He had made one miscalculation.
He had assumed that the woman he’d selected would remain a liability. That the connection between us was the kind that created weakness.
He didn’t understand how the Bratva worked. He never had. It was why he operated on the margins of my territory and called it ambition.
What you claimed, you kept. What you kept, you defended. And what you defended became, over time, the thing you were made of.
I straightened the files and stood.
Elena Morozova had no idea of what I was about to do. She would hate me for it. But that was acceptable. I could manage hatred.
What I could not manage was her death. What I could not manage was the knowledge that I had seen the trap and calculated it correctly and done nothing.
There was also the issue of how my desier for her made things even more complicated.
For now,though, there was only the work.
I had no plans to give her options; it wasn’t about asking for her consent.
No one will dare challenge me.
Chapter Five — Elena
Viktor Golovin was not a man who offered options.
I understood this within approximately thirty seconds of him appearing in the backstage corridor after the evening show, filling the space with the kind of presence that didn’t announce itself because it didn’t need to. He was large in the way of people built for specific purposes—broad through the shoulders, economical in movement, with dark eyes that swept the corridor once and catalogued everything in it before settling on me.
He was in a black suit, just like his brother, Mikhail. Having thrown myself into girl-talks and asking questions out of maskedcuriosity, I had gotten Mikhail’s name. My new co-dancers were also too eager to tell me about his brother, Viktor. They also told me there were other siblings, and that they didn’t really know them. Not that they knew anything much about Mikhail and Viktor, either.
“Ms. Morozova,” he said. “I need you to come with me.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Viktor Golovin,” he answered coolly. “Head of casino security. I need you to come with me now.”
He was not touching me, was not crowding me, was standing at a distance that could technically be described as respectful, and every instinct I owned was telling me that the respectful distance was a courtesy rather than a constraint—that it would evaporate the moment I indicated I intended to decline.
“Where are we going?”
“Somewhere secure.”
The non-answers landed in my stomach like stones. Around us, the backstage was its usual post-show chaos. And in the middle of them, a very large man in a very dark suit waiting for me to agree to something I didn’t understand.
I followed Viktor out of the casino.
The car was black and large and said nothing about where it was going.
I sat in the back and watched the Strip recede through the tinted window, the neon shrinking, the density of the city thinning bydegrees. Viktor sat in the passenger seat and did not speak. The driver did not speak.
I knew Mikhail had something to do with this. I just didn’t know what exactly… yet.
We drove for twenty minutes. One moment there were lights and hotels and the specific human density of a place designed to never let you feel alone, and then there was desert. Dark and wide and quietly indifferent to all of it.
I watched it go by and tried to think.
The question of ‘why me’ had no comfortable answer, and I was still turning it over when the car slowed and turned through a gate, and I looked through the window and forgot about the question entirely.
A grand building rose from the desert with the settled authority of something that had been there long before the Strip existed and expected to be there long after. It was all stone, dark glass, and wrought iron. Lit from below, it looked like something between a fortress and a monument. Wide steps led to an entrance flanked by figures I couldn’t quite make out. The grounds were immaculate in the austere way of places that employed people specifically to keep them that way.
