Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride (New York Korovin Bratva #2)

Chapter 1 - Zara

Dubai’s edges of glass and gold let you mistake shine for substance, the surface for the whole story. You don’t see the layers unless you’re looking for them.

I have been looking for nothing else.

The heat is different here than anywhere I’ve been before. It presses down through the fabric of my blazer and sits between my shoulder blades like an insistent palm. This kind of heat does well to remind you it was here before the towers were built and will be here long after they’re gone.

The first rule, wherever I go, is to walk like I live there. A woman who moves like she belongs is invisible in a way that a woman with a map never could be.

My pace is measured, my eyes forward but not fixed, my attention spread thin across everything the way light spreads across still water. My notebook sits in the inner pocket of my blazer, my phone in my hand. My camera stays in my bag today—too conspicuous, too easily read as exactly what it is.

I am not here as a journalist.

The contact goes by Yusuf now, though I doubt that’s the name he was born with, any more than the shell company he used to operate was born with its registered address in the Cayman Islands.

He is a small man in a short-sleeved shirt wearing the kind of anxiety that clings to people who know too much about other people’s secrets.

We meet in a restaurant that is deliberately ordinary—no views, no decor worth photographing, no reason for anyone interesting to be here, which is exactly why I chose it.

He checks the door twice after entering, his glass of water sitting mostly untouched because his hands keep finding each other beneath the table, interlacing and unlacing like he is doing calculations with his fingers that keep coming out wrong.

He does not want to be here.

I knew that before he sat down.

“I told you on the phone,” he says, eyes on the table, voice low, barely above a murmur. “I don’t have much.”

“You have something,” I say. "Or you wouldn’t have come.”

He knows it’s true. I wait for him to speak expectantly. Waiting is the thing most people cannot stand, and I have made a practice of it the way other people make a practice of small talk.

He gives me a financial routing network operating out of Dubai in the early 2000s.

Fragments like chips of a broken plate; I can tell from the curve of each piece that it was once whole, but I cannot yet see the pattern on it.

Transactions that move through shell identities, layered through three jurisdictions before landing anywhere traceable.

The names attached to the accounts are not names at all, but designations and codes.

He gives me one.

SABLE-7.

He does not know who SABLE-7 is. He tells me this twice, both times looking up from the table to make eye contact—the first and only time during our entire conversation that he does so. The eye contact makes it feel like a confession rather than information.

SABLE-7 cross-references with a second designation from a ledger I recovered three weeks ago in New York. A ledger that had been deliberately corrupted but not thoroughly enough, because whoever destroyed it underestimated how long I am willing to sit with a broken thing before I understand it.

My parents had a code name too.

I don’t know yet which designation was theirs. But I know I am standing close enough to the truth now that I can smell it, the way you can smell rain before the sky breaks open, something acidic and clean at once, washing away everything that came before it.

Yusuf drinks his water in one sip and rises before I have asked my last question. “That’s everything,” he says.

It isn’t.

But it’s everything he will give me today, and pushing will cost more than it earns. I let him go. He moves through the restaurant without looking back, the way men move when they are glad to be done with something.

SABLE-7.

I write it down anyway, even though I won’t forget it. Writing is the ritual. It tells my brain, this matters, keep it, don’t let go.

Outside the restaurant, in the narrow corridor of afternoon shadow between two buildings where the heat stacks itself and the noise of the street arrives muffled, I realize something is deeply wrong.

I haven’t even taken two steps out of the restaurant when an animal sensation crawls through the base of my spine to my head.

Two separate conversations cut short when I pass. I noted them and filed them and dismissed them altogether.

A man near the corner of the last street I turned off has been standing in the same spot for the full duration of my walk, not waiting for anyone. There’s no phone in his hand, no coffee, no reason to be standing there while everything around him moves.

His eyes find me and then move away smoothly.

I know the difference between paranoia and pattern recognition. I have spent five years building my career on that exact distinction.

I keep walking, pulling out my phone. Elena picks up on the second ring.

“Tell me something good,” I murmur in lieu of a greeting, because I cannot say what I actually mean—tell me I’m not walking toward something I won’t walk away from.

