Chapter Eighteen
I knew something had shifted the second she walked out of that café. So I asked Yuri to instruct our tech gurus to pull up the CCTV footage of the interior.
A part of me wanted to follow her back home, if only to make sure she got to the house safely, given how recklessly she was driving. Although I was in the dark about what was happening, I knew for sure something was off. Something was way off.
But instead of tailing her back to her apartment, I slammed on the brakes and spun the vehicle around. I told my men to keep an eye on her and ensure no harm came to her.
Later that evening, I sat in my office, wishing I hadn’t chickened out at the last minute. I turned on the large screen that displayed the footage of her apartment, and that’s when I saw her sitting in silence on her bed.
She had her legs pulled up in front of her with her arms around them. Every now and then, she’d chew on her nails like she was lost in her own thoughts. I didn’t have to be a magician to know something wasn’t right.
A mix of emotions flashed across her face in that position—anger, sadness, and something else I had yet to name. I watched her rise from her bed, fingers combing through her messy blond hair as she paced the length of her room.
I was still wondering what the actual fuck had happened in that café that made her so restless when Yuri arrived in my office.
“Boss.” He halted in front of me.
“Did you get the footage?” I met his gaze.
He nodded, setting the flash drive on my table. “I think I know why she stormed out of the café like that.”
I paused, staring at him impatiently. “Well, spit it out already.”
“She knows.”
My brows furrowed together slightly.
“She knows who you are, Boss.”
I locked my jaw, unsure of what to make of this. I’d always known she was going to figure out the truth sooner or later. But now that the moment had come, I wasn’t entirely sure how to handle it.
“The guy she met—Jimmy Johnson,” he explained, “is her friend, a tech genius. He helped her pull up the footage from the festival and the café from weeks ago.” A pause.
“She knows you were at the festival; she saw you on the footage. She also knows you were the one who pulled her away from the café during her interview with Daniel Whitfield.”
I leaned back in my chair, fingers rubbing my eyes.
She knew.
Not suspected. Not theorized. She had a face matched to footage matched to a face matched to a name.
She knew I’d been following her around and was the man who saved her all those times. But was that enough to get her so riled up?
“What else does she know?” I asked him.
“I’m not sure yet,” he replied. “But I want to believe she knows more, considering her current behavior. The fact that you’re the same man who removed her from trouble three times shouldn’t bother her like this.” A pause. “Unless, of course, there’s something else.”
Yuri was right.
“I don’t mean to tell you what to do, Boss,” he said. “But don’t you think now is the time to act?”
I thought for a second. There was no point in dragging this on anymore. She already knew too much, and from the look of things, it was messing with her head.
“Bring her to me,” I said to him. “No weapons drawn unless absolutely necessary. She is not to be harmed. Is that understood?”
“Understood, Boss.”
“I mean it, Yuri. A bruise that doesn’t need to exist will cost the man who put it there considerably more than his job.”
He gave a curt nod and walked out of my office.
***
I parked across the street from her building a little after midnight, the tablet propped against the wheel, the live feed from her apartment’s hidden cameras glowing pale blue against my face in the dark car.
She was awake. Of course, she was awake. I watched her move through her kitchen in an old T-shirt and little else, hair loose, pouring a glass of water at the sink. With the glass raised to her lips, she paused like she’d heard a sound coming from her living room.
The neighbor’s dog was barking in the distance, and I watched her head toward the kitchen. Her eyes scanned the surroundings outside as though she could sense something was off.
My men entered through the service door at the rear of the building—Yuri first, then two others I trusted to move quietly.
All three of them dressed dark, silent, and professional.
I watched their progress on a second feed, the hallway camera, their shapes crossing from one dim pool of light to the next.
I should have felt nothing watching this. I had ordered dozens of operations like it over the years, watched men being removed from buildings with less ceremony than this. I never once felt the particular tightness now sitting in my chest.
This was different. I made myself admit that much, alone in a dark car, where admitting it cost nothing.
This was her.
She saw them before they reached her.
I watched it happen on the kitchen feed—her head turning sharply toward the hallway, toward the shift of shadow that shouldn’t have been there. The glass slipped from her hand and shattered against the tile a half-second before she moved.
She didn’t scream. I noted it with something that wasn’t quite pride and wasn’t quite alarm. Aria didn’t waste breath on it, and in a split second, she spun toward the knife block on the counter, guided by the same instinct that had put a stick in her hand in an alley months ago.
Yuri reached her first.
He caught her wrist before she closed her fingers around the handle. She turned into him instead of away, driving her elbow back into his ribs with enough force that I heard him grunt even through the feed’s thin audio.
My brows arched in disbelief.
