Page 24 of Forced By an Obsessive Bratva Stalker

He stopped.

Not a pause. A full stop, mid-sentence. His whole body went rigid immediately in a way that had nothing to do with the words he’d been saying.

I followed his eyeline toward the door.

A man had walked in. Unremarkable on the surface—dark coat, average height, the kind of forgettable face you’d struggle to describe to a sketch artist twenty minutes later.

He didn’t look at us. He didn’t look at anyone in particular. He just walked to the counter and got in line like every other person who’d walked through that door in the last hour.

Daniel’s hands were shaking on the table.

“I have to go.” He reached for the paper still half-visible at the edge of the table, panic making his fingers clumsy.

“Daniel, c’mon…”

“I honestly shouldn’t have come.” He was already standing, already pulling his coat tighter around himself like it could make him smaller, less visible.

“Can we talk about this?”

“There’s nothing to talk about. This was a mistake.”

“All right.” I threw my hands slightly in the air. “Just tell me the name of the parent entity then. That’s all I need—”

“Keep your voice down.” It came out sharper than anything he’d said yet, a hiss more than a sentence.

His eyes weren’t on me anymore—they were on the man at the counter, who still hadn’t looked our way. The newcomer seemed to simply be waiting for a coffee like a person waits for a coffee. Yet, his presence unsettled Daniel in a way that piqued my curiosity.

“You don’t understand what you’re asking me.”

“Yes, I do. I understand exactly what I’m asking you.” I leaned forward, lowering my voice further instead of raising it. “Daniel, you reached out to me. You said you couldn’t keep pretending. I’m not going anywhere until—”

“Seriously, you need to stop talking.” His voice cracked slightly on the stop, the word coming out higher than the rest of the sentence.

Daniel grabbed the folded paper off the table, shoved it into his coat, and was moving before I’d fully processed that the conversation had ended without my permission.

“Forget this ever happened. Forget my email. I never sent it.”

“Daniel!” I exclaimed softly through gritted teeth.

He didn’t look back.

I sat there for a half-second too long, replaying the sequence in reverse, trying to locate the exact moment things had tipped over.

That was when I understood, with the specific, sick clarity of a thought arriving exactly one beat too late to be useful, that I’d pushed in precisely the wrong direction. He didn’t need me to lower my voice.

He’d needed the entire conversation to have never happened, and every question I’d asked after that man walked in had been one more nail in a door Daniel was trying to close.

The man at the counter still hadn’t looked at our table.

That was somehow worse than if he had.

“Fuck,” I murmured, gathering my things.

My movements were too quick and too obvious, the exact kind of motion that draws attention by trying not to.

My hands fumbled the strap of my bag. I knocked my own coffee cup half an inch sideways, coffee sloshing dangerously close to the rim. “Shit.”

The man at the counter turned around.