Page 92 of Forced By an Obsessive Bratva Stalker

She was right. I was counting on it.

I found them in the east garden on a Thursday afternoon, three weeks after the last of the opposing network had been formally dissolved.

Aria was seated on the blanket she’d claimed from the library weeks ago, legs crossed, Elena propped carefully against her knees. Both of them were engaged in whatever conversation a four-month-old conducted through expression alone.

Aria was talking. Not to me—she hadn’t heard me yet—just talking to her, narrating something about the garden with the particular easy warmth she used only when she thought no one else was listening.

I stood in the doorway and watched them for longer than I intended.

The estate had changed. Not structurally—the same stone, the same formal gardens, the same long corridors and high ceilings and rooms full of things selected to communicate a specific kind of authority.

But the air inside it was different. Lighter in a way that seemed more like a home than just a house.

Elena noticed me first. Her eyes found mine across the garden with the same directness her mother brought to everything, and she made a sound—small, definitive, the verbal equivalent of an acknowledgment.

Aria turned.

“How long have you been standing there?” she asked.

“Long enough.”

She rolled her eyes. Turned back to Elena. “Your father is dramatic,” she told her, in the same conversational tone she’d been using for whatever she’d been narrating before I arrived.

Elena appeared to consider this information seriously.

I crossed the garden and lowered myself onto the blanket beside them, something I wouldn’t have done a year ago. Not because the blanket wasn’t large enough, but because a year ago, I wouldn’t have known how to simply sit in a garden with no agenda beyond being present in it.

She had taught me that. Slowly, and without making a project of it, which I appreciated.

Elena reached immediately for my hand. The same grip as the first day—small fingers closing around one of mine with a certainty that still did something to my chest I had no language for and had stopped trying to find language for.

“She missed you this morning,” Aria said.

“I missed you, too, baby,” I said to Elena, smiling.

“How’d it go at the office?” She glanced at me sideways.

“Same old, same old,” I replied. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

A pause. The garden was quiet. Somewhere beyond the wall, the city continued its indifferent business.

Here, the light fell across the stone in the long, amber way it did in late afternoon, and Elena held my finger, and Aria sat close enough that her shoulder touched mine, warm and unhurried.

“Are you happy?” she asked.

The question was quiet. Direct. The way she asked everything that actually mattered.

I looked at Elena first. Then at her.

“I’m the happiest man in the world, my love,” I said, meaning every word.

She held my gaze for a moment, that gorgeous smile of hers still in place. Then she looked back at the garden, and I watched the small, private smile she tried to contain but didn’t quite manage.

“Good,” she said. “Because I feel the same way.”

Later, after Elena had been settled for the evening, I found Aria in our bedroom, standing at the window in the blue hour between sunset and dark, her hair loose, one hand resting lightly against the glass.

I crossed the room and stood behind her. My hands found her waist, and she leaned back into me without hesitation—easy, unguarded, the particular ease of someone who had stopped calculating whether to allow herself the thing she wanted.