Page 28 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

Zara wraps her legs around my hips, arms circling my neck. The ink on my throat is pressed against her lips as she kisses the vines, the thorns, the dark twisted patterns that tell a story I’ve never spoken aloud.

“Don’t close your eyes,” I grunt. “Stay with me.”

She opens her eyes. Her face is inches from mine—flushed, open,seen—and the intimacy of it is almost too much.

The rhythm builds. Slow, deep thrusts that fill her completely and leave her gasping. Her hips rise to meet mine. Our bodies learn a language without words. The couch creaks.

“Close,” she breathes. “I’m—”

“I know. I feel it.”

My hand slips between us, finding the place where she’s most sensitive. She shudders at the touch. Her nails bite into my shoulders. The sound she makes—a broken syllable that might be my name—shatters something inside me.

She comes undone beneath me, cunt pulsing around me. Her body clenches and releases and I hold her steady, holding back my own release, watching her face as pleasure breaks across it like dawn.

Only when she stills do I let myself follow. The climax rolls through me in waves that feel like they’ll never stop—hot and bright and terrifying in its gentleness.

Afterward, neither of us speaks. I shift to my side, drawing her with me, pulling the throw blanket from the back of the couchand draping it over us. She nestles against my chest. My arm wraps around her, my hand resting on the curve of her waist.

The ink on my skin seems darker against her bronze.

She sleeps before I do.

The weight of what I am carrying settles back down across my chest with the patient, immovable quality of something that was always going to be here, waiting.

Arman and Samira Khan.

Their daughter is asleep against my side, trusting the dark and the stillness and, by some architecture I don’t entirely understand, trusting me.

I look at the ceiling and breathe in and out. I hold her, and I keep what I know, and the night goes on around us without asking me whether I have earned the right to any of this.

Chapter 9 - Zara

I wake before Mikhail does, which is pretty surprising on its own.

His breathing is steady and quiet against the dark of what I register is his room. His arm is still loosely across my waist, and for approximately thirty seconds I allow myself to lie there and bask in his presence.

Then the note arrives in my head the first thing.

Stop looking for them. You won’t like what you find.

Thirty seconds is all I get.

Moving his hand carefully, I slip out of his bed, get dressed in the dark, trained by my teenage years in a foster home where the walls were thin and other people’s fragility was always a factor.

My notebook is where I left it.

I have a meeting to get to.

Elena Vasquez picks a nondescript, unremarkable coffee place in Midtown. It is exactly the kind of location Elena would choose, because Elena Vasquez approaches even informal meetings as logistical exercises.

She is already there when I arrive, seated with her back to the wall and a single espresso on the table. Her hair is tied back in a neat ponytail, exposing her forehead and dark eyebrows. Her lips are glossy, eyes sharp and lined in kohl.

“You look like you haven’t slept well,” she says in lieu of greeting.

“I slept fine,” I tell her, sitting down. “I just didn’t sleep long enough.”

She studies me for a moment. “Tell me everything.”