Page 4 of Brutal Bratva’s Owned Hostage

The first shot went off before I’d even pulled my weapon from its holster, and the room detonated into the typical chaos that gunfire always brought with it—chairs scraping backward, men diving beneath tables that offered no real cover, someone screaming in a language I didn’t have time to place. I drew my gun up and got moving, shouting orders at my security that came out concise and automatic, years of training taking over somewhere beneath the part of my brain that was still catching up to what was happening.

Two of the intruders went down fast, my men earning their pay in the space of about four seconds. A third caught one of our dealers across the shoulder, and the man crumpled against the table with a pained cry.

I was moving toward the east side of the room, toward the man from Macau, who had more reason than most to be a target tonight, when I saw her.

Val.

She hadn’t moved.

Everyone else in that room, whatever their job, whatever their loyalty, had at least the sense to duck, to run, to get low behind something solid. Val stood exactly where she was when the first shot rang out, frozen between two overturned chairs, a tray of half-full glasses still gripped in one hand, like her body hadn’t gotten the message that the rest of the world had gone to hell around her. Her face had gone the color of the tablecloths. Her eyes were huge and blank, fixed on nothing.

Not ten feet from her, one of the intruders was turning, weapon raised, pinning her in his sight. He apparently didn’t care who she was, only that she was standing between him and the door.

I don’t remember deciding to move. I only remember the weight of the gun in my hand and the narrow tunnel my vision collapsed into, everything outside of him and her going unclear and irrelevant at the edges. I fired once, and he dropped before his finger had finished its pull, blood arcing across the polished floor in a pattern I’d seen more times than I could count.

This time, I thought about it.

Val saw all of it.

She saw the exact second the bullet went through him. She saw him fold. She saw the blood, close enough that some of it reached her shoes.

I’d killed more men than I could name or count over the years, and none of it had cost me a night’s sleep. I wasn’t proud of that. I also wasn’t ashamed of it. It was simply the arithmetic of the life I’d been born into, the price of the world I moved through. But watching her face did something to me, something that felt uncomfortably close to shame, even though the man on the floor had earned exactly what he’d gotten.

Her knees buckled before I could reach her.

I crossed the last few feet at a dead run and caught her before she hit the ground, one arm hooking under her before her legs gave out entirely, the tray clattering somewhere behind us. She was shaking with a tremor that ran the length of her whole body. Her breath came in short pulls that didn’t give her enough air. Her hand found the front of my jacket and gripped it. It was probably just a reflex to hold onto something in a room that had become enveloped in chaos.

“Val.” I kept my voice low, though I doubted she could hear much of anything past the ringing the gunfire had probably left in her ears. “You’re alright. Look at me. You’re alright.”

She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking past my shoulder at the man on the floor. I turned my body slightly, instinctively, to block the view, though it was several seconds too late to do her any real good.

Around us, things were winding down. My security fanned out to secure the door as the last of the intruders were either down or bolting for whatever exit hadn’t been covered yet. Someone was shouting for a medic for the dealer who’d taken a hit to his shoulder. All of it was entirely secondary to the woman going limp against my chest.

Roman found me maybe ninety seconds later.

“We’ve got federal agents two floors up executing a warrant on the casino’s main office. Alexei’s people are already moving on it.”

“We should head to your office. I’ll give the full situation report,” he added when I didn’t respond.

“Not now.”

“Dmitri,” he called.

“I said not now.” I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t need to.

He huffed. “Who is she?”

“Nobody you need to worry about.”

That wasn’t true, and some part of me already knew it wasn’t true even as I said it.

I didn’t wait for Roman’s permission. I got an arm under her knees and lifted her. She made a small sound against my shoulder and her fingers tightened weakly in the fabric of my jacket, like she was afraid I’d set her down somewhere unsafe if she let go.

I wouldn’t. I understood that with a clarity that surprised me, carrying her past the wreckage of shattered glass and the wide, careful berth my men gave us without being told to. Whatever this had started as, whatever game I’d told myself I was playing every time I crossed a room to talk to her, it had stopped being a game the moment I put a bullet through a man’s skull to keep hers intact.

She’d seen exactly what I was tonight. Most women who saw that part of me eventually learned to either romanticize it or run from it. I didn’t yet know which direction Val would go, once the shock wore off enough for her to think clearly again. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I found I genuinely didn’t know how I wanted that question to resolve.

What I did know was that letting her walk away from tonight untouched wasn’t a possibility anymore. Too many people had seen her in that room. Too many of the men still standing, both ours and theirs, now knew her face. They now knew she’d been close enough to watch a man die by my hand.