Page 20 of Forced By an Obsessive Bratva Stalker

She stole another glance at me. “I figured you’d say that.”

“I’m sorry for bailing on you.”

“You better be,” she growled, wearing a mock frown on her face. “But know this: My comeback will hit you where you least expect.”

“Iris Hart, are you threatening me?” I pulled my head back, a small smile tugging at my mouth.

“Maybe.” She shrugged. “Maybe not. I guess time will tell.”

I laughed.

She did too.

When I looked outside the window, I spotted a black SUV in the side mirror. I’d seen the same vehicle on the drive to the festival on campus. At first, I didn’t think much of it. But seeing the SUV again on the same night after the incident sparked my curiosity.

I needed to be sure that the vehicle was following us, so I discreetly kept an eye on it. However, after a couple of turns, I lost it. I looked behind us, trying to spot it, but it seemed to have vanished off the road.

Maybe it wasn’t following us after all.

Maybe it was just my mind playing tricks on me.

I lowered my face, fingers rubbing my eyes as a thousand thoughts occupied my head. At this point, I wasn’t sure of anything anymore, and these uncertainties were driving me nuts.

How did I move from worrying about the Bratva coming after me to wondering who my mystery masked crusader was? The more I thought about the whole thing, the more unanswered questions piled up.

A lot was happening in my life, and it was unfolding at a pace beyond my control. The journalist in me was awakened. My curiosity was piqued. And in that moment, I made a conscious decision to defy my fears and begin digging.

In the meantime, I had a research assignment to get back to. I was done hiding from men who may or may not be after me. I wasn’t going to continue living in fear while the rest of the world moved on. No.

Why should I be afraid when I have a guardian angel who follows me everywhere?

That should unsettle me more than it did.

Right?

Chapter 8 – Rodion

Her university credentials took less effort to acquire than her coffee order.

I had both, as it happened. The coffee order came from three days of surveillance and a barista who answered questions about regular customers more freely than she should have.

The credentials came from a contact who specialized in exactly this kind of access and asked no questions about why a Bratva financial strategist wanted into a journalism student’s cloud drive.

I told him it was due diligence.

It wasn’t, and some part of me—the part I generally kept locked behind the same door as everything else inconvenient—knew that already.

I sat at my desk with the lights low and opened her files the way I opened everything that mattered: alone, unhurried, with no one in the building aware of what I was doing.

Her drafts were better than I expected.

I hadn’t expected that to bother me, and yet there it was—a thin current of irritation running underneath something closer to admiration as I read through three months of research organized with a precision that didn’t match the chaos I’d watched her create everywhere else in her life.

Color-coded folders. Cross-referenced sources. A working bibliography that cited financial disclosure databases I knew for a fact weren’t supposed to be searchable by undergraduates without an institutional override.

She’d found the override herself. Of course she had.

I read her central document twice.