Page 36 of Forced By an Obsessive Bratva Stalker

She sat in a corner of the university library. Three books were open around her laptop as she stared at the screen. Her blue eyes didn’t seem as bright today. They seemed rather tired and heavy.

I didn’t have to be a genius to know that that particular hunched focus was that of someone who’d had four hours of sleep and was running entirely on conviction instead of rest.

I took a seat at a table close enough to keep an eye on her without being noticed.

I observed in silence, drinking in every detail I could catch. The way her messy blond hair framed her face, the faint bags under her eyes. And the way she chewed the end of her pen without seeming to realize she was doing it.

I noticed everything, including the small, frustrated exhale she gave every time a search returned nothing useful.

She looked up twice. Both times, her tired eyes swept the room with the same hyper-vigilance I’d come to understand was part of her. Her gaze passed over me without catching.

I spied on her as she worked, oblivious to my presence. My eyes caught the exact moment frustration crossed into something sharper.

She slammed her hand flat against the table. Not hard enough to draw attention. But enough to keep her displeasure from venting out.

She was close. Closer than I’d let myself fully acknowledge in Yuri’s report. Not close enough to expose the structure. No. Not yet. But close enough that the gap between “not yet” and “now” had narrowed to something I could measure in weeks rather than months.

I should have found that more alarming than I did.

Strange how a part of me wanted her to stop and just get some rest. She was already pushing way too hard, and it was affecting her in ways that shouldn’t concern me, yet it did.

From my corner, I watched her for about thirty more minutes before deciding it was time to leave. Being around her had worked its magic again even though it was something I didn’t have a name for yet.

Quietly, I rose to my feet, took one last look in her direction, and then walked away.

***

Later that evening, I ran a deeper background check myself because I realized I hadn’t actually done thorough homework on her.

I told myself it was just standard procedure, but at this point, I no longer entirely believed my own explanations when it came to her.

Yuri had dug into her background before and had presented the files to me. However, with all that’s happened with Aria within the last week, I felt the urge to look into her myself.

There was something about her surname that always bugged me.

Bennett.

Yuri had run the name before, in the early days of identifying her as a threat. It had returned nothing of consequence then—a journalism student, unremarkable family, a father who worked in finance somewhere in the Midwest, nothing that intersected with anything that mattered to my world.

This time, I went deeper. Further back. Old advisory firm records, the kind buried under decades of mergers and dissolutions and name changes.

Bennett, Charles. Senior advisor, a now-dissolved financial consultancy, active roughly twenty-two years ago.

I read the name twice before the recognition arrived, slow and unwelcome, like cold water finding a crack it had been looking for.

Charles Bennett.

The name surfaced from somewhere old enough that it took me a full minute to place exactly where I’d encountered it.

Not in any current file. Not in anything I’d built myself. But in the organization’s earlier history, the part predating my own direct control.

A restructuring, more than two decades ago. A consultancy brought in to help reorganize a portion of the network’s holdings, back when the architecture had been cruder, more exposed.

This was before men like me had spent fifteen years refining it into something nearly invisible.

The restructuring had gone wrong—badly enough to cost the organization a significant position in two markets. Badly enough that the consultancy involved had been quietly, permanently removed from any future consideration.

I didn’t yet know if Charles Bennett was Aria’s father. Or if the two men were even the same person. In Chicago alone, there were hundreds of people bearing the name Charles Bennett. What were the odds of this particular person being Aria’s father?