Page 27 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
She didn't move for a moment. Then, so gradually it could have been unconscious, she shifted. Her back pressed against my side. The warmth of her moved through the barrier of the covers and registered along my arm, my ribs.
I lay still.
Her breathing slowed. Over the next ten minutes, it steadied, deepened, lost the shallow irregularity of wakefulness, and settled into something closer to rest. She turned slightly in her sleep, and her face was against my chest, and her hand had found the fabric of my shirt and held it with that same grip, loosened now with sleep, the fingers relaxed, the urgency drained out.
I looked at the ceiling.
The penthouse was quiet. I could feel Sofia breathing. I could feel each exhale against my shirt and each small shift as her body settled further into sleep, the dreams or non-dreams of a person who had spent their adrenaline and found, finally, something it was willing to rest against.
I thought about the apartment. The overturned chair. The way she had said,‘they knew my name’with that stripped-bare openness.
I thought about Cruz's men, efficient and careful not to leave marks—not because they were merciful but because the message required she be intact to deliver it. I thought about what they had told her, what they had promised, the specific theater of it designed to reach not her but me.
They had reached me.
Not in the way they intended. They had intended to demonstrate leverage. What they had actually done was simpler and more total than leverage. They had put her on the floor of her own apartment, frightened and shaking, and I had arrived and found her holding herself together with both hands, and whatever careful strategy I had been using to manage what she meant to me had not survived the finding.
She was not a variable. She had not been a variable for some time.
I had told her that marriage was the only option that protected her. The logic remained sound. But the logic had nothing to do with why it was going to happen now.
She was going to be my wife because I had walked into an apartment that smelled of violation and found her intact, and the relief of it had been so total, so beyond the proportional response of a man managing a security asset, that there was no longer any useful pretense available. She was going to be my wife because the quiet fury in my chest had a shape now, and I was not willing to be in a world where Cruz's men had access to her.
The decision was not new. The clarity of it was.
I lay in the dark with Sofia Reyes breathing against my chest and her hand in my shirt, and I made the arrangements in my mind. Who to call. When. What the structure would look like. How quickly could the registration be made real, made public, made visible to the people who needed to understand what touching her would mean?
Tonight, she was breathing.
Her grip on my shirt tightened once in her sleep, some dream-reflex, and loosened again.
I didn't sleep. I didn't try.
I watched the ceiling and held the weight of her against my side, letting the decision finish settling into its final form, solid and irreversible.
She was alive.
It was the only thing that mattered.
It would remain the only thing that mattered, and every other thing I did from this point forward would be organized around it, and I was done pretending otherwise.
Chapter Nine
Sofia
I woke to silence.
Not the silence of my apartment, which was never truly silent—the building breathed, the neighbors moved, the street below supplied a constant low frequency of sound. This was a different type of quiet. It was intentional. The silence of a space insulated from the world by design and cost, where the city existed only as a distant suggestion, and everything inside operated isolated from everything outside.
I lay still for a moment, looked at the ceiling, and tried to locate myself.
The ceiling was high. The sheets beneath me were the kind of sheets that had a thread count I could feel without being told. The pillow under my head smelled of something clean and dark that I identified, with a jolt that moved through my chest before my brain had finished waking, as Viktor.
Memory came back in pieces and then all at once.
The apartment. The door. Two masked men moving through my living room with practiced efficiency. The chair overturned. The lamp in pieces. Their voices—calm, specific, informative in the way that was worse than shouting—telling me what I was, what I would become, what would happen if certain conditions were not met. Me running straight to the car lazing around the building—the car that Viktor didn’t deny belonging to his men. His men following me back into the apartment, asking me gently to calm down and tell them what exactly happened.
Viktor arriving. His face, which I had read, in the half-dark of my bedroom with my shoes still on and a borrowed blanket around my shoulders, as something I had not expected to find there: controlled fury and relief in the same expression, the two things coexisting in a way that should have been contradictory and wasn’t.
