Page 11 of Ruthless Bratva's Forced Virgin
“I’m not asking for an apology.” My voice was steady, which surprised me. “I’m asking for the truth. I deserve that much.”
“What you deserve,” he said, “and what is safe for you to have are not the same thing.”
I hated that I had to look up. I hated the way proximity to him rearranged the available air — as I said, “That is the most arrogant thing anyone has ever said to me.”
His jaw tightened. The compressed thing below the surface moved again. “You followed me into a restricted corridor. Alone. In costume. After a show in my casino.”
“Your—” The word landed wrong. I replayed it. “This is your casino.”
He said nothing.
The corridor seemed to tilt slightly under me. I looked at him—at the bespoke suit, the watch, the particular authority of someonewho didn’t ask rooms for permission—and I did the arithmetic I should have done weeks ago, and it came out to a number that made my stomach drop.
I work for him.
“I didn’t know you were here,” he said, and something in his voice shifted just enough to tell me it was true. “Not until tonight.”
The distance between us was not a foot anymore. I wasn’t sure when it had closed, whether I’d moved or he had or whether it had simply collapsed under its own weight, but the wall was solid at my back and he was close enough that the warmth of him was palpable.
I looked at his mouth, which was a mistake, and then back up at his eyes, which was a different kind of mistake, and I asked,“So what happens now?”
Again, I didn’t know which of us moved.
The kiss was nothing like two weeks ago. Two weeks ago there had been softness in it, intention slowed down to consideration. This was not that. This was everything the argument had wound tight and then let go—sharp and claiming and not particularly gentle, his hand at my jaw, my fingers finding the lapel of his jacket without my permission.
And then he pulled back an inch. His hand hadn’t moved.
In the silence, both of us breathing differently, he looked at me with those pale, unreadable eyes.
“Your name,” he said. His voice had changed register. Lower. Something in it that had not been there before.
I blinked. “What?”
“Your full name.” A pause. “Tell me.”
“Elena. Elena Morozova.”
The effect was immediate and strange. He went very still—stiller than his usual stillness, which was already extreme—and something moved across his face that I couldn’t interpret. It was not surprise exactly. It was more like recognition. Like a man who had been doing a calculation and had just received the final number.
His hand dropped from my jaw. He took a step back.
I watched his jaw clench before he turned around and walked away.
What I knew, walking down that corridor in the aftermath of four seconds that had rewritten the last two weeks entirely, was this: he was not a stranger passing through Vegas.
He owned the casino.
And I, apparently, danced in his house.
Chapter Four — Mikhail
I did not sleep.
This was not unusual. I had never been a man who slept easily—the habit had been trained out of me young, in the particular school that the Bratva ran for its sons, where the lesson was repeated until it became reflex: rest is a vulnerability. The men who sleep deeply are the men who don’t hear the door.
Beyond that was the fact that I was thePakhan, the absolute ruler of the Russian Bratva. Many lives were ties to mine. So I had learned to function on three hours, to keep the surface of my mind alert even when the rest of it was dark. It was useful. It had kept me alive on several occasions when others had not been so fortunate.
But this was not that kind of wakefulness. This was the kind that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with a woman in a sequined costume standing in a service corridor with fury in her eyes, saying‘you left’like an accusation I had no clean defense against.
