Page 7 of Brutal Bratva’s Owned Hostage

“Valentina.”

My name in this stranger’s mouth seemed like a physical blow.

I backed up a step, keys still clutched uselessly in my hand, my mind scrambling for an exit that didn’t exist in a hallway barely wide enough for two people to pass. Every rule I’d absorbed over three years of working in a room full of dangerous men—stay calm, stay small, don’t give them a reason—evaporated the moment I understood no version of politeness could get me out of this one.

“We just want to talk,” the second one said, though nothing in his voice made that sound remotely true.

I turned to run and made it exactly one step before a hand closed around my arm hard enough to bruise, yanking me back with enough force that pain shot bright and sharp up into my shoulder. I screamed, the sound tearing out of me before I’d consciously decided to make it, every image from the night before crashing back into my skull at once—gunfire, blood, the flat crack of a weapon discharging feet from where I stood.

I fought, twisting hard against the grip on my arm, nails raking uselessly against a hand three times the strength of mine.

Then the hallway exploded with noise.

The man holding me went down before I understood what had happened, his grip releasing all at once as he collapsed against the wall behind him.

The second man barely had time to turn before he was slammed into the opposite wall with a violence that rattled my neighbor’s door. I watched, frozen, as Dmitri finished him in seconds, his movements economical and merciless.

The hallway went quiet except for my breathing, which was ragged and loud in my ears.

Dmitri turned toward me slowly, chest rising and falling hard, something violent and unspent still burning behind his eyes. It took me a moment, standing there shaking against my door, to understand what his presence in the hallway actually meant.

He hadn’t simply worried about me from a distance; he had followed me the entire way home.

He’d known. He’d anticipated this.

He’d known and let me walk out anyway, arguing with him the whole time about control and a world I supposedly didn’t belong to. He’d simply followed at a distance rather than forced the point, because some part of him had understood I needed to hear it from the men in this hallway before I’d believe it.

That should have made me angry. Instead all I felt was the cold understanding that I had been wrong—and that being wrong had very nearly cost me everything.

Chapter Four

Dmitri

I knew she’d be followed the moment she walked out of my building.

I could have stopped her. It would have taken just one word to the men downstairs, one lock engaged on the elevator, and she’d have stayed in that penthouse whether she liked it or not. I thought about it for the length of time it took her to cross the living room and reach the door, weighing the satisfaction of keeping her safe against the certainty of what it would do to whatever fragile thing existed between us if I forced her hand. Val already believed I was trying to cage her. Proving her right seemed like the fastest way to lose whatever ground I’d gained by not touching her, not pushing when she’d told me to stop, not being the man she expected me to be.

So I let her go, and I hated myself a little for it. Then I got in my car and followed her cab at a distance, close enough to matter and far enough that she wouldn’t notice.

I could call it instinct. I could attribute it to every year I’d spent learning to read danger before it showed itself properly. Either way, the moment I watched two men I didn’t recognize slip through the side entrance of her building less than a minute behind her, every quiet hope that I’d been overreacting collapsed.

I was out of the car and moving before I’d finished processing it, phone already against my ear, Roman’s voice sharp and immediate on the other end.

“Her building. Now. Bring two men, quiet, no sirens.”

“Dmitri, what—”

“Now, Roman.”

I didn’t wait to hear whether he understood. I took the stairwell two steps at a time instead of the elevator. I heard her scream before I reached her floor, and something in my chest came apart in a way I didn’t understand.

By the time I cleared the stairwell door, one man already had a hand around her arm, and she was fighting him with the desperate violence of someone who’s never had to fight. The second man stood a few feet back, weapon half raised, watching the hallway rather than her, which told me he was the one running this and she was simply the job.

I shot the one holding her before either of them realized I was in the hallway. He dropped, Val stumbled free, and I didn’t slow down long enough to feel anything about the kill before I closed the distance on the second man and put him into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster.

He went down easier than I wanted him to. Some professional part of my mind distantly noted that I should have kept him breathing long enough to ask him questions, that I should have found out who’d sent him and how they’d known where she lived, that I should have handled this the way I’d handled every other threat. But I finished him fast and turned toward Val instead.

She was pressed against her own front door, shaking hard enough that I could see it from six feet away, her eyes fixed on me with an expression I didn’t like at all. It was not gratitude. It was not even fear of the men on the floor. She was looking at me the way you’d look at something that might have proven every reason you had to be afraid of it.