Page 59 of Brutal Bratva’s Owned Hostage

Saying it out loud to Camila made it real in a way that startled me, the weight of the admission settling into my chest with more permanence than it had carried privately in my head.

Camila looked at me with playful happiness clear in her expression. “I mean, I could have told you that weeks ago, but I’m glad you’re finally catching up.”

“You could have told me?” I repeated, half asking.

“Val, you talk about that man like he hung the moon, even when you’re complaining about him. I’ve watched you go from terrified hostess avoiding his flirting to a woman who lit up every time his name came up in conversation. It wasn’t exactly subtle.”

“I didn’t realize it was that obvious.”

“It was that obvious.” She squeezed my hand across the table. “For what it’s worth, given everything you’ve just told me, everything you’ve survived together, I think it’s allowed to be real. I think you’re allowed to actually have this, whatever complicated, dangerous form it takes.”

“Even knowing what his world actually looks like? What I’ve watched him do?” I asked, not because I was unsure but because I wanted to hear the consideration out loud.

“Especially knowing that, honestly. Because you went into this with your eyes open, Val. You’ve seen the absolute worst of what this life requires, and you’re still choosing to stay in it. That’s not naïve. That’s a decision, made with full information, which is more than most people ever get to say about who they love.”

“I keep waiting for someone to tell me I’m making a mistake. That I should have run the first chance I got, back before any of this became permanent.”

“Do you want me to tell you that?”

“No,” I admitted, surprising myself with how quickly the answer came. “I don’t think I do.”

“Then I won’t. Not because I’m not worried about you, sometimes, in the middle of the night when I actually think about what your life looks like now. But because I’ve watched you choose this, deliberately, even though the beginning wasn’t much of a choice. That’s not the same thing as being trapped in it.”

I smiled at hearing my complicated feelings reflected back at me with the clarity only a good friend like Camila could offer.

“How’s everything else been?” I asked, redirecting some of the attention away from myself. “The floor, the regulars, all of it. I feel like I’ve been gone longer than I actually was.”

“Mostly normal since I’ve been back, believe it or not. Table six finally gave up asking about you once word got around that you were officially married.” She grinned. “Varley’s absence got noticed, obviously, though management kept the official story vague enough that most people just assumed he retired suddenly. I guess that was why I couldn’t imagine he was actually, you know, killed here. ”

“Do you think anyone actually suspects the truth?”

“A few of the older staff, probably. Nobody’s saying anything out loud, though. I mean I didn’t know. This business runs on knowing which questions not to ask.” She shrugged. “New management’s already been appointed for his old responsibilities. Quiet guy, keeps to himself. I haven’t fully sized him up yet.”

“What’s he like?”

“Careful. Formal, almost to a fault. Introduced himself to the whole floor staff individually on his first day, which nobody’s ever bothered doing before. Some of the girls think it’s charming. I think it’s a little unsettling, honestly, though I couldn’t tell you exactly why.”

“Maybe it’s just because we’re all still on edge after everything.”

“Probably. Or maybe I’ve just gotten permanently suspicious of anyone new who shows up around here asking a lot of careful, polite questions.” She said it lightly, but something in her tone suggested she meant it more seriously than the joke implied. “I’ll keep an eye on him for you, if it helps. Report back if anything feels off.”

“I’d appreciate that, actually.”

By the time my break ended and I headed back to the penthouse with the security men, I felt the relief of having said the truest, most vulnerable thing I’d been carrying out loud to someone who mattered.

Later, alone in the quiet of the penthouse, Dmitri still finishing a call with Roman somewhere down the hall, I found myself sitting by the window overlooking the Strip, reflecting on everything the last two months had actually put me through.

Fear, more than I’d ever experienced in my entire life before the raid changed everything. Violence, witnessed up close in ways I’d never imagined I’d have to reckon with. Uncertainty, the exhaustion of never quite knowing whether tomorrow would bring another threat or another quiet, ordinary morning. And underneath all of it, transformation, which came slow and steady, reshaping me into someone I barely recognized when I compared her to the uninterested hostess who’d first caught Dmitri Golovin’s attention across a poker lounge floor.

Something clearer emerged from turning all of that over.

I was no longer simply reacting to Dmitri’s world, letting fear and circumstance dictate every choice I made inside it. I was choosing my place within it now, deliberately, with full knowledge of exactly what that choice required and exactly what it had already cost.

I thought about the woman I’d been months ago, without ever once imagining a life that included armed security, safe rooms, or a husband capable of ending a threat in the space of a single heartbeat. That woman would have run from everything I’d survived since, would have called it insanity to stay, would have packed her things the moment danger first arrived at her door instead of learning to live beside or even inside it. Something in me had changed enough since then that running no longer felt like the obvious answer, or even an appealing one.

I thought about Vale’s words in that safe room, about being the one thing Dmitri couldn’t afford to lose, about becoming, whether I wanted it or not, the center of someone else’s war against everything Dmitri had built. The fear those words carried hadn’t fully faded. I doubted it ever completely would, as long as Vale remained a threat circling somewhere beyond the edges of our life.

But underneath that fear, a steadier certainty and clarity had taken root.