Page 12 of Ruthless Bratva's Forced Virgin
I sat at the desk in my private office and looked at the city until the sky went from black to the particular shade of deep blue that preceded dawn, and I thought. This was what I did instead of feeling things. I had learned that early, too.
Elena Morozova.
That was the name I kept returning to. The way it had landed when she said it—not the name itself, but what it had done to the information I’d been assembling since the night in the alley. A piece arriving late to a puzzle I’d been working for two weeks, slotting into a gap I hadn’t realized was shaped exactly like her.
Morozova was not a name I had encountered. But it was Russian. And she was young, alone, and worked in my casino. And I had already figured that her loan had been designed, I’d known that from the night we met.
I had a rule about coincidences. I did not believe in them.
I picked up my phone at five-thirty in the morning and called Alexei.
He answered on the third ring, which meant he’d been awake. Alexei was frequently awake at irregular hours—he said it was when he thought most clearly, which I believed, because his mind operated with a cold and elegant precision that benefited from quiet. He was the most dangerous of my brothers in the specific way that accountants and surgeons were dangerous: not through force, but through the ability to understand a system well enough to break it.
“Brother,” he spoke.
“I need everything on a woman,” I said. “Elena Morozova. Twenty-two. Russian-American. Currently employed as a dancer in the VOLNAYA cast. Prior employment at The Constellation.” I paused. “I need her full financial history. Specifically, I need the origin and chain of ownership of a private debt she’s been carrying for approximately six months.”
A brief silence.
“How deep do you want me to go?”
“All the way.”
“Timeline?”
“You have until eight.”
Another pause, this one carrying the faint weight of a question Alexei had decided not to ask.
“Done,” he said, and ended the call.
I put the phone down and looked at the city, trying to identify what I was feeling.
The honest answer was that I was feeling several things simultaneously, which I disliked, because multiple feelings created interference and interference created errors in judgment, and I had already made at least one significant error in judgment in the past two weeks and was not eager to compound it.
Someone had put her here. In my casino, under my roof, inside the perimeter of my world. Someone had engineered her presence with the patience and attention to detail of a personwho understood that the most effective weapons were the ones that arrived looking like accidents.
And then there was the memory of her in that corridor, chin up, color in her face, the full force of her attention directed at me without deflection or pretense.
The vibration of my phone caught my attention.
Alexei.
I gazed up at the clock. It was 7:43.
“Tell me,” I prompted.
“The original loan originated eighteen months ago from a private lending entity registered in Nevada as Meridian Financial Solutions. Clean paperwork, legally compliant, structured to pass surface scrutiny.” He paused. I heard the faint sound of keys. “Meridian Financial Solutions is a subsidiary of a holding company called Stargate Consolidated, registered in Delaware. Stargate Consolidated is majority-owned by a shell entity in the Cayman Islands called Harborline Group.” Another pause. “Harborline Group has its beneficial ownership structured through three additional layers, but the endpoint is a real estate and entertainment holding company based in Las Vegas.”
I already knew the name before he said it.
“Volkov Entertainment Group,” Alexei said. “Roman Volkov.”
The silence between us lasted approximately four seconds.
“She was targeted,” I said.
“From the beginning. The loan itself was designed to be unrepayable on her income. The compounding structure was—and I want to be precise here—mathematically impossible to service on what a showgirl earns. It wasn’t a loan. It was a leash.” His voice was even, but I knew Alexei well enough to hear the cold displeasure underneath it.
