Page 23 of Ruthless Bratva's Forced Virgin
Elena Golovina existed now. In the law and the ledger of the world I commanded. She stood at my left and she had looked at me the way a wife looked at a husband for forty people who would not forget it, and by morning every significant figure in Las Vegas would know that moving against her was moving against me.
The machinery of protection had engaged. It should have felt like the close of a strategy. The satisfying completion of a sequence of moves that had proceeded logically from a threat to a solution.
What I felt instead was considerably more complicated and considerably less familiar.
She was still beside me, and the room was continuing its gradual wind-down, and I was aware of her in the way I had been aware of her since a hotel suite two weeks ago that I had left before dawn because staying had seemed like the less disciplined option. I was aware of the warmth of her at my left side and the faint scent of whatever Katerina’s people had put in her hair and the fact that the slight tension in her jaw had eased incrementally over the last hour, which was either the evening becoming familiar or something else that I was not examining directly.
I had told everyone she was a weakness I was containing. Standing beside her in the thinning reception, her presence a fact I had built the entire evening around, I understood that I had mislabeled it.
This was not containment.
This was something else, and I had known it since the alley, and I had been calling it by the wrong name because the right name had implications I was not yet prepared to operate within.
Elena turned to look at me. “Is it over?”
“Nearly.”
She exhaled.
“The Vasin brothers,” she said. “Gregor. He’ll be an ally?”
I looked at her. She had been watching.
“He’s weighing the marriage,” I said. “By next week, he’ll decide it makes me more stable, not less. He’ll confirm the alliance.”
“Because a man who has something to protect is a man with incentive to keep the peace,” she said.
I looked at her.
“I’ve been listening,” she said, with a slight edge that was not quite defensiveness. “All evening.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ve been watching you do it.”
Something moved across her face. Not softness exactly, but something that acknowledged the fact of being seen.
The space began to clear out as the last guests started leaving.
I gave her my arm and she placed her hand in the crook of my elbow. I led her out of the reception venue, anticipating what the night had in store.
In that moment, I was aware that I had long since passed the point where walking away was a discipline I could practice.
She was beside me.
And that was where she was going to stay.
Chapter Seven–Elena
The reception had lasted three hours and forty minutes.
I knew this because I had been counting. Not obsessively, not with desperation, but in the quiet background. Three hours and forty minutes of standing at the correct angle, smiling at the correct moment, accepting the weight of eyes I didn’t fully understand and conversations I was only partially equipped to decode. Three hours and forty minutes of Mikhail’s hand at my lower back—light and consistent.
What I had seen in that room was still assembling itself as Mikhail led me out of it.
The way Gregor Vasin had looked at me like an element in an equation he was solving. The woman with Morin who had never once looked our way, and what that careful avoidance meant about who she was serving. Anya at my elbow for twenty minutes, warm and careful and conducting what was technically a social conversation but was also, I understood now, an orientation.
“The kitchen staff is loyal but the hospitality contractors rotate—be careful what you say near the event staff.”
“Alexei is easier than he looks and harder than he sounds.”
