Page 50 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

The realization stuns my head, like a brick to the skull.

Someonefedher those photographs.

The meeting in the empty warehouse, the package she found personally—all of it carefully constructed to feel like an authentic discovery rather than something handed to her, or a directed push by someone.

She may be walking toward her parents, or she may have been altogether baited by the idea of reaching them.

She told me not to follow her and that I had already done enough. This doesn’t mean she wants space to do her own shit, but rather a clean and unambiguous assessment of what my choices have cost.

If I send a team to Greece and she discovers it, which she will, I lose her completely. We have already been walking a very thin thread since that confrontation in Dubai, and now…

The steam from the coffee curls. She is somewhere in the air between New York and Greece and I have no control over whatever is waiting for her there, standing in my kitchen all alone.

I put the cup down.

The wrong decision and the only decision are not always different things.

I leave the coffee on the counter to review the security infrastructure for the eastern bloc contacts and redirect two operational updates. I reply to Nikolai about the Zurich accounts, all of it done mindlessly.

At half past nine, Timur comes in, composed.

He sets a folder on the edge of the desk and begins his briefing professionally.

Then he pauses in the middle of a sentence about warehouse rotation schedules, finally registering the elephant in the room.

“Where is she?” he asks.

I do not look up from the document in front of me.

“Following a lead,” I tell him. “She’ll return.”

“Alone?” he continues after a deliberate pause.

“Yes.”

“That seems like an unnecessary risk given the current threats.” He clears his throat. “I could send someone after her. She would never know the detail was there.”

I put the document down, directing the full weight of my gaze at him.

My gaze is the same as it has been since the afternoon of Zara’s attack, with the accumulated and unresolved weight of everything I have filed under his name.

There is nothing in his face that gives him away.

“No,” I tell him.

“Boss—”

“No one follows her,” I state finally, leaving no room for argument. “No detail, no contact, no communication in her direction from anyone in this organization. She moves on her own terms until she chooses otherwise.”

Timur holds my gaze for a moment that is one second longer than he usually would.

“Understood.”

He picks up the folder from the edge of the desk and closes the briefing, making his way back toward the door. He doesn’t look back before the door closes.

The air in the room settles.

She ordered me not to follow her. Not a request, not just the instruction of a woman who needed physical distance because shit became suffocating. She meant every word.