“I’m midway through a financial compliance audit,” she replies instantly. Elena Vasquez does not do small talk any more than I do, which is why we have always understood each other without much ceremony. "I don’t have something good.”

The stone that drops into my stomach has weight and edges.

“The trails you’ve been following are not cold.

They’re buried. There is a meaningful difference.

Cold trails go dead because people stop maintaining them.

These were—” She pauses uncharacteristically.

“Purposefully closed. Someone sealed these records. This is not the work of someone hiding money, but someone hiding people.”

My footsteps don’t slow. I make sure my pace is even, my face neutral. “What else?”

“Your name.” The words land like a door shutting in a quiet room.

“It’s appearing in inquiry threads it has no legitimate business being in.

After the Moretti coverage—Zara, you put enough of their operations into public record that anyone with access to the right databases can triangulate your involvement.

You handed them a face to attach to the disruption. ”

“I was doing my job.”

“Yes, and now people who have very strong opinions about that job know exactly who you are, where you’ve been recently, and—” The pause returns, smaller this time. “Where you’re likely going.”

The city is a shimmering blur of white walls and glass towers, the gold of late afternoon catching everything at once.

“Come home,” Elena pleads, quiet and exact. “Let me work the financial angle from here. The paper trail doesn’t require you to be physically present in Dubai.”

“Yes, it does.”

“Zara—”

“My parents might be alive, Elena.”

The silence that follows is pregnant with everything she has decided not to say, every caution she knows I will not receive the way she intends it. When she speaks again, her voice has gone softer. “Be careful.”

The call ends, and the same car whizzes past me for the second time. It is dark and unremarkable, windows tinted. It moves too slowly for traffic and too steadily for a driver who is lost.

I don’t turn my head to glance at it, tracking it in the reflection of a shopfront window. Its glass reflects the street behind me in a slightly curved, distorted version of itself, like the city seen through the eyes of someone deep in a fever.

The man from the corner is no longer at the corner.

Reflexively, I take a turn I hadn’t planned because the street ahead is too open, exposed, too straight a line for someone who is being followed to walk down.

The street narrows as the towers disappear behind me. The more I walk, the older, quieter version of this city comes out to greet me—the version that existed before the glass and ambition.

The quiet here is eerie. Fewer people mean fewer witnesses, and it sinks in, approximately thirty seconds after making the turn, that I have walked exactly where they wanted me to walk.

Suddenly, bodies materialize from doorways and recessed thresholds—three of them at minimum, possibly four. They move with unhurried confidence, well-versed in closing off a space from multiple angles until the person inside it runs out of options.

These are not amateurs.

My stride transforms into a run before I can even curse myself out.

Cutting hard on a diagonal toward the closing gap between two of them that has not yet fully shut, I pump my legs even faster.

Thank fuck I wore these boots today.

My heart pounds faster, sweat beading at my hairline, adrenaline burning everything in my vision.

A hand clamps around my arm. I wrench free, but I spin into the wall, shoulder striking stone, and the world stutters sideways for one nauseating beat.

They are faster than I can outrun, and the cold realization slips its slimy fingers down my spine.

My throat bobs drily. I know what comes next.

I’ve always known that this is how my story might end.

Before the man can advance towards me, he drops hard and fast and without sound, exactly like how it happens in nightmares. The second body thuds to the ground before I’ve processed the first. Then the third.

My neck jerks and—

Dark hair lies messily atop piercing eyes, creeping vines crawling over his throat, emerging from the neckline of his black undershirt. His jacket sits entirely undisturbed, not a single button out of place. His height only adds to his stature.

His lips are in a flat line, nothing to be seen behind those dark eyes.

I know that face.

Mikhail Korovin stands in the narrow throat of the alley. In Alina’s life, he was a constant, present force, never quite in the center of any room but never truly absent from it either.

Those same eyes watch me now.

My body heats up with a feeling I have never felt before. It’s fear, apprehension, anxiety, and something far darker curling poisonously beneath my belly.

He steps forward, closing the space.

My body has frozen. All alarms blare in my head to get the fuck out of there but—

But what stops me now is not instinct.

He will not hurt me. Not right now. Not tonight.