Page 17 of Ruthless Bratva's Forced Virgin
I stepped out of the car and stood in the dry night air and felt like a fish out of water.
Viktor led me up the steps without ceremony. The front door opened before he touched it.
Inside was even more grand, and way colder. High ceilings. Dark wood and stone floors. The kind of furnishings that were chosenfor permanence rather than comfort. However, it was warm, physically warm, the kind of heat that came from a building that had been maintained at exactly the right temperature by systems you couldn’t see—and it smelled faintly of something expensive and clean. Flowers, maybe. Something green.
I stood in the entrance hall and did not move, because the entrance hall alone was larger than my apartment, and somewhere in this building Mikhail Golovin was waiting for me, and I was trying very hard to assemble a version of myself that could handle whatever came next.
A woman descended the staircase.
She was perhaps thirty-five, elegant with her dark hair pinned back, a silk blouse, an assessing quality to her gaze that she made no effort to conceal. She looked at me the way a person looked at something they’d been briefed on but were now forming their own opinion about.
“Elena Morozova,” she said. “I’m Katerina Golovina. I manage the entertainment operations.”
She descended the last step and extended her hand, giving me a dry and brief handshake. “Mikhail is in his study. I’ll take you up.”
I could only nod in response, not because I was too intimidated to speak but because I had too many things to ask about at once.
I wiped the last of the glitter from my collarbone and followed her down a long hallway.
“Here we are.”
Katerina delivered me to a closed door and left.
I knocked.
“Come in,” Mikhail said.
He was at a desk by the window, standing when I entered. No jacket, which was the only concession to the hour—otherwise entirely composed, the white shirt immaculate, the watch catching the lamplight. He looked exactly like what he was: a man entirely at home in a room that was built to make other people feel small.
I thought about telling myself I didn’t feel small.
I felt a little small. But that didn’t stop me from asking, “So why the hell am I here? I thought we established that my life wasn’t yours to decide over.”
“Sit down,” he said.
“I’d rather stand.”
He looked at me. Something moved in his expression—acknowledgment, perhaps, or the very slight adjustment of a person recalibrating. He gestured toward the chairs across the desk anyway, an invitation rather than an instruction. I sat, because my legs were unsteady and pride had its limits.
He sat across from me and put a file on the desk between us.
“The debt was not an accident,” he declared. “It was constructed. The initial lender, the terms, the placement of the offer within your social circle—all of it was deliberate. Designed to trap youin a cycle you couldn’t pay your way out of on a showgirl’s salary.”
I looked at the file. Despite some of the numbers being familiar, I didn’t understand what exactly I was looking at.
“Deliberate? For what? Why?”
“Because you were useful in a specific position.” He held my gaze. “The man who built the mechanism is named Roman Volkov. He owns a rival casino operation and has been attempting to destabilize my business interests for some time. He needed leverage. He identified you as someone who could be made desperate and then positioned inside my operation.” He paused before going on. “Your debt was sold to the loan sharks as an enforcement mechanism. When they collected violently, you would be sufficiently frightened to cooperate with anyone who offered you a way out.”
The room was very quiet.
“I was supposed to be a spy,” I said.
“An involuntary one. He would have approached you eventually—someone would have made contact, offered to make the debt disappear in exchange for small favors. Information. Access.” He paused. “You’ve not gotten to that stage yet—”
“Because you were in the alley,” I said.
“Yes.”
