Page 55 of Brutal Bratva’s Owned Hostage

For the first time since the raid had torn my world apart and rebuilt it into something unrecognizable, I didn’t feel like I was simply surviving my own life.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Dmitri

I woke before Val did, the way I usually did no matter where we happened to be.

The island carried a quiet Las Vegas never allowed itself, no distant sirens threading through the dark, no constant hum of neon bleeding through curtains that never quite blocked it out completely.

I lay there a while, listening to the quiet in a way I rarely allowed myself back in the city, where every silence eventually resolved into some new demand on my attention. Here, the silence simply existed for its own sake, unbothered by anything requiring my immediate response.

For a brief moment, I allowed myself to simply exist inside that stillness, lying beside her without reaching for my phone, without running through the mental checklist of threats and contingencies that usually claimed my first waking thought.

Val slept beside me, her presence calm and entirely unguarded in a way I rarely saw during her waking hours. Sleep had smoothed away the vigilance she’d built over the last two months, the readiness she carried even during ordinary conversations, the way some part of her always braced for the next threat to announce itself. Here, as she lay asleep, none of that showed.

It was just her, breathing slow and even.

Something about the sight unsettled me in a way danger never quite managed to. Watching her this unguarded reminded me of how much I’d need to protect. It showed me exactly how much I stood to lose if I failed to finish what Vale had started properly.

I got up, careful not to wake her, and made my way to the back of the house.

She was already up when I arrived about an hour later.

She stood at the stove, moving through the small kitchen with more confidence than she’d carried the last time I saw her in the penthouse kitchen. She cracked eggs into a bowl with the easy, practiced motion of someone who’d clearly cooked for herself for years before any of this began. The domesticity of the scene struck me as almost foreign, given everything that had defined our life together up to this point—gunfire and tactical retreats rather than quiet mornings spent making breakfast in a borrowed kitchen.

I stood in the doorway a moment, simply watching her, some part of me reluctant to disturb whatever peace she’d found in the ordinary motions of preparing food for the two of us.

When she noticed me, her face brightened up with a small but real smile.

“You got up early,” she commented.

“Habit.” I crossed into the kitchen, leaning against the counter beside her rather than intruding on the actual cooking, which I had no particular skill at and no intention of embarrassing myself attempting. “You seem to know your way around this kitchen better than I expected.”

“Marisol showed me where everything was yesterday, while you were on the phone with Roman for the third time in an hour.”

“Was I really on with him that many times?”

“You really were.” She glanced at me sideways, something teasing in her expression. “For a man who told me this was supposed to be a genuine withdrawal, you spent an alarming amount of last night still working.”

“Old habits.”

“Apparently.” She plated the eggs alongside some fruit Marisol had left cut and ready in the refrigerator, sliding one plate across the counter toward me. “Eat. You look like you need it more than you’re willing to admit.”

“This is better than I would have expected,” I told her after the first bite.

“Is that supposed to be a compliment, Dmitri Golovin?”

“I love the sound of my full name on your lips,” I said, my voice just above a whisper, making her eyes flick back to her plate. “And it’s a real compliment.”

We kept eating silently, our eyes continually finding each other’s.

“This island is too quiet,” she said at one point, glancing out toward the water visible through the kitchen’s wide window. “I keep expecting to hear something. A car alarm, sirens, anything. It’s strange, how much I’ve apparently gotten used to noise as a kind of background reassurance.”

“You’ll adjust. Give it another day.”

“Or I’ll just start making my own noise to compensate.”

“Please don’t. I’ve grown fond of the quiet.”