Page 80 of Captive Virgin of the Bratva

“You’re right,” I murmur. “It has been, but I don’t need focus to kill you. I could do it sleepwalking.”

He flinches.

Boris blows smoke toward him. “This is Kolyacalm, Viktor. You don’t want to see what he looks like when he’s angry.”

For once, Viktor says the smart thing.

“I understand,” he mutters. “I’ll fix it.”

I nod. “Good.”

We don’t shake hands. We don’t play pretend. He leaves like a dog with his tail between his legs.

Once he’s gone, Boris steps beside me again. “You think he’ll follow through?”

“No,” I say. “He’ll lead us to the rest.”

Boris grins. “Always liked a trail of corpses.”

I check my watch. The meeting took less time than expected. Viktor’s fear did most of the work for me.

Despite the victory, my mind’s not here. It’s already back at the house.

Back in that room, where she was pretending not to care. Where she thought she had the upper hand.

Boris catches my expression. “Still thinking about her?”

I glance at him. “What do you think?”

He chuckles. “She’s a firecracker, I’ll give you that. Never seen anyone make you clench your jaw that much.”

“She’s testing me.”

“She’s winning.”

My glare shuts him up—but not before he smirks again.

“She’s playing games, Kolya. You really gonna let her?”

I flick ash from my sleeve. “She can play all she wants,” I murmur. “But when I walk through that door, she’ll remember exactly who she belongs to.”

Boris doesn’t argue. He knows.

Chapter Twenty - Elise

I can’t stop thinking about his face.

The man who called himself my father. The one who left me in the dark, who turned his back and never looked back. I remember the way his voice sounded muffled through a door I couldn’t open. I remember the silence that followed. Hours. Days.

I remember crying so hard I forgot how to speak.

Now—he’s back. Stumbling through the garden like some broken ghost, muttering my name like it still belongs to him.

He doesn’t deserve a single second of my thoughts; yet here I am, hours later, still tangled in them.

I lie in bed with my body perfectly still, pretending to sleep. The blankets rise and fall with my breath, but my mind is a storm. Kolya’s guards passed through the hallway a few minutes ago—quiet, but not quiet enough. I’ve memorized their schedule. That’s what happens when you spend your days caged in velvet. You learn the rhythm of your prison.

I wait for the shift change. When it comes, I move.

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