Page 26 of Forced By the Bratva

A pencil.

“You might end up killing me, Ilya, but I swear to God, I’ll leave a lasting scar on your face before I draw my last breath.”

The threat had landed well. But not as she’d intended. I thought it was funny and had almost let my blank expression slip for a moment. I didn’t.

Iris had messed up. She revealed herself to Ivan at the wrong time, and I wasn’t pleased with that. Couldn’t she have just stayed hidden until I’d walked him out of the mansion?

I hadn’t wanted him setting his eyes on her, at least not now. Too bad she didn’t listen and obey my instructions.

“You told me to stay in my room and not come out until morning. How was I supposed to know you’d extended the curfew?”

Thinking back now, perhaps she was right. Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough. I reviewed the footage from that night, and she’d truly never left her room. She’d done as I’d said.

Maybe if I’d been more specific about when she was supposed to remain in her room, Ivan wouldn’t have set his eyes on her.

She’d heard when he asked me to eliminate the witness, and that statement scared her so much that she’d locked herself away from me.

By now, she should’ve known that I had no interest in taking her life. She was more valuable to me alive than dead. Whatever that meant.

My brother’s stance on the matter was clear: I was supposed to abide by the rules and do things by the book. Deep down, I knew my obligations to the Bratva should come first over everything else.

This wasn’t my first rodeo. He knew that. The entire council knew that. My life had been dedicated to our cause, and I’d never once broken the rules or defaulted in any way.

I killed for the Bratva.

I fought for the Bratva.

I lived for the Bratva.

And I would die for the Bratva.

But somehow, I couldn’t end one life for the Bratva.

To everyone else, she was just another witness to be disposed of, someone expendable and insignificant. However, to me, she was something more.

I obviously didn’t have what it took to kill her, and I wasn’t willing to let someone else do that for me. The thought of her dying wasn’t even something I allowed into my head. I couldn’t imagine it.

Why, though?

Why was I getting so attached to her so quickly? What about her kept pulling me in? Why was she living rent-free in my head all the time?

It got so bad that I found myself always keeping tabs on her. I watched through the screens, studying her routine more diligently.

I began paying closer attention to whether she ate properly. What time her lights went off. Whether she’d taken the long way around the house to avoid passing my office.

I noticed patterns I had no business noticing, the kind of detail I usually reserved for surveillance, for men I was building a case against before I ended them.

I knew, for instance, that she’d stopped eating breakfast in her room and started taking it by the window instead, where the morning light hit the desk.

I knew she read faster when she was anxious, flipping pages too quickly to actually absorb them, like the motion itself was the point.

I knew all these things because I could hear and see everything in this house. That was the problem.

None of it mattered. I told myself that every day, sometimes more than once, standing in my office with a glass of vodka I wasn’t drinking, running through every reason this fixation made no sense.

It still didn’t stop.

This newfound fixation annoyed me. It was reckless, the kind of thing that got men in my position killed, or worse, got someone else killed because of them.