Page 2 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
“Fine,” I said.
He nodded and turned around like he did not doubt in his mind that I’d oblige, which I knew he did.
Sighing, I told myself I’d be in and out in four minutes. Tops.
The hallway beyond the poker suites was a different world.
The bass of the casino, that relentless, low-frequency pulse that became invisible as background noise after the first hour, faded behind me as soon as the door clicked shut. The carpet here was brighter, even though the whole space felt darker in a way. The lighting shifted from the casino’s deliberately optimistic warmth to something more subdued, more serious. Security cameras blinked from their corners, small red lights like eyes.
My heels were too loud here. Every step announced me. I tried to soften my gait and only succeeded in feeling slightly ridiculous.
It’s not like I’m walking into a horror movie scene.
I walked past the third door, and that was when I heard the male voices. The tones suggested a conversation, more like an argument, that banned witnesses. One of them was speaking in Russian, short, clipped syllables. The other was speaking in a mixture of Russian and English, the English rising in pitch the way voices do when they’re scared.
I paused at the fourth door where the sounds clearly came from, even though it wasn’t my destination. The door stood open by a few inches, the latch not fully engaged, the kind of thing that happened when someone passed through quickly and didn’t wait to hear the click.
I should leave. Whatever was happening in that room was not my business. Whatever these men were discussing was not my problem.
Yet I remained rooted to the spot.
The tray was heavier than it had been at the start of the shift, or maybe that was my imagination, my body registering a tension my mind hadn’t fully caught up to yet. It tilted slightly, and I corrected it, the ice shifting in its bucket with a small, crystalline sound that seemed catastrophically loud.
Again, I considered walking on.
But then one of the voices dropped lower, and something in the register of it, in the way it was calm in a way that almost felt inhuman, made recognition crawl up the back of my neck.
I knew that voice.
Not from a conversation. I had never spoken to Viktor Golovin in my life. But I had heard him, from a distance, enough times that the sound of his voice had lodged somewhere in my memory. Head of casino security. The man who walked through the VIP floor as the room reorganized itself around him, who never smiled and never wasted words. The man who reportedly made every single person within ten feet of him acutely aware of how far they were standing from the exit.
A man who radiated control the way other men radiated cologne.
I edged forward. Just enough. Just to see through the gap in the partially open door, just to confirm what I already suspected, and then back away. Just to look.
Inside the private poker room, a man was on his knees.
He was bleeding from his mouth, or maybe his nose; the light was strange, and the blood was dark. He was speaking in broken fragments of Russian and English, the words tumblingover each other, some of them begging, some of them promising, some of them names I didn’t recognize.
Another man stood to the right of the door, his back partially toward me, his posture rigid with the kind of tension that meant he was trying very hard not to run.
Viktor Golovin stood directly in front of the kneeling man.
He had taken his jacket off. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows, precise folds, the kind of detail that registered even then, even in the middle of everything, because it was so deliberate. His expression was empty in a way that was worse than anger, not blank but settled. Decided.
He held the gun loosely. Like it was an extension of his hand rather than a thing he was holding.
The kneeling man said something. A name, I thought. Or a number. Some last bargaining chip was laid on the floor between them.
Viktor shot him.
One shot. Clean. The sound was not as loud as I expected, or maybe I had gone somewhere outside of sound, outside of ordinary sensation, because what I registered was less the noise and more the completeness of it. The utter lack of hesitation. The body slumped sideways with an unmistakably final weight.
The blood spread slowly across the carpet, dark against dark.
Oh, God, I take back my words. This is nothing short of horror.
My breath caught so hard it actually hurt, like something had seized. The tray tipped. I caught it—I don’t know how, I guess from some automatic reflex that didn’t consult my brain—but the ice moved in its bucket, shifting against the metal sides with a sound that should have been nothing.
