Page 58 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride
Control, I think, is a practice and I’m rusty at it.
By the fourth day, it feels like waiting is all I do.
All that patience has become a living, breathing thing in the penthouse—building during the long stretches of silence between updates, disappearing briefly when a message comes through from one of Mikhail’s deployed teams, then appearing again when the message turns out to be nothing of substance.
I have become acutely sensitive to it, attuned to the shifts. Every notification sound my phone makes causes my heart to start racing, palms to become balmy.
My body preempts the content of the notification, my pulse speeding up in the moment between the sound and the screen lighting up as my hands dart toward the phone urgently.
Twice today it has been Elena with additional Ionian data. Once it has been an automated reminder about a professional deadline that belongs to another Zara Kahn, in a life before allthis. Once it has been Mikhail’s second-in-command updating the status of the Corfu surveillance.
Each time I pick up the phone, the cocktail of hope and dread runs through me. Hope arrives first like a lit match, dread following half a second behind like the draft that decides whether the match stays lit or goes out.
The knock at the study door at two in the afternoon makes me tip over my coffee cup.
Turns out to be Greger, holding some documents delivered from the secure courier Mikhail uses for certain transfers.
As I flail, trying to keep papers away from the little splatters of leftover, diluted coffee, my hands shake, the sudden appearance and dissolution of adrenaline nearly making me tachycardic. Thankfully, Greger either does not notice or has developed the professional tact of pretending he doesn’t.
“Thank you,” I mutter, and the steadiness in my voice costs more than it should.
After he leaves I sit for a moment with both hands wrapped around the righted coffee cup and finally come face to face with the fact that I’m losing grip on reality bit by bit.
This amount of anxiety is not okay. It has built up across weeks of sustained danger and unresolved uncertainty until it has now become a new normal for my body. I have been in enough high-stress field situations to recognize the difference between being alert and—whatever this is.
Jumping up and damn near spilling coffee on everything because I can’t let loose.
Iamholding it together, but I’m sure Mikhail can see how poorly.
He comes in at intervals throughout the day, making sure they don’t feel like supervised visits by asking a question about the Ionian data, or a document, with coffee placed at the edge of the desk sneakily.
He asks me once if I have slept, dark eyes peering into my soul.
“Enough,” I mutter, not looking him in the eye.
“That’s not what I asked,” he replies flatly.
“It’s the only answer I have,” I tell him, which is the same answer I gave Elena, and he knows it too.
Thankfully, he doesn’t push it, just setting the coffee down and leaving. Picking a random photograph up and staring at it for another hour, I think about him as an escapist fantasy.
“Zara.”
I don’t even know when he’s returned, his steps not registering at all. Snapping out of my reverie, I look at him, standing in the doorway with a weird expression on his face.
His eyes are tight at the corners, mouth carefully placed in a neutral line. It’s a mask.
Something has happened.
I put the photograph down.
“What is it?”
He crosses the room and stands across the desk from me, holding my gaze all the while without letting anything come to surface.
“My team in the Ionian. The location flagged from the Corfu surveillance cross-reference,” he pauses to let it sink in. “We got a lead. There has been a sighting. It’s recent, withinthe last seventy-two hours, of two people matching your parents’ descriptions. The location is consistent with the stone architecture in the photographs and the coastal horizon data from the images Elena identified.”
My lips part but nothing comes out. My heart climbs up my throat, making it hard for me to swallow.
