Page 5 of Brutal Bratva’s Owned Hostage

Valentina had walked into that room as a hostess nobody had reason to remember. She was walking out of it—or rather, being carried out of it—as a loose end. A witness. A liability with a face that dangerous men now had reason to look for.

Chapter Three

Valentina

I woke to silence. Silence that I knew was wrong even before I could pinpoint why.

My body had learned to wake up to the slightest noise, from the hum of the casino through the thin apartment walls to sirens a mile down the Strip.

But this silence had weight to it.

The cool, filtered air smelled faintly of cedar and something expensive. For several seconds I lay still with my eyes shut, waiting for my mind to lead me to an explanation. But it refused.

Then it all came back at once.

Gunfire. The doors splintering inward. Screaming that hadn’t sounded human until I realized it was coming from men in three-thousand-dollar suits diving under card tables like animals. Blood, more blood than I’d ever seen outside of a TV screen, spreading dark and glossy across the floor. And Dmitri, standing over a man who was no longer moving, gun still raised, a stranger wearing a familiar face.

I sat up so quickly the room tilted.

My hands went first to my own body, checking to confirm that none of the blood on that floor had belonged to me. And that was when I noticed a second absurdity—I wasn’t wearing my uniform. Someone had put me in soft cotton pajamas. They were pale blue, clearly expensive, and clearly not mine.

Someone undressed me while I was unconscious. Someone had made a decision about my body without asking me a single question first. That made the fabric feel dirty against my skin.

Panic climbed up my throat so fast that I nearly missed the sound of footsteps.

“You’re awake.”

Dmitri stood in the bedroom doorway holding two mugs of coffee like this was any ordinary morning, like hours ago he hadn’t put a bullet through a man’s skull just feet from where I’d been standing. His hair was still damp and dark under the low morning light coming through floor-to-ceiling windows. Apparently, he’d showered.

“Where am I?”

“My penthouse.” He said simply, crossing the room. He set one mug down on the nightstand within my reach and kept the other for himself. “You passed out after the raid. I brought you somewhere secure.”

“Who changed my clothes?”

Something in my voice must have carried the accusation clearly enough because he stopped, and the entertained expression he wore like a second skin actually faltered.

“My housekeeper. Nadia. You’d been unconscious for almost two hours, and you were still in the uniform. It looked uncomfortable, so I asked her to change you into something you could actually sleep in.”

I searched his face for the lie and didn’t find it. Dmitri had never once, in months of unwanted flirting, sounded like this. No teasing. As if he understood how thin the ground was under both of us this morning and had decided not to test it.

“I want to go home.”

“Eat something first.”

“I don’t want to eat. I want to go home.” My voice cracked on the last word in a way I hated, and I hated it more because I could tell he’d noticed.

I looked around the room instead of at him. The penthouse was enormous, all clean lines and dark wood. Understated luxury that didn’t need to announce itself the way the casino downstairs did.

I gazed again at the floor-to-ceiling glass. My eyes lingered on the skyline, high enough up that the Strip’s noise didn’t reach us at all. It hit me slowly that this was more than simple wealth. This was something else.

It was the kind of power that could absorb a gunfight, a raid, and several deaths and still produce a relaxed and indifferent calm by morning. That frightened me nearly as much as the shooting had.

Then I noticed the stack of clean towels folded at the foot of the bed and a glass of water someone had left on the far nightstand, condensation still beading on the outside like it had been poured recently. Someone had thought of my comfort on a night that had ended with a man dead on a casino floor. It should have felt like kindness. But instead, it felt like I’d become a problem someone competent was managing.

“You can’t go home yet,” Dmitri said, setting his coffee down and folding his arms, and the shift in his tone told me he’d been waiting for me to say it. “Not until we know more about who did this.”

“I’m not part of whatever this is. I work there. I pour drinks. That’s the extent of my involvement in your family’s business, and I’d like to keep it that way.”