Page 5 of The Bratva's Innocent Bride

Tomorrow morning, I’ll feel silly about all this. For the hour I spent sitting at the desk, taser in hand, thinking someone was in the office with me. But right now, it feels too real.

I’m just about to put the taser away when I hear a sound across the room again, and I spin around, seeing a man—huge and muscular—standing between the desks.

Jesus fucking Christ—this is actually happening. My body freezes.

Eighteen years of training and preparation rises in me, like a robot that’s heard it’s command code. For years, I’ve been trying to shake away my dad’s incessant paranoia, telling myself I would never need to use hand-to-hand combat.

But now, here I am, in exactly the kind of situation my father prepared me for.

“Well, hello princess,” he says, and I leap up from the chair, grabbing the mace and pointing the taser at him, pressing the button but—faulty. Nothing happens.

I growl in frustration as he laughs and turn on my heel, running for the door. The mace is in my hand, I should point it at him, spray it on him, but I can’t get my body to stop running away.

My feet slap loudly against the tile floor, and I mutter a curse under my breath. These damn Converse don’t have the right support for running from a bad guy in the middle of the night. I let out the kind of deranged laugh that can only come from a low-paid intern running on two energy drinks and a bag of cold fries at lunch.

I reach out for the door, my fingertips brushing it, when something grabs the back of my hoodie and pulls, choking me and yanking me on my ass. My body reacts without my thinking—all those hours of training with my dad kicking in—and I roll with the motion, going backward over my head when I hit the ground and popping onto my feet a moment later.

“What the fuck?” the guy asks, his mouth dropping open as he looks at me.

“My thoughts exactly,” I breathe, before spraying him with the mace. The second it hits his face, I run past him, but that means it hits my face, too, and we’re both running, coughing, and sputtering. I can hear his footsteps behind me, and I realize I only have one place to go if I’m running in this direction.

I burst out onto the roof, heaving the fresh night air, trying to clear my lungs of the painful pepper spray. My eyes are watering so much it’s hard to see straight, but it’s got to be much worse for my bad guy, who’s swearing enough to make a dozen grandmothers faint behind me.

“Woah,” he says, holding his hands up when he gets to the top of the roof. “What the hell are you doing? No need to jump—”

“What?” I ask, confused, until I turn and realize I’m right on the edge of the roof. I gasp in a breath and lurch away from it.

And right into the bad guy’s arms.

“Got you,” he says, almost playfully, and I smirk at him before growling low in my throat and swinging my arm.

I catch him under the chin and get that stupid mask off his face.

With a strong jaw and the faintest five o’clock shadow, he looks like he’d be on the cover of an action movie. His eyes are dark blue in a way that almost looks photoshopped, captivating, and deep. I can almost hear Olive in my head calling them fuck me eyes.

He’s handsome if you’re the kind of crazy who takes time to admire the man who is—what? Tormenting you? Breaking and entering? I realize I don’t actually know what his intentions are. If he was going to kill me, surely he could have just shot me by now. He looks like the kind of man who would have a gun.

The podcast I was just listening to comes back to me, and I think of her words.

The most skilled, prolific serial killers are handsome. It’s how they get their victims to lower their defenses. We automatically trust handsome people.

After a moment, I realize he’s just holding me, and we’re just breathing hard, looking into each other’s eyes like this is a rom-com. As if on impulse, I jerk my leg, kneeing him hard in the nuts and jerking away from him when he curses, stumbling back.

But he’s too fast. He sticks his leg out, tripping me and sending me sprawling across the rooftop, which is like the worst mix of concrete and gravel. I wince and hiss through my teeth when I feel the little pieces of gravel embedded in my skin.

“Fuck,” I say, rolling onto my back, just in time to see my bad guy coming to stand over the top of me. He reaches out a hand to me, and I can’t help but laugh at the gesture. He’s laughing, too. We are both insane.

When I get to my feet, he smiles at me, then puts a chloroform rag over my mouth, pressing down with a surprising gentleness.

The strangest part is that I don’t fight back. For some reason, I’m curious. I want to know who this man is, what he’s doing, and where he’s going to take me. I meet his eyes as I breathe in the fumes, feeling my body slowly relax.

Chapter 3 - Boris

With her limp in my arms, I walk out to my waiting SUV. She can’t weigh more than 150 pounds, so it’s not a difficult feat, but I can’t help but think that if she were fighting back against me, I would be struggling a lot more.

I sit her up in the passenger seat and buckle her in, then I tie a loose gag in her mouth and bind her wrists, being careful not to leave a mark on her skin.

Already, there is so much about this woman that I wasn’t expecting. The fighting back. The fucking pepper spray. In my face. It burns as I drive, but I find myself looking over at her. She’s not what I expected from a mafia princess. On the roof, when I had her in my arms, and she was looking into my eyes, there was something there. Something deeper. Like I had already known her a long time.

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