Page 58 of Ruthless Bratva's Forced Virgin
“Both of them visible from the dock exit or one on each end?”
“One on each end.”
“So there’s a gap at the exit itself.”
Viktor studied the floor plan. His expression did not change, but something in the quality of his attention shifted–the slight recalibration of a man receiving input he found worth receiving.
“I’ll add a third,” he said.
I looked at the highlighted names. “The yellow ones. How many will be in the room?”
“Seventeen confirmed. Possibly twenty-two depending on last-minute additions from the Vasin brothers’ guest additions.”
“And the ones in the red–Volkov-adjacent?”
“Three confirmed.” He held my gaze. “We don’t expect Volkov himself.”
“No,” I said. “He wouldn’t come himself.” I thought about the parking structure, the nine minutes, the way Bykov had stood with flanking men and the absolute absence of anything that resembled personal risk in his posture. “He uses intermediaries for everything that can be observed.”
Viktor absorbed this.
“Yes.”
I looked at the floor plan for a moment longer and then I looked up at him.
“What does a normal evening look like at these events? The flow of it–what do people do between the formal parts?”
He ran me through it. The cocktail hour, the dinner, the presentation segment, the networking that followed. The specific social geography of a Bratva-adjacent gala–which spaces were for display and which were for conversation, where the real business happened versus where the appearance of the evening happened.
“One more thing,” I said. Viktor waited. “If someone wanted to get a message to me specifically–not to Mikhail, to me–at an event like this, how would they do it?”
“Why?”
“Because if I understand the mechanism, I can recognize it when it happens.” I held his gaze. “And if I can recognize it, I can tell you rather than responding to it.”
Viktor looked at me for a long moment. Then he told me.
**************
The gown Katerina sent was black.
Not the deep blue of the wedding night–that had been the color of something being displayed for the first time, the declaration of a specific status. This was different. Structured at the shoulder, fluid below, the kind of garment that communicated confidence rather than presentation.
She had sent it with a note in a precise handwriting.
You know this room now. Dress like you do.
I stood in front of the mirror and looked at myself for a long time.
The woman in the mirror had been in Las Vegas for three years, had worn sequins and performed glamour for strangers, had managed the presentation of her body as a professional function for long enough that she understood what clothing communicated as language rather than decoration. She had been a showgirl, a debtor, an unwilling informant, and the wife of a man who ran an empire, and she had been all of these things while looking at mirrors and managing what they showed and keeping the interior separate from the surface.
Tonight the interior and the surface needed to be the same thing.
I did my own makeup. This was mine to do.
*************
Mikhail came to the room at 7 pm.
