Page 26 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

They had been taken by one of the other opposing organizations, or they had taken themselves—disappeared, leaving behind a child and a clean narrative about a car accident because a clean narrative is the only protection you can offer a daughter when you can no longer offer her yourself.

I had always assumed the former. It was the more probable outcome. People with a target on their head as big as the Khans generally don’t survive long enough to design their own disappearance.

I am looking at their daughter.

I am looking at their daughter, and she is sitting across from me in the aftermath of a gunfight she walked out of unharmed because I was in the room, and she is telling me the letter might mean they are alive.

Brown eyes shine with the incandescent hope that she is working very hard to hide. Just a girl who lost her parents and has never in all the years since entirely accepted the loss.

The crack in my chest does not close.

Guilt belongs to a man who hasn’t lived my life. I have made peace with that.

But this is Zara’s face and this is the name of the operation I was part of.

“Tell me about after,” I say quietly, “after they were gone. What did that look like for you?”

Her eyes widen in surprise. She was ready for a question so personal.

She starts carefully, telling me about the weeks after, the official version, the social worker and the temporary placements.

Then something changes in her voice.

It is a small change, but I notice it the moment it happens.

“I was eight years old,” she says, voice trembling just barely, “eight years old, and the woman at the third placement told me that some children are just harder to place, like that was information I was supposed to do something useful with. I thought that I needed to be quieter and smaller. That I was taking up the wrong kind of space and if I could just figure out the right kind, someone would keep me.”

She does not look at me while she says this, and I do not look away from her.

She tells me about the notebooks. How she started filling them at nine years old—not with stories or drawings the way other children might, but with observations, with questions.

“If the world was going to keep refusing to give me answers, I was going to find them myself. Mrs. Jones was kind of like me, in a way,” she says softly, telling me about the school librarian who was the first adult she remembers trusting completely.

Even that trust was fragile because every placement ended eventually, and so every person ended eventually; it became simpler to love things at a distance than to build anything closer.

“I never belonged anywhere,” she whispers, a crack in her voice. “I got very good at making it not matter. At making it look like it didn’t matter.” Her hands, which had been still at first, are now shaking. “But I never stopped needing to know why they left.”

The room is very quiet.

I don’t know when I move or why. The couch just accepts my weight beside her, and she does not startle, does not shift away, which tells me something about how fragile she is right now.

“They might have left to protect you,” I say carefully.

Her watery eyes at this distance are the same I have been studying for six weeks in surveillance photographs. None of them prepared me for the real deal, for how beguiling and beautiful they really are.

The exhaustion in her bones weighs her down. Slowly, my pinky finger reduces the distance between her hand and mine, gradually intertwining our fingers together. Her fingers are cold, and they close around mine after a moment.

“Mikhail.” My name in her mouth is a prayer.

I answer it.

My knee brushes hers. The heat of her seeps through the fabric of my trousers. She smells like sandalwood and rain and something else, something I can only name asher. I’ve cataloged that scent over months of glances across this very room that said everything neither of us would speak aloud.

My fingers hover near her jaw, close enough that my skin prickles. My palm settles against her cheek. I hold her face in my hands like something I have never held before.

The contact unravels something inside me. A tightness I didn’t know I’d been carrying. My eyes fall shut, and for three heartbeats I just breathe her in.

Then I move. Cupping the back of her neck—her hair is soft, dark curls slipping through my fingers—I guide her mouth to mine.