Page 32 of Forced By an Obsessive Bratva Stalker

A blurry photo isn’t a financial paper trail, and you know that, the voice added. We’ve built entire investigative threads before on connections that felt so tight and still watched them come apart under actual scrutiny. A pause. You, of all people, should know how dangerous it is to fall in love with a theory before stress-testing it.

As much as it pained me to admit, my voice of reason had some valid points.

R.T. might not mean anything. But we all know Rodion Tarasov is a name, my voice of curiosity chipped in. Look him up.

Fantastic idea.

I did exactly that, pulling up everything I could find on him. It wasn’t much—that, in itself, told me something.

Men who ran legitimate businesses at his apparent level usually had a digital footprint. Interviews, profiles, the institutional vanity that came with money that wanted to be seen.

Rodion Tarasov had almost none of that. A handful of gala mentions. A registered address for a financial consulting firm that, when I cross-referenced it, shared a building with two of the holding entities I’d already flagged.

I opened the photos section, hoping to finally add a face to the name. But to my disappointment, the images I saw weren’t of the man I was looking for. I didn’t know who this Rodion Tarasov was, but I was certain none of those men I saw online were him.

Of all the photographs on that web page, only three stood out to me. And I was convinced those were actual pictures of him. However, these pictures were taken completely out of focus. None of them caught his face—just a couple of side views taken from terrible angles.

Whoever this man was, he was skilled at keeping a low profile. But why? What was he hiding?

I turned the internet upside down looking for clearer pictures of this man, but found none. Not even one.

It was almost four in the morning by the time I made myself stop, mostly because my eyes had started blurring the screen into something unreadable. Plus, I knew from experience that exhausted research was usually bad research.

I closed the laptop and lay back on my bedroom floor, staring at the ceiling, when the other thought arrived. The one I’d been successfully outrunning for the last two hours by staying buried in documents.

Anton Vasylenko.

A faint grin tugged at my lips, and I found myself replaying the coffee shop conversation with a completely different lens than the one I’d used at the time.

Every detail I’d filed under “interesting stranger” started rearranging itself into something with sharper edges. The way he hadn’t flinched at Cyprus. The way he’d made that joke about laundering money.

“Are you planning to start laundering money, Miss Bennett?”

He’d asked that question with a kind of ease that, at the time, I’d read as confidence. However, thinking about it now, it was starting to read as something closer to a man testing exactly how much I already knew.

“You talk like someone used to being the most informed person in every room he walks into. Someone important. Confident. Someone who’s used to calling the shots.”

I’d said that to him, and I’d meant it as an observation. Now it sat in my memory like something closer to a confession I’d accidentally extracted and hadn’t recognized as one.

I didn’t have any actual reason to connect Anton Vasylenko to Rodion Tarasov or the craziness going on in my life at the moment. None.

They didn’t share a name or a face I could verify against that blurry gala photo. Nothing concrete enough to write down without it looking like a kind of paranoid overreach.

“Correlation is not your friend, ladies and gentlemen; correlation will get you sued,” my journalism professor once said.

But the feeling wouldn’t leave. The specific, prickling certainty that I’d been in a room with someone who already knew far more about me than the conversation had let on.

There was something about Anton’s presence that felt strangely familiar. And that cologne of his…I could’ve sworn I’d smelled it before. But where?

Why couldn’t I shake the feeling that that wasn’t our first time in the same space?

And why the hell did the thought of him make me feel some sort of peace? Why did the image of him in my head prompt a smile on my face?

You’re spiraling, said my voice of reason, and for once it sounded less annoyed than genuinely concerned. It’s four in the morning. You’ve connected a stranger from a coffee shop to a name from a charity gala photo based on a vibe. God! What is wrong with you?

It’s not a vibe. My voice of curiosity, sharper, was less inclined to back down, even at four in the morning.

Of course you’d say that—you always push her into making wrong decisions.