Page 66 of Brutal Bratva’s Owned Hostage

I woke in the middle of the night to a silence that felt too heavy, too final, to be nice. I reached for my phone out of pure instinct, checking for messages that should have arrived hours earlier, some update from Dmitri or Roman confirming the operation had gone according to plan. There was nothing.

I lay there a moment, staring at the ceiling, trying to talk myself out of the dread already building in my chest. Operations like this took time. Coordination across five locations couldn’t possibly resolve as quickly as I wanted it to, and silence didn’t necessarily mean anything had gone wrong. But each repetition felt thinner and less convincing than the last.

So I called his phone. It rang through to voicemail. I called Roman next, my hands already trembling despite every effort to stay calm, and it rang twice before going unanswered as well.

The penthouse felt unusually still around me. I sat on the edge of the bed, staring at my phone, willing it to light up with something, anything, that would prove the dread building steadily in my chest was simply anxiety rather than genuine premonition.

I went out of our bedroom.

Then I heard the elevator.

Roman appeared in the doorway moments later, and the expression on his face confirmed everything before he said a single word.

“Val.”

“Where is he?” My voice came out steadier than I expected, though everything inside me had already started to fracture.

“He’s injured. The operation succeeded, Val; Vale is dead, the network’s collapsed entirely. But Dmitri took two rounds during the final confrontation. He’s alive. He’s not stable yet, but he’s alive.”

The words landed in fragments, each one requiring separate processing before I could fully absorb what he was telling me. Injured. Alive. Not stable. I felt the room tilt slightly around me but told myself to remain calm.

“Take me to him.”

“Val—”

“Now, Roman. I need to see him now.”

He didn’t argue further, understanding that arguing would waste time neither of us actually had to spare. I didn’t remember the drive at all, only the blur of city lights sliding past a window I wasn’t actually looking through and Roman’s voice occasionally breaking the silence.

But I remembered being led quickly through a private entrance, down a hallway that smelled sharply of antiseptic, into a secured medical wing I hadn’t known existed until that exact moment, clearly one of the family’s private facilities maintained for situations like this.

And then I saw him.

Dmitri lay unconscious in a hospital bed, machines surrounding him with their steady, mechanical hum, monitors tracking his vitals in glowing lines across several screens. His face had gone pale in a way I’d never seen, drained of the warmth and color that usually animated his features. Bandages wrapped tightly around his shoulder and along his side, a thin tube feeding fluid into his arm, everything about the scene carrying the weight of genuine medical crisis rather than simple injury.

For the first time since any of this began, I understood what fear without control actually felt like.

It was not the immediate fear of gunfire that my body could at least respond to with movement and instinct. This was the helplessness of standing beside someone you loved while machines, doctors, and forces entirely beyond your control determined whether they lived or died.

I crossed to his bedside and took his hand, careful of the IV line. His skin was warmer than I expected given how pale he looked, and I found some small, stubborn comfort in that single detail.

“I’m here,” I said quietly, though I had no way of knowing whether he could hear me at all. “I’m not leaving.”

And I meant it completely. Over the following hours, I refused every gentle suggestion that I should rest, go eat something, or step away even briefly to collect myself. I stayed beside him constantly, holding his hand through every quiet hour, speaking to him even when he couldn’t answer, refusing to accept silence as something final rather than simply temporary.

The Golovin family arrived one by one.

Nikolai came first, his precise exterior cracking just slightly at the sight of his brother lying pale and unconscious in that bed. He spoke quietly with the attending doctor, nodding careful attention. Then he crossed to stand near me, his hand briefly finding my shoulder in a gesture of solidarity that surprised me given how reserved he usually was.

“He’s stronger than this looks,” Nikolai said quietly. “I’ve seen him survive worse.”

“Have you actually?”

“Once. A long time ago. He came back from that too.”

“What happened?”

“A rival family, before Vale, before any of this. He took a knife wound that should have killed him outright, according to the doctors who treated him at the time. He was unconscious for two days. Everyone had already started preparing for the worst.” Nikolai’s voice stayed even, though something underneath it carried genuine weight. “He woke up on the third morning asking whether the operation had succeeded before he even asked about his own condition. That’s simply who he is, Valentina. Duty and stubbornness in equal measure, both of them keeping him alive when either one alone might not have been enough.”