Page 17 of Forced By the Bratva

I picked it up without thinking.

Pages full of pencil marks. Underlined passages, notes crammed into the margins in small, careful handwriting. Betrayal. Human behavior. Whole paragraphs circled twice, like she’d needed to make sure she understood them.

I flipped through more pages than I should have.

I caught myself doing it and stopped, the book still open in my hands, and stood there for a second, feeling like an idiot.

I’d interrogated men until they gave up the names they’d sworn to protect. I’d buried three bodies this month without losing sleep over any of them.

And here I was, alone in a library, studying a woman’s reading habits as if they meant something.

I put the book down exactly where I’d found it.

Over the next few days, I made changes around the estate. Small ones. Nothing anyone would question.

I told the kitchen to stop sending up the heavy Russian meals. She barely touched them anyway.

I noticed she was awake early, before the house stirred, and that she drank tea instead of coffee. So the kitchen started leaving tea instead.

I told one of the staff to have the library fireplace lit before nightfall. She always ended up near it eventually, curled into the chair closest to the warmth, whether she noticed or not.

None of it was strategic. That was the problem.

I’d stopped pretending it was for information, for control, for anything I could justify to Boris if he asked. I just did it.

Deep down, the fact that I couldn’t explain my newfound behavior toward her irritated me almost as much as the rest of what I felt whenever I was near her.

I found her in the library one night, wrapped in a blanket, curled up in the chair by the window. The fire was burning. Rain against the glass behind her.

I walked in quietly. Quiet enough that she didn’t hear me until I was already behind her chair, close enough to see the page she’d stopped on. She’d been sitting on the same page for a while. Not reading it. Just staring at it.

I reached past her shoulder and turned the page for her.

She flinched and yelped, the book nearly slipping from her hands. Her head snapped up to find me standing right behind her.

“What the hell, Ilya!” she barked, a hand on her heaving chest. “Don’t creep on me like that again—unless you want me to die of a heart attack before the Bratva finds me.”

That was funny. I almost smiled. Almost.

“I told you. You’re safe here.”

She paused. “Yeah, safe from everyone else but you, apparently.”

I looked down at the book properly.

Criminal psychology, one of the older texts from the back shelves, the kind most people in this house had no reason to touch. She’d picked it at random, probably, reaching for whatever was closest in the dark.

The case in the chapter she’d stalled on was one I actually knew, having read the book multiple times myself.

“That case,” I said. “The details in here are wrong.”

She glanced down at the page, then slowly raised her brows in disbelief. “Really?”

Silence.

“Are you claiming you know the case better than the authors?”

“Yes.”