Page 73 of Forced By the Bratva

I sat back and let that settle. The shape of the problem shifted under her observation again. Internal and external working together. That changed the list of people I could trust and the list of people I needed to watch.

She was right more often than she was wrong. That unsettled me more than I wanted to admit. The ease with which she found what my own people missed. The speed at which her mind moved through data that took my analysts hours to process.

Over the following days, I started deferring to her conclusions before locking in operational decisions.

Small things at first. Which guard rotations to adjust. Which accounts to freeze quietly instead of alerting the wider organization.

Then came larger things. Decisions that mattered. Decisions I would have made on instinct alone before, now running past her first.

I caught myself waiting for her reaction before I signed off on a change to the night watch.

I caught myself explaining a financial freeze in more detail than I needed to, just to hear whether she saw a gap I had missed. The habit formed without me deciding to form it.

I realized too late how far the balance had shifted.

This wasn’t the woman I’d dragged out of her apartment weeks ago. Restrained. Terrified. A problem to contain until the danger passed.

This was someone I relied on. Someone whose judgment I trusted enough to weigh against my own before acting.

That should have scared me more than it did.

We worked late most nights, long after the rest of the estate had gone quiet around us.

Some nights, the only sounds were the turning of a page or the scratch of her pen. She would lean over a ledger, hair falling forward, and stay that way until something clicked.

Then she would sit up and start talking, laying out the next piece of the pattern without looking at me for approval.

I listened. I asked the questions that needed asking. I stopped pretending I already had every answer.

The silence between us during those hours had changed. Not hostile anymore. Not even tense the way it used to be. Just quiet. Comfortable in a way I hadn’t expected from anything in my life.

I watched her work sometimes instead of the documents in front of me. The way she chewed the end of her pen when something didn’t add up. The way she’d go still for a few seconds, processing, before the pieces clicked and she started talking again—faster, more certain.

Once, she caught me at it and raised an eyebrow. I looked back at the page in front of me and said nothing. She didn’t push. She just returned to the numbers.

I understood, watching her like that one night near midnight, that there was no version of this that let either of us walk away untouched.

If we solved it together—traced the external network back to whoever was funding it, exposed the internal source feeding them information—we might survive it. Both of us. Together.

If we didn’t, we’d both be eliminated.

There was no clean exit left. No version where I pulled myself out of this, sent her somewhere safe, and went back to handling Bratva business the way I always had. Alone. Unattached. Uncomplicated.

The ring on her finger had been a solution at the time. Protection. A claim that kept other men from treating her as fair game.

Somewhere along the way, it had become something else. I could feel the difference when she sat across from me at the table, when she argued a point without fear of my reaction. When she stayed in the room after the work was done instead of finding a reason to leave.

She looked up from the papers and caught me watching her.

“You know it’s rude to stare, right?”

“It’s not if you’re staring at your wife, who just happens to be the most beautiful woman in the world.”

Her cheeks flushed, and she lowered her head slightly, as if to hide her blush. “Flattery will get you nowhere, Mr. Tarasov,” she teased.

“Are you sure about that?” I leaned back in my chair. “Because I can think of a few places it can get me.”

She held my gaze a second longer than necessary, her hazel eyes shining with something I didn’t have a name for yet.