Page 39 of His Stolen Bride

He breaks then, and he starts talking too fast. He names the corridor captain first, then an outside handler and a courier, and he insists he never met the top. That’s fine. I don’t need the top in this room. I need the leak stopped.

I nod once at Enzo, who understands. There’s no spectacle, audience, or long walk. The man is taken out through the side door that leads to the downstairs service corridor. The sound that follows is contained and final, and the house absorbs it the way a house like this always does.

A few minutes later, Enzo returns. His face doesn’t change, and neither does his voice. “It’s done,” he says.

“Good,” I reply.

I say, “Now we clean,” and the words aren’t dramatic. They’re instruction.

By evening, routes are changed, code phrases rotated, and the guard posts that Sergei treated like decoration become what they were always meant to be. Anyone who was promoted under Sergei without my approval gets moved to the outer ring, and anyone who complains gets moved out entirely.

I don’t stop at one interrogation.

I pull the same men twice, and I ask the same questions twice, and I watch for story drift, because truth stays in place and lies shift.

When I’m satisfied enough to breathe, I go back upstairs.

Alina’s door is guarded from the inside and outside, and I can feel the tension before I even open it.

I knock once, then step in.

She’s sitting on the edge of the bed, fully dressed, and her hands are folded so tightly in her lap that her knuckles are pale. She stands the moment I enter, and she does it like she expects bad news because in her experience, bad news always follows silence.

“Sit,” I say.

She sits again, her eyes fixed on me. I don’t move deep into the room. I stay nearer the door, and I keep the distance because distance keeps my voice clean. “It’s handled,” I tell her. “The man who lied is gone, and the rest have been reassigned.”

Her face tightens. “Gone,” she repeats.

“Yes.”

She draws in a breath, and it shakes. “Did you kill him?”

I don’t lie to her, because lying makes people reckless later. “Yes,” I say.

Then she says, very quietly, “This will never stop.”

I hold her gaze and I don’t deny it.

I don’t deny it, because denying it would be another lie.

Her eyes soften for a fraction of a second, then harden again, and she looks past me as if she’s already figuring out how to survive the next thing. That’s when it lands, sharp and clean, and it doesn’t need poetry to be true.

She will never belong to this world, and the world won’t care, because it doesn’t ask permission before it takes blood.

But she’s mine, and I’ll burn the world down to ashes before it tries to take her from me.

12

ALINA

Iknow I don’t have much time.

Since the shot, the house has tightened in ways that don’t announce themselves. Guards stand closer. Cameras catch more angles. People ask questions with polite voices and sharp eyes. Nothing is openly restricted, but everything feels narrower, like choices are being quietly removed. At one point, I considered telling Mikhail about the child growing inside me. But now, I can’t think beyond the need to escape this place before I’m killed with that child.

Waiting isn’t an option.

I don’t tell Mikhail anything. I don’t mention the nausea, the counting, or the way my body no longer feels predictable. I stick to routines that look harmless and keep my expressions neutral, because the fastest way to lose freedom here is to look like you’re thinking too much.