Page 59 of Forced By an Obsessive Bratva Stalker

“Boss.” He halted in front of me.

“Did you get the footage?” I met his gaze.

He nodded, setting the flash drive on my table. “I think I know why she stormed out of the café like that.”

I paused, staring at him impatiently. “Well, spit it out already.”

“She knows.”

My brows furrowed together slightly.

“She knows who you are, Boss.”

I locked my jaw, unsure of what to make of this. I’d always known she was going to figure out the truth sooner or later. But now that the moment had come, I wasn’t entirely sure how to handle it.

“The guy she met—Jimmy Johnson,” he explained, “is her friend, a tech genius. He helped her pull up the footage from the festival and the café from weeks ago.” A pause. “She knows you were at the festival; she saw you on the footage. She also knows you were the one who pulled her away from the café during her interview with Daniel Whitfield.”

I leaned back in my chair, fingers rubbing my eyes.

She knew.

Not suspected. Not theorized. She had a face matched to footage matched to a face matched to a name.

She knew I’d been following her around and was the man who saved her all those times. But was that enough to get her so riled up?

“What else does she know?” I asked him.

“I’m not sure yet,” he replied. “But I want to believe she knows more, considering her current behavior. The fact that you’re the same man who removed her from trouble three times shouldn’t bother her like this.” A pause. “Unless, of course, there’s something else.”

Yuri was right.

“I don’t mean to tell you what to do, Boss,” he said. “But don’t you think now is the time to act?”

I thought for a second. There was no point in dragging this on anymore. She already knew too much, and from the look of things, it was messing with her head.

“Bring her to me,” I said to him. “No weapons drawn unless absolutely necessary. She is not to be harmed. Is that understood?”

“Understood, Boss.”

“I mean it, Yuri. A bruise that doesn’t need to exist will cost the man who put it there considerably more than his job.”

He gave a curt nod and walked out of my office.

***

I parked across the street from her building a little after midnight, the tablet propped against the wheel, the live feed from her apartment’s hidden cameras glowing pale blue against my face in the dark car.

She was awake. Of course, she was awake. I watched her move through her kitchen in an old T-shirt and little else, hair loose, pouring a glass of water at the sink. With the glass raised to her lips, she paused like she’d heard a sound coming from her living room.

The neighbor’s dog was barking in the distance, and I watched her head toward the kitchen. Her eyes scanned the surroundings outside as though she could sense something was off.

My men entered through the service door at the rear of the building—Yuri first, then two others I trusted to move quietly. All three of them dressed dark, silent, and professional. I watched their progress on a second feed, the hallway camera, their shapes crossing from one dim pool of light to the next.

I should have felt nothing watching this. I had ordered dozens of operations like it over the years, watched men being removed from buildings with less ceremony than this. I never once felt the particular tightness now sitting in my chest.

This was different. I made myself admit that much, alone in a dark car, where admitting it cost nothing.

This was her.