Page 22 of Forced By an Obsessive Bratva Stalker

That distinction should have alarmed me more than it did.

On the fourth visit, I found something I hadn’t expected—a personal document, separate from her coursework, password-protected in a way that told me she considered it different from everything else. The password took my contact eleven minutes.

I didn’t open it.

I sat there with the file unlocked and available and didn’t open it, and I told myself it was discipline, the same discipline that had kept me from watching longer than I should have the night I’d had her apartment fitted with cameras. But discipline implied resistance to something I wanted. I wasn’t sure anymore whether what I wanted was information.

I thought what I wanted was simply to keep being inside the part of her life she didn’t know I occupied.

I closed the laptop instead.

What unsettled me, lying awake afterward, was not that I had broken into a federal-adjacent academic system to tamper with evidence that could expose a criminal enterprise I had spent two decades constructing. That was Tuesday. That was any Tuesday, for a man in my position.

What unsettled me was that I had stopped thinking of it as damage control three visits ago, and I had not corrected the thought even once.

I was no longer protecting the network from her.

I was deciding, one quiet deletion at a time, what kind of woman she was allowed to become—and some part of me, the part I usually kept disciplined enough not to ask questions it didn’t want answered, very much liked having that power in my hands.

I didn’t examine that thought any further than I had to.

I rarely did when it came to her.

That night in my bed, my mind kept drifting back to her and the brief moment she was safe in my arms. The scent of her perfume, the feeling of her skin against mine, and the sound of her voice when she called out to me.

Aria Bennett had woven her way into my stone-cold heart and was now occupying my every thought. I tried to focus on something more important. However, the more I tried thinking about anything else, the more thoughts of her would flood my mind.

It had been a few days since I was around her, and just like a drug, I needed her so badly. Well, not her exactly. Her presence. I craved being in the same space as her, just watching her from the shadows. I’d gotten involved twice already, and a part of me didn’t mind rounding it up to three times.

I recalled reading somewhere in her notes that she had a meeting with a source of hers at a café tomorrow evening. Perfect. This was exactly the window I was looking for.

Chapter 9 – Aria

Marrow & Bean.

That was the name of the cafe that sat two blocks off the financial district in a stretch of street quiet enough that you could actually hear the espresso machine over the conversation.

I’d picked it for exactly that reason. Quiet meant fewer ears. Fewer ears meant Daniel Whitfield might actually say something useful before his nerve gave out.

Daniel Whitfield was a finance source who agreed to speak off the record about offshore accounts tied to shell companies.

He was already there when I arrived, eleven minutes early, which told me something before he’d said a word.

People who show up eleven minutes early to a coffee meeting are either compulsively punctual or actively afraid of missing their own exit. Daniel didn’t strike me as the punctual type.

He worked in compliance at a mid-sized investment firm downtown, the kind of job that paid well enough to keep him quiet and not well enough to keep him comfortable.

Also, the email he’d sent me three days ago had been four sentences long and contained the phrase “I can’t keep pretending I don’t see what I see,” like he’d rehearsed it in the mirror before he had the nerve to type it.

I slid into the chair across from him and set my phone on the table between us. “Thanks for meeting me, Mr. Whitefield,” I said, keeping my voice low, unremarkable.

“Daniel is fine.” His eyes roamed the streets outside, his tone faint and slightly shaky.

He had a coffee he hadn’t touched and a folded copy of the Tribune he definitely hadn’t read. It was positioned like a prop, like something to hold if his hands needed somewhere to go.

“Okay, Daniel.” I leaned in. “Shall we begin?”

He hesitated. “Listen, I don’t have long.”