Page 31 of Brutal Bratva’s Owned Hostage

“I grew up understanding danger before I understood safety,” he answered. “That’s not a metaphor. My earliest real memories involve my father explaining which rooms in our house were safe to stand near windows in and which weren’t. Mikhail was groomed for leadership from the moment he could walk. Nikolai found his place in numbers and structure early, the same way Alexei found his in reading people and angles. Viktor became the fist because someone in the family always has to be the fist.”

“And you?”

“I became the one who learned to survive unpredictability. Nobody groomed me for a specific role, not the way they did the others. I filled whatever gap was left, which happened to be chaos. Risk. The parts of this business that require someone comfortable enough with danger to walk toward it instead of managing it from a safe distance.” He turned his glass slowly, mirroring my earlier gesture without seeming to notice he’d done it. “I never learned how to live without risk, because risk was the one constant I actually trusted. Everything else in that house could shift. Danger stayed reliable.”

I listened without interrupting, his voice carrying a rawness I hadn’t heard from him before. Not even on the night he’d come home bleeding and let me see how tired he actually was underneath the composure.

“That’s a strange thing to trust,” I said quietly.

“It is. I’ve had considerable time to notice that myself.” Something almost like a smile crossed his face, tired rather than amused.

“Did your brothers ever resent you for it? For being the one who didn’t get groomed into a specific role?”

“Not exactly. But for a while, Viktor thought unpredictability was a weakness dressed up as usefulness. It took him years to understand. Mikhail understood it faster. He’s always been better at seeing use in people before they fully see it in themselves.”

“And Alexei?”

“Alexei watches everyone the same way regardless of role. I don’t think resentment particularly interests him. He’s too busy calculating whether a person is useful or a liability to bother with anything as inefficient as jealousy.” Something wry passed behind his expression. “Your turn.”

I hesitated, unused to being the one handing over something real instead of simply absorbing whatever he offered. But the quiet of the restaurant made honesty feel possible in a way it usually didn’t.

“My family expected obedience,” I said slowly. “Not cruelly, exactly. I learned early that being good meant being quiet, being helpful, never creating trouble anyone had to clean up. Coming to Las Vegas was supposed to be temporary. A sacrifice I told myself I could manage for a year or two, until things got easier at home and I could go back to building whatever ordinary life I’d originally planned.”

“Did you resent them for it? The expectation.”

“Sometimes. Mostly I resented myself for how easily I fell into it. I never once tried to be anything except exactly what everyone needed me to be. It took me almost twenty years and a gunfight to realize how much of myself I’d quietly given up just to avoid being a burden to anyone.”

“That’s not a small thing to realize.”

“No. It isn’t.” I turned my glass again. “I used to think that made me good. Selfless, easy, someone people could rely on without ever having to worry about what I needed in return. Now I think it just made me easy to overlook.”

“It didn’t get easier.”

“No. It became something else entirely. Something that eventually led me to you, somehow, through the strangest, most violent possible path a person could take to get there,” I answered, a light laugh leaving my lips.

Dmitri reached across the table and took my hand without speaking, his thumb moving slowly over my knuckles, grounding rather than possessive. I realized, sitting there with his hand wrapped around mine, that I wasn’t nearly as afraid of silence as I used to be. Now it just felt like being known.

We talked about random, lighter stuff as our table was cleared and we were left with only drinks.

He told me about the first time he’d ever won a hand of poker as a teenager, hustling money off one of his father’s associates who’d underestimated him badly enough to lose twice. I told him about the one time I’d tried to run away from Bible study as a child, only to be found four houses down sitting on a neighbor’s porch swing, too polite even in rebellion to actually go anywhere useful.

By the time we finally stood to leave, it occurred to me that we were like a regular, romantic couple.

Outside, the night air carried the desert chill that always surprised newcomers to this city, the daytime heat vanishing the moment the sun went down. I hesitated on the sidewalk, working up the nerve to ask him something I’d been turning over for days.

“Can I go back to work?”

He stopped walking, studying me carefully under the streetlight. Then he asked, “At the lounge?”

“Yes. I know it’s complicated. But I’ve been sitting in that penthouse for weeks now, thinking, replaying everything. I need something else to do besides waiting to see what happens next. I need to feel like I have some piece of my life still moving forward under my own power, instead of just enduring whatever comes at me next.”

“This isn’t rebellion,” he said finally, more to himself than to me.

“No. It’s not about proving anything to you or fighting against being protected. I just can’t keep existing like this, frozen, waiting. I need to reclaim something that feels like mine.”

“I understand that.” He was quiet a moment longer. “You can go back. Under conditions.”

“What conditions?”