Stolen By The Bratva Brothers

Chapter 8

SERAPHINE’S POV

Sleep no longer worked the way it used to. Falling asleep was never the hard part. My body still knew how to shut down when it had no choice left. The trouble started after that. I would sleep for two hours, sometimes three, and then my eyes would open in the dark, and my mind would already be moving. It pulled at every loose piece of information I had, replayed every gap. It ran Voron’s assessment lists the way other people counted sheep: what do I know, what do I not know, what do I need, and what do I still have that I have not used. The last answer was always the same. Myself.

By four in the morning on the third day, I stopped pretending. I pushed the covers back and stood up. The room was quiet and cold. I cleared the space between the bed and the window, moved the wooden chair out of the way, and began Voron’s third conditioning sequence. It wasn’t for fitness or to tire myself out, though restlessness sat heavy in my muscles. I did it because the sequence forced the mind into a straight line. Sixteen steps, three rotations, weight shifting in a pattern so exact that nothing else could fit inside it. You could not run it correctly and think about something else at the same time. That was the point.

I was halfway through the third rotation when the door opened hard. I stopped at once. It was Viktor; he stood in the doorway. For the first time since I arrived, he wasn't in a suit but dark, loose trousers and a dark shirt with the sleeves pushed up. The tattoos on his forearms showed clearly in the low light. He looked like someone who had been awake for a long time and did not mind it. His eyes moved over my feet, the angle of my arms, the place where my weight sat at my back. The expression on his face was almost neutral, the careful almost-neutral of someone who had noticed something important and chosen not to show it. He said, “Again. Properly.”

I stared at him. He crossed his arms and waited. I ran the sequence from the start.

He watched the first rotation without moving. On the second, he stepped forward, crouched to my feet, and adjusted my back heel with two fingers. The change was small, maybe fifteen degrees. He stood up at once and stepped back two full paces, putting the distance between us again as if the correction had been purely technical. As if this were only a training session and not a locked room inside a compound full of armed men at four in the morning. As if I were not his prisoner and he were not the man who had locked the door. I ran it again; he said nothing. I finished the third rotation; he said, “Better.” Then walked out and closed the door.

I stood in the middle of the quiet room and tried to make sense of what was happening in my chest. It was not fear. I knew fear; I had been managing it since the BMW, and I knew its exact weight and texture. This was different and had no name yet. It came from the simple fact that Viktor had come to my door at four in the morning, seen exactly what I was doing, and asked nothing. He didn’t ask how I knew the sequence, or ask who had taught me. He didn't care to ask why I was awake and moving in the dark. He had only looked at my form, found the error, fixed it, said the word better, and left, as if those were the only facts that mattered.

He had recognized the sequence the moment he saw it. He had spotted the foot error in a single rotation. That kind of recognition meant one of two things. Either he had trained in the same system, or he had watched me closely enough over the past three days to learn the movements by how I carried them in my body, even when I thought I was still. Neither possibility sat comfortably.

I walked to the window and looked out at the dark trees and the darker wall beyond them. I kept thinking about the two fingers on my heel. The brief, practical touch. The way he had stepped back the second the correction was done, as if he owed me space. I thought about what it meant that a man who moved through the world as if every obstacle had already been solved had touched me carefully and then removed himself before I could speak. My pulse was doing something that had nothing to do with the effort of the sequence. I went back to bed. I did not sleep.

When Anya brought me breakfast at seven, she set the tray on the desk and looked straight at my feet. I was standing near the window. Anya’s eyes took in the position of my weight, the new angle of the back foot, the correction that my body had already accepted. Anya said, “Viktor taught you that correction.” It was not a question. It was flat and certain, the voice of someone confirming a fact rather than discovering it. She put the tray down on the table and walked out before I could answer.

That meant Anya had either seen the moment herself or had some other way of knowing it had happened. Both possibilities said the same thing. Anya Petrova watched this compound with a precision she never allowed to show on her face. She saw what happened, noted it, brought it out again at breakfast, and placed it next to the food without explanation.

I stood in the room after the door closed and looked at the tray and the closed door. Two people in this place were paying that level of attention to details that were not supposed to matter. I sat down and began to eat. Outside, the first real morning light came through the window and stretched across the floor in a long pale line. It was the first proper sunrise I had seen since the gala. Everything looked different from inside a locked room. The only useful thing left was to make sure that difference did not become permanent.

I chewed slowly and kept my eyes on the strip of light. Somewhere beyond the walls, Viktor was already moving through his day. Somewhere Anya was noting the morning’s observations. And somewhere inside my own chest, the unnamed thing that had started when two fingers touched my heel was still awake, still waiting for the next time the door opened in the dark.