She twisted free for a half-second, made it two steps toward the hallway, and the second man caught her from behind, both arms wrapping around her middle.
With her legs dangling in the air, she drove her head back into his face.
The crack of it carried clearly enough that I straightened in my seat, my hand tightening involuntarily around the edge of the tablet.
He groaned, staggering as blood began to well beneath his nose. Reflexively, his grip loosened just enough for her to wrench an arm free and rake her nails down the side of his face, hard enough to draw blood in four parallel lines.
Wow.
“Get off me!” Her voice came through ragged, furious, cut short as Yuri caught her other arm.
She didn’t stop fighting.
I sat there and watched with something close to disbelief.
Three trained men, men who had handled considerably more dangerous opposition than a twenty-two-year-old woman in a T-shirt, and she made every single one of them work for it.
She twisted, kicked, and connected a knee somewhere that made the second man double over with a strangled curse.
“Fuck!”
She bit down on the hand that tried to cover her mouth, hard enough that her victim swore in Russian and nearly let go entirely.
“Hold her arms, not her mouth,” Yuri snapped at the victim.
The man who’d been hanging back near the doorway, clearly unprepared for the level of resistance currently unfolding in front of him, looked so confused.
I had told them not to hurt her. Watching it unfold, I understood exactly how much that instruction was costing them. Those poor souls. They’d had no idea what they were walking into. I hadn’t either.
She continued to struggle, slashing her fingernails like makeshift claws. Even pinned between two of them, her arms wrenched behind her, she kept resisting, kept twisting her weight, trying for an angle that would let her drive an elbow or a heel into something vulnerable.
“Jesus Christ, stop fighting!” one of the men barked at her in accented English.
“Then fuckin’ get off me!” she snapped back with the same energy.
Her hair had come completely loose, falling across her face. Through it, I could see her eyes: wide, blazing, utterly without the fear I would have expected from anyone else in that position.
She looked like she intended to win.
“Hold her down,” Yuri ordered, breathless. “Before she breaks something else.”
She headbutted the man holding her down, her forehead connecting with his nose. As he groaned in pain, she kicked him in the nuts, forcing him to let go. Aria tried to run, but the second man grabbed her by the foot.
She snatched a piece of broken glass from the kitchen floor and cut him across the cheek. Then kicked him in the face. She was already on her feet, ready to bolt, when Yuri barked at her.
“That’s it, you’re done!”
The third man moved quickly, circling behind her, and I watched him press a cloth soaked in something pale against her face. One hand was braced firmly against her jaw to hold it there despite her renewed thrashing.
She fought that too.
Fought it longer than I expected, her body bucking against the man holding her from behind. A muffled, furious sound escaped from behind the cloth, neither a scream nor anything else I had a name for.
Her movements slowed gradually rather than all at once—a few more seconds of struggle, weaker each time. Her knees buckled, her grip on the man’s sleeve loosening finger by finger until her whole body went slack between them.
The man caught her before she hit the floor.
I sat in the car with my jaw locked, watching them carry her out through the service entrance.
They moved fast, in the same careful silence they’d entered with.
And within four minutes of the glass shattering on her kitchen floor, they had her in the back of the van parked in the alley behind her building.
I watched the feed go dark as they left the apartment, the broken glass still scattered across the tile, a single drop of blood—one of the men’s, not hers.
I drove the long way back, giving myself time to settle whatever was currently sitting wrong in my chest before I had to face the result of what I’d just ordered.
She had fought three trained men with nothing but her bare hands and the element of surprise stripped entirely from her. Aria had made every one of them bleed before they’d managed to put her down.
That was more than remarkable.
I thought of Ilya’s voice in my office two weeks ago.
“Are you falling for this girl?”
I tightened my grip on the steering wheel as I followed the van back home. A mix of uncertainty and guilt settled in my chest as I wondered what exactly was driving me to act the way I did around her.
This obsession with her, was it healthy? Was it necessary for this cause?
This wasn’t my first time kidnapping someone, and I never felt guilty or anything like that. However, with her, things weren’t the same anymore. It didn’t feel like business as usual. It felt both wrong and right at the same time.
I had no idea what else she now knew about me and what she was going to do with that information. Considering how unpredictable she was, I told myself that removing her from public space was good for both of us.
That way, I’d make sure she wouldn’t do anything stupid with the information she had. And at the same time, she’d be safe under my watch—safe from whoever might want to target her.
Did it make sense? Probably not. But it was what I told myself.
My mind flashed back to the way she fought like something cornered and furious rather than something afraid. And it made me feel a certain type of way.
I had just taken her.
And there was no going back now.
What the hell was I going to do with her now?