Page 61 of Forced By an Obsessive Bratva Stalker

The third man moved quickly, circling behind her, and I watched him press a cloth soaked in something pale against her face. One hand was braced firmly against her jaw to hold it there despite her renewed thrashing.

She fought that too.

Fought it longer than I expected, her body bucking against the man holding her from behind. A muffled, furious sound escaped from behind the cloth, neither a scream nor anything else I had a name for.

Her movements slowed gradually rather than all at once—a few more seconds of struggle, weaker each time. Her knees buckled, her grip on the man’s sleeve loosening finger by finger until her whole body went slack between them.

The man caught her before she hit the floor.

I sat in the car with my jaw locked, watching them carry her out through the service entrance. They moved fast, in the same careful silence they’d entered with. And within four minutes of the glass shattering on her kitchen floor, they had her in the back of the van parked in the alley behind her building.

I watched the feed go dark as they left the apartment, the broken glass still scattered across the tile, a single drop of blood—one of the men’s, not hers.

I drove the long way back, giving myself time to settle whatever was currently sitting wrong in my chest before I had to face the result of what I’d just ordered.

She had fought three trained men with nothing but her bare hands and the element of surprise stripped entirely from her. Aria had made every one of them bleed before they’d managed to put her down.

That was more than remarkable.

I thought of Ilya’s voice in my office two weeks ago.

“Are you falling for this girl?”

I tightened my grip on the steering wheel as I followed the van back home. A mix of uncertainty and guilt settled in my chest as I wondered what exactly was driving me to act the way I did around her.

This obsession with her, was it healthy? Was it necessary for this cause?

This wasn’t my first time kidnapping someone, and I never felt guilty or anything like that. However, with her, things weren’t the same anymore. It didn’t feel like business as usual. It felt both wrong and right at the same time.

I had no idea what else she now knew about me and what she was going to do with that information. Considering how unpredictable she was, I told myself that removing her from public space was good for both of us.

That way, I’d make sure she wouldn’t do anything stupid with the information she had. And at the same time, she’d be safe under my watch—safe from whoever might want to target her.

Did it make sense? Probably not. But it was what I told myself.

My mind flashed back to the way she fought like something cornered and furious rather than something afraid. And it made me feel a certain type of way.

I had just taken her.

And there was no going back now.

What the hell was I going to do with her now?

Chapter 19 – Aria

My eyes fluttered as a slight wince escaped my lips. The back of my head was throbbing, and my eyes seemed too heavy. Consciousness came back slowly, in pieces, like wading up through something thick and dark toward a surface I couldn’t quite see yet.

The first thing I registered was the sheets.

Cool. Impossibly soft, the kind of fabric that didn’t exist anywhere in my actual life. It wasn’t cotton. No. It was something finer, something that whispered against my skin when I shifted instead of catching on it.

My own apartment had a comforter from a clearance rack and a fitted sheet that had pilled from too many washings. This felt like lying inside a cloud someone had spent a small fortune perfecting.

My head still throbbed, and that dull, heavy ache behind my eyes remained. There was a chemical aftertaste clinging to the back of my throat that made my stomach turn before I’d even opened my eyes.

I opened them anyway.

The ceiling above me was high—higher than any ceiling had a right to be in a residential space. It had exposed wooden beams running across it in a pattern that looked deliberate and expensive.