Page 12 of Brutal Bratva’s Owned Hostage

He swore under his breath and answered it with obvious irritation. Within seconds, whatever ease had settled into him over the last hour drained away. His posture changed. His jaw tightened. He went quiet, listening to whoever was on the other end without a single interruption. I watched the version of him I’d started to feel comfortable around disappear entirely, replaced by something colder and considerably more alert.

“When?” he questioned, voice clipped. “How long ago?”

Whatever answer came back changed his face in a way I didn’t like at all.

“I’ll call you back.”

He set the phone down slowly, staring at it for a beat longer than felt necessary. When he finally looked up at me, the fear that had lived under my ribs for days curled tighter than it had since the raid.

“What happened?”

He didn’t answer right away, and the silence stretched long enough that I already knew whatever came next was going to be bad.

“Someone accessed the lounge’s internal employee records tonight,” he said, his tone low and even, like he was choosing every word carefully before letting it out. “Personnel files. Schedules.”

“Oh….” My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to.

He held my gaze.

“They used your credentials to do it.”

“What?” I said, my voice just above a whisper.

I sat there for a long moment, the words refusing to fully land, the storm still hammering against the glass behind him. Whatever softness had existed between us an hour ago felt suddenly very far away.

Chapter Six

Dmitri

The boardroom on the penthouse’s private floor was colder than anywhere else in the building, and not by accident. It was designed that way years ago, stripped of the excess that ran through every other room the Golovin name touched. It was just dark wood, a bank of security monitors along one wall, and enough silence that a man could hear his own pulse if he sat still long enough. Down on the casino floors, we sold people the illusion that money bought warmth. Up here, we dealt in the truth underneath that illusion, which was considerably colder.

I hadn’t slept more than three hours since the call broke off whatever had been building between Val and me in that private lounge. So I walked into the meeting already short on patience, which wasn’t a good place to start when the subject on the table was her.

I’d spent most of the elevator ride up rehearsing what I already knew this meeting would demand of me—patience I didn’t currently have, distance from her I wasn’t sure I could manufacture convincingly, the discipline to sit at that table and discuss Valentina as a security problem rather than a woman I felt compelled to protect. I hadn’t managed to talk myself into any of it by the time the doors opened.

Roman stood near the back wall, half his attention on a tablet feeding him security updates, half on the room itself— present, useful, careful never to sit at the table unless someone asked him to. None of our right-hand men were usually invited to meetings like these, but Roman was invited because the issue at hand involved my area of the Golovin empire, of which Roman was a primary member.

Nikolai, my cousin, sat with his own tablet, scrolling through something with an unhurried precision that made him terrifying in negotiations. Mikhail, my brother, occupied the head of the table the way he occupied most rooms. He was the Pakhan, after all. Viktor sat to his left, arms crossed, already wearing an expression that was always difficult to interpret. Alexei sat across from Mikhail, quiet, watching everything with a stillness that told me he was running calculations in his head already.

Varley sat near the end of the table, hands folded, his expression concerned.

Something about him sitting there annoyed me more than it should have. I couldn’t explain why, only that every time I looked at him lately something in the back of my skull itched in a way I didn’t like.

Nikolai started without preamble, which was not new for him. “Employee credentials assigned to Valentina Cruz were used to access internal shift schedules and restricted game information in the hours before the raid. Security timestamps place the access directly inside our systems. Encrypted communications tied to the federal movement upstairs originated from terminals near the VIP lounge, the same terminals her login has access to.”

He turned the tablet so the rest of us could see the timeline laid out clearly even though I’d already seen it all on Roman’s tablet. Dates and access points were stacked in neat rows that made the story look simple even though nothing about the last six days had been simple at all.

“Objectively,” Nikolai continued, “this looks bad.”

“It looks exactly like what it is,” Viktor pointed out, not bothering to soften it. “Whether she did it herself or someone used her credentials without her knowledge, we can’t rule out infiltration. We’ve survived this long by eliminating threats early instead of sentimentally.”

I felt my jaw tighten. Of course, Viktor wasn’t wrong. Cruelty wasn’t the point for him; efficiency was. But it didn’t make it easier to sit there and listen to her being discussed like an item that needed resolving.

“The evidence is too clean,” Alexei said before I had to say anything myself. He hadn’t looked up from his own notes yet, still sorting something out privately before he offered it to the room. “Whoever coordinated a raid sophisticated enough to hit both our legal floor and the private game in the same ten minutes isn’t the kind of person who leaves their fingerprints sitting in plain sight a week later. This is either sloppy, or it’s meant to look exactly this obvious.”

“A frame,” Nikolai said, considering it. “Possible. It doesn’t change the political exposure, though. Whether she’s guilty or was set up, her name is attached to a leak inside our operation. Partners will ask questions regardless of what actually happened.”

Varley leaned forward slightly, voice smooth as he opined, “The safest path might be isolating her. A full interrogation, until we understand precisely what she does and doesn’t know. Better to be thorough now than exposed later.”