Page 26 of Ruthless Bratva's Forced Virgin
I stared at the ceiling.
I am married.
The word was still arriving in pieces, still not fully landing. I was married to a man I had known for a combined total of—what, ten hours of actual shared presence? Who had saved my life and left without a word and kissed me in a service corridor and told me the truth about who he was while simultaneously constructing a situation I had no clean way out of.
A man I might never be free of.
An even scarier truth was that a part of me wasn’t sure I wanted to be.
Chapter Eight–Mikhail
The numbers were clean.
That was the first thing I verified every morning—not the gross figures, not the summaries that Alexei’s team prepared for the purposes of the legitimate reporting structure, but the underlying data. The raw feeds. The actual movement of actual money through the actual channels, before any layer of interpretation had been applied to it. I had learned early that the interpretive layer was where errors hid, either honest ones or the other kind, and that a Pakhan who relied on summaries was a Pakhan who was only ever seeing what his people decided he should see.
I had run the Golovin operation for fifteen years on the principle that I saw everything first.
The numbers this morning were clean. Revenue from the casino floor was consistent with the prior four-week average, adjusted for the slight seasonal dip that came every year in the third week after major holidays when the tourist volume thinned. The entertainment division—Katerina’s territory—was performingabove projection, largely because VOLNAYA had opened to the kind of reception that generated its own momentum, audiences bringing other audiences, the particular self-sustaining energy of a show that had caught something in the cultural temperature.
I noted this without particular satisfaction, filed it, and moved on.
The security feeds occupied the second monitor. Twelve cameras covering the casino’s exterior and approach routes, another eighteen inside, the feeds from the manor running in a separate window that I checked on a rotation. I had added six new cameras to the manor’s grounds since the wedding—discreetly, installed during the night by people who understood that installation and visibility were separate requirements. The manor’s perimeter was, at present, the most comprehensively monitored private property in the county.
Elena was in the garden.
She appeared on the feed for the east garden at 7:43 am, dressed in a simple cotton dress, her hair down, walking the path that curved around the stone fountain and back toward the terrace. She was alone, which was technically in compliance with the current security arrangements since Viktor had two men on the garden’s exterior perimeter, but which still produced the specific low-level tension that her being outside the manor’s inner walls always produced in me now.
I watched the feed for approximately thirty seconds longer than was operationally necessary.
Then I moved to the other monitors.
******************
The breach report arrived at 9am.
It came through Dmitri, which was the first anomaly. Dmitri’s operational territory was the underground gambling circuit, the poker rooms and private games that existed in the profitable grey space between the Golovin operation’s legitimate face and its foundational structure. Security breaches at physical properties were Viktor’s domain, and Viktor would have called me directly.
That Dmitri was calling meant the breach had been identified through one of his back-channel contacts, which meant it had surfaced laterally rather than through the formal reporting structure.
“Tell me,” I said.
“The Harmon property.”
He meant the off-Strip building we used for mid-tier money processing—not primary infrastructure, nothing that couldn’t be replaced, but significant enough that its exposure would require restructuring several adjacent operations.
“One of the external access codes was used at three-seventeen this morning. The camera on the east service entrance was running, but the storage was wiped for that window. Two hours,” he explained.
“Who has the access code?”
“That’s the problem.” Dmitri’s voice had its usual lightness, but underneath it was something more careful. “According to the current access list, four people. Me, Viktor, Alexei, and you.”
I was quiet for a moment.
“The code was changed six weeks ago,” Dmitri continued. “After the standard rotation. The list is current.”
“Physical evidence of entry?”
“Nothing disturbed. Whatever they were doing, they were looking rather than taking.” A pause. “Or they were establishing that they could.”
