Page 23 of Brutal Bratva’s Owned Hostage

Dmitri

The days that followed the wedding settled into a rhythm I didn’t fully trust. Rhythms like this one rarely lasted long in my line of work.

On the surface, everything was stable. The casino floors ran smoothly. Dealers were back to their usual routines. The private lounge reopened under tighter security than before but otherwise functioned the way it had for years. The internal investigation into the raid had slowed to a crawl, mostly because nobody had turned up anything new to chase. Val was adjusting, slowly, to the strange new architecture of her life.

I kept my usual responsibilities running. I had meetings with my men about security protocols and calls with partners who were nervous about the federal attention still circling our operations. Mikhail had asked twice already whether the marriage had settled the perception problem the way I’d promised it would, and twice I’d told him yes without fully believing it myself. Nikolai had run the numbers on our exposure following the raid and pronounced the family financially stable enough to weather whatever scrutiny came next, though even his usual flat certainty carried a note of caution I didn’t like hearing from him.

My attention split in ways that frustrated me more than I let anyone see, half of it always tracking back to the penthouse. Back to Val and whatever she might be doing at any given hour.

Because something was wrong.

I felt it in a way I couldn’t shake. In the way I felt most things wrong in my world before I had proof enough to name it.

I found the proof three days after the wedding as I sat alone in my office, reviewing security logs I checked out of habit more than suspicion.

At first it looked minor. Just a handful of encrypted files related to financial routing, accessed outside normal hours. I assumed it was residue from the earlier breach, some cleanup process still working through the mess the raid had left behind.

Then I cross-checked time stamps against device logs, and the pattern that emerged made something in my chest go cold.

The access hadn’t come from outside our systems.

It had come from inside them. Specifically, from a device tied to my network credentials.

Instinctively, I ran the search again to be certain I hadn’t misread something in my suspicion or exhaustion. The result didn’t change. Someone had used my access, my clearance, to pull files over the last several days. It was careful and precise in a way that told me exactly what kind of person I was dealing with.

Someone working with structure, not chaos. Not a smash-and-grab looking for whatever they could find before getting caught. Someone methodically pulling exactly what they needed and nothing more, patient enough to spread the access out over days instead of hours to avoid tripping any obvious alarm.

Financial routing documents. Private meeting schedules. The kind of information that told a person not just what we did, but when, where, and through whom. The precise information of how this family actually moved money and made decisions.

I pulled up the full access history and forced myself to read through it slowly instead of scanning for the parts that frightened me most. Whoever this was had been careful about timing, pulling files during hours when routine maintenance traffic would have masked the activity from anyone doing a casual review. They’d touched three separate document clusters over five days, never more than a handful of files in any single session, spread out enough that no automated alert had ever tripped. This wasn’t someone panicking, grabbing whatever they could before getting caught. This was someone with time, patience, and a clear sense of exactly what they needed.

For one brief, unwelcome second, my mind went to Val.

I dismissed it almost as fast as it arrived, disgusted with myself for even letting the thought surface. Val didn’t have the technical skill for something like this. She didn’t have the years of experience required to navigate systems this deep without leaving obvious traces everywhere. She still flinched at raised voices and relied on me to walk her through basic pieces of this world that everyone else around her had absorbed by osmosis over decades. The idea of her quietly extracting sensitive documents through my credentials while sitting beside me every night was absurd on every level I examined it from.

And yet the timing bothered me in a way I couldn’t fully talk myself out of.

I chose not to bring it to anyone yet. Not Roman, not Nikolai, and certainly not Mikhail. Raising internal suspicion around Val again, so soon after the last accusation had nearly gotten her locked in a room and interrogated, wasn’t something I was willing to do without confirming exactly what I was looking at first.

Instead, I started quietly tracing the breach backward myself, checking access points one at a time, building a picture before I let anyone else near it. I’d learned long ago that half-formed suspicions, spoken too early in a room full of people already inclined toward the worst interpretation, had a way of hardening into conclusions nobody could walk back from afterward.

Roman came in when I was hunched over a second monitor I’d set up specifically for this and read my expression correctly before I’d said a word.

“You look like a man who found something he didn’t want to find.”

“Maybe.”

“You want to tell me what it is, or are you going to sit on it for three days before finally admitting you need help?”

I glanced up at him, almost scoffing. His expectant expression made me reconsider keeping this entirely to myself. He was my right-hand, after all. I didn’t need to ask for his discretion; it was implied on a primary level.

“Someone’s been pulling documents through my credentials. Financial routing, meeting schedules. Careful, patient extraction, not a smash-and-grab.”

His expression sharpened immediately. “And I didn’t find it? How long?”

“Days.”

“You don’t think it’s her,” he said, carefully neutral.