Page 12 of The Bratva’s Innocent Sold Bride (Fokin Bratva #9)

Giving CJ time to stew was on par with any of my cousin’s worst torture methods, but I wanted her to come to me.

So, for several days after the wedding, I left the house early in the morning and didn’t come back until it was late.

If she happened to be awake when I got home, I made a point not to go anywhere near her.

Was it driving her crazy? Because it was driving me crazy. Only time would tell if she broke and demanded I give her some attention, but I didn’t know how much longer I could hold out.

My cousin Masha had joined me, wanting to see some new sights.

She was the eldest daughter of my youngest uncle, so quite a bit younger than my brothers and me, but I would have trusted her with anything I had going on.

In fact, I would have probably been dragging her up here anyway, since I needed someone to infiltrate Anatoli’s group.

She kept a low profile in Moscow, only working in the background or carrying out highly specific operations.

Those operations rarely left any witnesses behind to remember her.

After just a day, she had “accidentally” met someone who we thought might know Anatoli personally, and we were optimistic that it might be a better lead than the guy Garik had caught during the wedding night raid on my storage units.

He had proven to be useless, the type to sell his own grandmother for a few bucks. After only an hour of interrogation, it was clear he didn’t know anything, or he would have spilled his guts to avoid any more pain.

So, I was still at a loss when it came to the mysterious Anatoli Ovinko.

Since the wedding, he seemed to be jumping between annoying Lev and pissing me the hell off.

But so far, he was untouchable. I didn’t even have a grainy security camera image of him to go off of, although Masha seemed to think she had a good lead on a brother who lived in Russia.

It almost seemed like a waste of time to be surveilling a random building in Palo Alto.

We'd gotten some very tenuous information that it might belong to Anatoli, or he might at least go there from time to time. I was beginning to think he was a figment of my imagination, but I didn’t have much else to do until my wife decided she missed me.

God, I missed her. I could smell her faint perfume on one of the chairs in the living room, and sat there before I went to sleep at night. Seriously, I wanted to kick my own ass for being so twisted up over CJ, but she had gotten under my skin.

She had to be bored out of her skull, left alone all day in that huge house.

Not even a chore list to keep her busy, and it didn’t seem like she was interested in decorating the place, after all.

She would most likely be charging into my bedroom one morning soon to demand I start acting like a husband.

My phone rang, knocking me out of thoughts of CJ blinking up at me and asking if I couldn’t spare her a little time. It was the head of my home security, and I shoved aside the stupid mental meanderings to answer.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, turning my car on. To hell with surveillance. I should be at home.

“It might be nothing, sir,” he said, clearly nervous about something.

“Just tell me,” I snapped.

“Well, we picked up Mrs. Fokin on one of the cameras. She was, um, climbing over the back fence.”

I covered the phone as I laughed. There was nothing funny, except how far off I’d been about CJ’s feelings. They hadn’t changed at all, and she wasn’t just not going to come to me; she was actively attempting to escape.

“Keep someone close, but don’t let him be seen,” I said. “I’m on my way home, and I’ll take care of it from there. Only intercept her if it looks like she’s in danger.”

He understood and hung up. By the time I got home, he had a map ready to send to my phone, complete with the trail CJ was taking and approximately where she was in real time, still being tailed by one of his men.

When I bought the house, it came with a couple of electric ATVs since the property was so large, and I headed out on one of them to follow my wife.

She had gotten quite a ways past the back fence, and I pushed the quiet little vehicle to its limit to catch up to her.

It was past midnight, and as much as any of these native Californians told me that coyotes were more scared of us than we were of them, I didn’t want CJ to end up as some wild mutt’s dinner.

I passed the security guard, stumping along about two hundred yards behind her, keeping his flashlight covered so the only light came from the bright sliver of moon overhead.

It was almost pitch black, but I could see a flash of CJ’s white t-shirt as she not-so-stealthily made her way across the terrain.

She was tenacious and fearless, but a chill ran through my blood from everything that could have happened to her out here at night, even with the guard trailing her.

She really was no good at escaping, if that’s what this was about, and it was actually pretty adorable.

I didn’t trust her, but that wasn’t the reason I needed to keep her close. She was mine.

Whatever spell she had on me made me send the guard home and follow her on foot for a little while, giving her the illusion that her plan was working. Hell, it was a pleasant night, why not take a stroll in the moonlight with my wife.