Page 76 of Forced By an Obsessive Bratva Stalker

***

As early as six a.m. the next morning, I sat on the edge of the tub for a long time after, holding the test in both hands. With a racing heart, I stared at the two marks on the strip, knowing exactly what that meant.

Positive.

Under different circumstances, this would have been good news. Except I was currently sitting alone, in a marble bathroom five floors above the ground in the house of a man who had surveilled me. A man who lied to me, kidnapped me, and kept me prisoner. A man who, apparently, was also the heir to a conflict with my own bloodline that I hadn’t known existed until forty minutes ago.

That’s the man whose baby I was pregnant with.

Rodion Tarasov.

How could this be good news in such a messy situation?

I set the test down on the edge of the tub, very carefully, like handling it gently would contain what it meant.

I sat with my hands in my lap and my eyes on the cold marble floor. My lips were quivering, my heart was racing, and a strange heat spread across my whole body.

Fear, anger, anxiety, and something I couldn’t yet name flooded my mind all at once.

I felt completely, utterly lost.

Not the investigative kind of lost. No. Not the kind that had a direction. Or the kind where “lost” just meant “not yet found,” and you simply kept looking until the picture resolved.

This was something older and quieter than that.

My father’s name.

The 2003 restructuring.

Rodion’s losses.

My degree.

Meridian Solutions.

The incident I witnessed.

The surveillance.

The fake identity. The office sex.

The night we fucked for the second time in this room.

Everything hit me at once.

I sat in that bathroom for a long time.

I didn’t cry. Not because I didn’t want to—God knows I did. But I couldn’t find the tears.

Underneath the shock, the grief, and the overwhelming weight of what I’d just confirmed in two separate ways that afternoon, something harder and quieter was already forming.

I was carrying his child.

I was bound to this man by blood I hadn’t known about. And now by something irreversible that hadn’t existed until a day in an office neither of us had planned on.

Now I was sitting in his house, with his rules, with his staff and his marble—trapped.

I needed to understand what he knew—when he found out in the midst of all this madness whose daughter I was.