury had settled into something beneath fury now. Something colder, more structural, the foundation of a decision that had been building for days.
She was still shaking when we arrived at the building. Less than before, but present and visible in her hands when I walked her through the lobby and into the private elevator.
My penthouse occupied the top floor. I had designed it, if design was the right word, for function rather than warmth: clean lines, sparse furniture, nothing that didn't earn its space.
The lights were on their lowest setting when we entered, which Sergei had arranged via message before we'd arrived, andsomeone had raised the temperature three degrees, which I had also requested.
She stood in the entrance, and her eyes moved around, taking the living area in.
"It looks like you," she said, her voice soft.
"Is that a criticism?"
She looked at me. Her eyes were swollen very slightly at the corners, her eyeliner tracking what the crying had done to it, and she looked, in this moment, like no version of herself I had seen before—not the composed casino worker, not the furious woman in my corridors, not the precise and deliberate presence that had been unsettling my equilibrium for days. She looked young. She looked tired. She looked like someone who had been frightened in her own home and was standing in a stranger's penthouse and was too exhausted to manage the absurdity of it.
"No," she said. "It's just… It's very quiet."
"Yes."
"I like it," she said, as if she hadn't intended to and didn't know what to do with the admission.
I led her into my bedroom—without telling her exactly that, anyway. And she was too tired to ask.
"Thank you," she said as she moved towards the bed, as if it had been waiting for her.
Maybe it has.
I had grown accustomed to Sofia's defiance. This simplicity was harder.
"You need to sleep," I said.
I stayed in the doorway for a moment and watched her sit on the edge of the bed and pull off her shoes with mechanical fatigue. She looked up once and found me watching.
“Are you just going to stand there?”
I couldn’t tell if it was an invitation or a genuine question.
“Sleep.”
I pulled the door mostly closed. Left it an inch open. Went to the end of the hall, stood at the window, and looked at the city.
Twenty minutes.
I gave her twenty minutes, and then I went back to the door and listened, and what I heard was the breathing of someone not asleep—shallow, slightly uneven, the sound of a body that was too activated to rest even when the mind had agreed it should.
I went in.
She was on top of the covers, still clothed, facing the window. She heard me and went still, not afraid, just aware.
I sat on the other side of the bed. Then, without ceremony or explanation, I lay down. On top of the covers. On my back, arms at my sides, staring at the ceiling.
