Page 22 of Stalked & Bred by the BRATVA (Bred by the BRATVA #6)

I never planned to leave her today.

I brought the coffee because I wanted to keep her in bed and watch her smile at the taste. I told her she had the day off because I wanted to own every quiet minute of it. I wanted to lay her back against the pillows and teach her new ways to breathe my name.

Then Aleksei’s message arrived.

Motel. Room number. Balance owed. A blurry still of Thom’s face when he checked in last night. The urge that tears through me is simple and clean. Find him. End him. Put him in the ground so the past can stop clawing at the edges of her psyche.

But I see Sarah in my head as I stand in the doorway to the hall.

The new softness in her mouth. The steadiness in her eyes.

If I kill him, that softness will harden.

She will look at me and see blood that she cannot wash away.

She would forgive me. I know she would. But I do not want forgiveness from her. I want trust.

I am not used to letting anyone live.

I pick up my keys anyway.

I leave a note on her pillow that only says back soon. I ignore the way my chest tightens when I pull the bedroom door closed. The car waits in the gravel, black and quiet. The morning is pale and cold. I drive without the radio, without thought, letting anger set the pace.

The motel looks like it is giving up. Paint peels from the railings. A soda machine hums in the corner as if it is the last heartbeat on the property. The manager behind the plastic window does not meet my eyes. He does not need to. He can feel what I am when I walk past.

Room 207. The number is a dull brass nailed into rotten wood. I knock once. Then I try the handle. It turns.

He is asleep with the curtains open, face buried in a filthy pillow, a half empty bottle of something cheap sweating on the nightstand. There is a roach on the wall above his head. I could end him before he even wakes.

Instead, I walk to the window and draw the curtains shut.

He rolls over, blinking at the darkness and then at me, his mouth opening and closing like a fish discovered on a dock.

“Who the hell are you?”

I sit in the chair by the window and take my time. I take out my phone. I wait until the little lock icon on my screen flashes to confirm the camera is on. Then I look at him.

“I am the man who kept your sister alive when you sent her to be punished.”

He squints, then laughs. It is an ugly sound, too loud for the room.

“You with those Bratva freaks? You the one she’s spreading for?”

I stand. The chair scrapes. I cross the room in two steps and catch his throat in my hand. Not tight enough to kill. Tight enough to teach his body to obey.

“Watch your mouth,” I say.

He wheezes. His hands come up to pry at my wrist. He is not weak, but it does not matter. I could break him with mistakes alone.

I let him go and he slumps back onto the bed, coughing. The roach above him scuttles away into a crack.

“What do you want?” he rasps.

“Your absence,” I say. “Permanently.”

He smirks, tries to sit up straighter, tries to find some version of himself that looks like a man. “You think you can scare me out of my own country?”

I ignore the swagger and open my phone again. A new message from Aleksei waits in the thread. Photos of IOUs. Screenshots of betting slips. A video of a man with a bent nose explaining what will happen to Thom if he does not pay by the end of the week.

I hold up the screen so Thom can see. I watch his pupils track each line. I see the moment fear slides under his skin.

“I paid them,” I say. “You owe no one. You have no local warrants. Your probation is terminated. Consider it a miracle purchased by the man you just insulted.”

“Why would you do that?” His mouth is dry. He licks his lip. “What do you want for it?”

“I want you gone by nightfall. You will take the cash in the envelope on the nightstand and you will leave the country. I don’t care where. If I hear your name in the same breath as hers again, there will be no one to warn you about me.”

He laughs again, but it is thinner now. “And if I don’t? What are you going to do, big man? You going to hit me?”

I step forward and he flinches. That pleases me more than it should. I grab his jaw and force his face up. I make him look into my eyes so he can understand the exact shape of the thing that is speaking to him.

“I do not hit men like you,” I say. “I erase them.”

He tries to pull back. He can’t. My thumb presses into the hinge of his jaw until his eyes water. I imagine all the ways I could make his bones sing. I taste copper in my mouth from clenching my teeth.

“I should kill you,” I say. “For the bruise on her ribs. For the split lip. For the night you locked her in a room and took her phone so she could not call anyone. For making her think pain was the price of being alive. I should end you and drop you in a river and tell no one.”

He has stopped fighting. Now he is listening. Men like him always listen when the wind changes.

“But she wouldn’t want that,” I finish.

He blinks. Confusion replaced by a sneer. “She always was soft.”

The punch lands before the thought is finished. I do not hit his nose. I hit the muscle at the side of his jaw so the shock rings in his teeth. He folds around the pain, palms up, breath gone.

“That is the last time you speak about her character,” I say.

“You will leave a note at the front desk that says you checked out early. You will take the bus to the airport with the ticket I have already purchased. You will disappear into a country that does not speak your language. Every month, a small transfer will arrive to a card in a name that is not yours. If you try to find her, the money ends. If you so much as stand on a street two neighborhoods from mine, your heart stops beating between one step and the next.”

He groans and rolls to his side. He looks at the envelope like it might bite him.

“There is no catch,” I say. “Only the reality that your usefulness as a lesson is over.”

“What lesson?” he whispers.

“That she belongs to me now. Not to you. Not to fear. Not to the past you built for her.”

He stares at the floor. The anger leaks out of him the way heat leaks out of old windows. He nods once. It is not contrition. It is instinct. Predators know when they have met something higher on the chain.

I take a step back so he can breathe without shaking. I look around the room one more time, confirming there is nothing here that ties him to her except his bad memory.

At the door, I pause.

“If you pray,” I say without turning, “thank whatever you pray to that she is better than I am.”

I leave him to his empty bed and dead roaches and unearned second chance.

The sun is higher when I step back into the street.

I want to wash the room off my skin. I want to scrub the shape of his face out of my hands.

Instead I drive back with the same quiet that carried me away.

At a red light I text Aleksei a single word.

Done. My phone buzzes with a check mark and a promise to keep eyes on any airport footage.

By the time I pull through the gates of the estate, the worst of the heat has evaporated. The house looks like it always does in the early afternoon. Clean windows. Order in the stone. The smell of lemon oil in the hall.

Sarah is in my room when I open the door. She has moved the coffee to the dresser and she is staring at herself in the mirror. Her hair is loose around her shoulders. Her mouth has that soft curve I do not see on anyone else. There is a scrap of blue silk between her fingers, held like a talisman.

She sees me in the reflection. Her eyes change. Something inside my ribs unlocks.

“I did not plan to leave the house today,” I say.

“I know.”

I cross the distance and stop behind her. I don’t touch her yet. I let her choose.

Her gaze drops to my hands. She leans back so her shoulder presses into my chest.

“What happened?” she asks.

“Something necessary,” I say. “He is gone. You won’t see him again.”

Her fingers tighten on the silk. She doesn’t ask for proof, or about what I did. She closes her eyes and takes one slow breath like her lungs just learned there is air for her too.

“Thank you,” she says.

I bend and put my mouth to the place where her neck meets her shoulder. The taste is warm and clean. The taste is home.

“You are free,” I tell her. “The rest of your life begins now.”

She turns and puts the scrap of silk into my hand. I wrap my fingers around it and then around her waist, drawing her against me until the mirror shows what I know is true.

Her past does not own her.

I do. And I will spend the rest of my days proving that means safety before it means anything else.