Page 10 of Brutal Bratva’s Owned Hostage

She wasn’t going back to that apartment. Not today, not soon, maybe not at all until I understood exactly what we were dealing with and made certain every person responsible had been found and handled permanently.

She could argue with me about it later, once she’d slept and eaten properly and had the strength to fight back the way I half wanted her to.

Tonight, she was staying with me. And whoever had sent those men to her hallway was going to learn, one way or another, exactly what that decision would cost them.

Chapter Five

Valentina

It had been four days of living inside Dmitri Golovin’s penthouse, and I still hadn’t decided whether I was a guest or a prisoner.

The city outside still glittered, while my own life had suddenly become something I barely recognized. A security detail walked me between rooms now, quiet men who didn’t make eye contact but never allowed more than ten feet between us. The raid dominated every local news channel I flipped past, anchors speaking in grave tones about an underground gambling ring and a federal operation gone violently wrong, careful never to use the Golovin name outright even though everyone in the city knew exactly whose building they meant. I flinched at the sound of the elevator now. I flinched at doors closing too hard, at trays dropped in the kitchen, at anything that carried even a distant echo of that night.

Sleep came in fragments, when it came at all. I’d drift off exhausted and wake up an hour later with my heart slamming, certain that gunfire was still going off somewhere close before the quiet of the penthouse reminded me of where I was.

What unsettled me most, though, wasn’t the flashbacks or the constant hum of fear under my ribs.

It was him.

I’d expected, once the flirting stopped serving any purpose, that whatever waited underneath it would be colder. Maybe cruel or at least indifferent. Instead, living under the same roof as Dmitri revealed a version of him I didn’t expect.

He still disappeared for hours at a stretch, returning some nights with his knuckles split and the same careless smirk, offering no explanation and expecting none of my questions either. And yet he noticed things nobody else in my life had ever bothered to notice. He noticed when I pushed food around a plate instead of eating it. He noticed when a car alarm outside made my shoulders lock up and would say something absurd and unrelated just to give my mind somewhere else to go. More than once, he noticed I wasn’t fine—and he simply looked at me until I stopped pretending.

I learned the rhythm of his nights, despite myself. Dmitri barely slept. I’d wake at 3 am for water and find him standing at the wall of windows overlooking the Strip, a glass of whiskey in hand. He drank like a man trying to outlast boredom rather than enjoy it, and there was something almost sad in watching him do it, though I kept asking myself why that thought bothered me the way it did.

Once, he caught me watching him from the kitchen doorway. He’d simply raised his glass in my direction without a word, like an acknowledgement that neither of us needed to talk about being awake at that hour.

He’d developed a kind of patience I hadn’t seen from him before the raid. He still teased. He still pushed at my boundaries the way he always had, testing to see how far a joke could go before I pushed back. But there was something softer, more tender, underneath it now. Something that hadn’t existed when all he’d wanted from me was a reaction.

One evening, he found me curled up on the couch with the television muted, staring at nothing in particular—and apparently decided he’d had enough of watching me do it.

“Get up,” he said, already crossing toward the door. “We’re going somewhere.”

“I’m not really in the mood to go anywhere.”

“You’re not in the mood to do anything, which is exactly why we’re going.” He held a hand out, not quite an order, but not quite a request either. “Trust me for twenty minutes. If it’s terrible, I’ll bring you straight back.”

I went because staring at the same muted channel for another hour sounded worse than whatever he had planned.

He took me down to one of the private lounges. It was the same kind of room I’d worked a hundred nights before, except this one sat empty and dark but for a few gold lights. I realized that, without the crowd, noise, and tension of watching wealthy men lose fortunes, it actually looked beautiful. Velvet chairs. Polished felt tables reflecting soft light off the glass wall. I’d never once, in over two years of working rooms like this, seen one at rest.

“What are we doing here?”

“Teaching you poker.” He pulled out a chair at the nearest table, gesturing for me to sit across from him. “You’ve spent years serving drinks to men playing this game. Might as well know what they’re actually doing.”

“I don’t think card games are going to fix whatever’s wrong with me right now.”

“They’re not supposed to fix anything.” He started shuffling, quick and practiced, the cards moving in his hands like they belonged there. “They’re supposed to give your brain something else to do for an hour. That’s all.”

I sat to humor him, but I found myself unexpectedly grateful for it within the first ten minutes. He explained the game patiently, more patiently than I’d have guessed he was capable of, walking me through hand rankings, betting patterns, and the art of reading another player’s tells.

I made mistakes constantly, and he laughed at most of them in a way that was not unkind. And the one time I correctly called his bluff on a hand I shouldn’t have won, he praised me with what sounded like genuine surprise.

“You’re cheating,” I accused him, halfway through the second hour, after he’d taken yet another pot off me with a hand I was certain had been worse than mine.

“I don’t need to cheat you. You fold every time you get nervous, and you get nervous constantly.”

“That’s not a tell; that’s just me being a normal, cautious person.”