Page 65 of Brutal Bratva’s Owned Hostage

His hand went for something concealed beneath his jacket, faster than I’d anticipated given how still he’d stood moments earlier. I fired almost simultaneously, training overriding conscious thought the same way it always did in the second between recognizing a threat and responding to it.

The room erupted into a controlled burst of violence, not chaos but precision, both of us moving like men who’d spent years training for moments like this one. Vale was faster than I’d expected, more skilled than his careful reputation had suggested. Each shot he fired was calculated rather than desperate, each movement he made designed to close distance while minimizing his own exposure.

We circled each other in the confined space, exchanging fire in short, controlled bursts. He clipped the edge of a support column beside me, plaster dust exploding into the air between us, and I answered with a shot that caught his forearm, though not deeply enough to slow him significantly.

I felt the first bullet before I fully registered being hit—a sharp, burning impact along my shoulder that spun me half a step sideways before I forced my body to keep moving. To keep firing and closing the distance between us instead of retreating.

The second hit landed lower, along my side, the impact driving the air from my lungs in a way that made the room briefly swim at the edges of my vision. I stayed upright through sheer, stubborn will, some part of my mind already calculating how much longer my body could realistically sustain this exchange before it simply stopped cooperating entirely.

But I didn’t stop.

I closed the distance instead, ignoring the growing weight of my own blood soaking through my shirt. I ignored the distant quality pain took on once adrenaline flooded my body past its normal threshold. Vale fired again, missing narrowly as I moved, and I used that one-second gap in his rhythm to close the final few feet between us.

The final shot came from me, precise in a way that left no room for uncertainty about the outcome.

Vale collapsed.

Silence followed almost immediately after.

I remained standing for only a few seconds longer. The pain arrived all at once, sharp and total, my legs suddenly uncertain beneath me in a way they hadn’t been moments earlier when survival still required them functioning properly. The floor tilted slowly toward me despite every instinct still fighting to keep me upright a moment longer.

I didn’t fall in fear.

I fell after certainty. After absolute confirmation that the war Vale had two years quietly building toward had finally, definitively ended.

My team breached the doorway seconds after I went down, their voices distant and urgent through my muffled hearing.

“Stay with me, boss.” One of my men, a young operative named Petrov who’d only been with the family two years, knelt over me, his hands pressing firm against the worst of the bleeding, his voice telling me he was trying very hard not to sound panicked. “Ambulance is four minutes out. Roman’s already on his way.”

I tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t quite assemble themselves properly, my mouth moving without producing anything coherent.

“Don’t try to talk. Just breathe. In and out, that’s all you need to do right now.”

I thought of Val, briefly, before the edges of my vision began narrowing further, of the memory of her face across that candlelit terrace the night before.

I’d promised her I would come back.

I intended to keep that promise, whatever it currently cost my body to honor it.

Roman’s voice cut through the growing haze somewhere above me, though I couldn’t fully make out the words anymore, everything fading into something distant and increasingly difficult to hold onto. I felt hands lifting me and the jarring pain of being transported despite whatever care the men handling me were clearly trying to exercise.

“You’re not dying tonight,” Roman said, close enough now that his voice cut through the fog more clearly than anything else had managed. “You hear me, Dmitri? You survived worse than this a decade ago. You’re not ending your night on the floor of Vale’s last pub after everything it took to get here. Val is waiting for you.”

I wanted to tell him I understood, that I had no intention of failing the one promise that actually mattered tonight, but the darkness pulling at the edges of my awareness had grown too heavy to fight against much longer.

The last coherent thought I managed to hold onto was that I’d promised Val I would come back to her.

As the darkness finally closed over everything, I held onto that promise like the only thing that actually mattered anymore, trusting my body to somehow honor it even as consciousness abandoned me.

The last thing I registered clearly was the sound of sirens somewhere distant, growing louder, and beneath it, faintly, Roman’s voice repeating my name like an anchor thrown out to keep me from drifting too far beyond reach.

Then nothing.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Valentina

I knew something was wrong before anyone actually told me.