Page 56 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
I was already being dragged.
Chapter Eighteen
Viktor
I waited until midnight.
Not because I needed more time to prepare—the preparation had been complete since Sergei had closed the folder and left my office. I waited because midnight was when the penthouse was fully quiet, when the building’s staff had cycled out, and the security rotation had completed its first pass, and there was nothing between me and the conversation except the distance between the study and the bedroom.
I had been honest with myself about what I had allowed—what I had built and what I had not looked for because I had not wanted to find it—and to understand that the honesty, while necessary, was also not the point. The point was the conversation. The conversation was the only remaining instrument for what I needed to know, which was not what Sergei’s data told me but what Sofia’s face would tell me when she could not manage it.
I went to the bedroom.
She was awake. I had known she would be, somehow. She turned when I came in. The lamp was off. The city light through the curtain gap gave just enough.
“Viktor,” she said.
“Come out to the main room,” I said.
She came.
She sat on the edge of the sofa in the clothes she had been wearing since the evening—she had not changed for bed, which was its own piece of data. I stood near the window with the city behind me and looked at her.
She looked back. Her gaze was calculating. Something that had the tell of a person who has been waiting for something they did not want to arrive and has heard it coming for some time.
She already knew I knew.
The recognition moved through me without surprise. She was perceptive in ways that had not stopped mattering because they had been deployed against me—Sofia’s intelligence was hers, not mine, and I had understood that from the beginning. She had read the change in me over the past two days, and she had been sitting with what that change meant, and she was sitting with it now, in the low light, waiting.
“I know,” I said.
One sentence. I delivered it without inflection, without pressure, without the bite of an accusation. Just the fact.
Her face didn’t move as she blinked.
“Know what?”
“What have you been hiding?”
“I…” she shook her head side-to-side, “I’m not hiding anything from you.”
Her voice sounded like a plea.
My gaze remained level.
“Viktor—”
“I know about the secondary phone,” I said. “I know about the communication channel. I know the signal was routed through Cruz’s network. I know the credential access pattern that pulled the reception configuration.” I said each statement without emotion.
She closed her eyes briefly, which was the only involuntary thing she allowed, and when she opened them, they were the same.
“Tell me the truth,” I said. “Once. I am asking you once.”
The silence that followed was the longest we had occupied together. Longer than the ceremony. Longer than the desert dark. She sat with her hands in her lap and looked at me, and I could see the internal negotiation—the assessment of what I had, what I didn’t, what confirming versus denying would cost in each direction.
Then she let it go.
I watched her do it. I watched her shoulders drop a fraction, her jaw loosen, and her eyes stay on mine without any pretence.
