Page 20 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
“Security matter requiring your attention. Suite 14-C. Eleven o’clock.”
There was no signature.
Marco handed it to me, wearing the expression of a man who had been instructed not to answer questions and was sincerely grateful for the instruction, because answering questions would have required knowing things he had apparently decided he preferred not to know.
I read it twice, then folded it. I put it in my apron pocket.
I knew the handwriting. I didn’t know how I knew it—I had never received anything written by Viktor Golovin before tonight—but there was something about it. The control. Each letter exact, no wasted motion, the pen applied with an economy that looked like his voice sounded.
I should have read that note, understood immediately what it was, and gone directly home. I should have clocked out, walked to the bus stop, sat in my apartment, and let Viktor Golovin wait in Suite 14-C until he understood that I was not a woman who responded to summons.
I went ten minutes past 11 pm.
Suite 14-C was at the end of the hall.
I knocked once because I was not going to just walk in. But then, I pushed the door open before whoever was inside could respond.
The room was large and elegant. It felt wrong to call it a room, the same name I called the small space I slept in in my apartment. It featured floor-to-ceiling windows on the far wall overlooking the Strip, Las Vegas spread out below in all its neon excess, the lights of the city trembling against the glass. A sitting area, a bar cart, a table with two chairs that faced each other like an argument waiting to happen. I noted there were no visible exits except the door I’d come through.
Viktor stood at the window. Jacket off, sleeves rolled to the elbows—the same way he’d been in that poker room, and I hated that my memory went there immediately, that those two images had fused in my mind in a way I couldn’t fully separate. He turned when I came in. Dark eyes, wearing the stillness that I had stopped interpreting as calm.
I walked three steps into the room and stopped. The Strip glittered behind him. He looked, framed against it, exactly like what he was—something dangerous wearing expensive clothing, existing comfortably in a world that had been built to contain and display danger.
“You summoned me,” I said. “Here I am. Talk.”
He talked.
I discovered that it was what I hadn’t fully prepared for—that he would simply tell me. No negotiation, no gradual pressure, no careful architecture of implication designed to make me draw my own conclusions. Viktor sat in one of thechairs at the table, forearms on his thighs, and told me about Rafael Cruz with the same unadorned directness with which he told me everything, as if the facts were the facts and decorating them was someone else’s problem.
The man he had killed that night. Who the man had worked for. What the disruption of his death had cost, and what that cost had prompted. Nine words on a piece of paper. A dark-haired waitress. Cruz’s people, methodical and patient and currently pointed in a direction that ended at me.
I sat in the other chair without deciding to sit. The Strip burned behind him, and I listened, feeling the information settle into my body.
“How long?” I said when he stopped.
“Before they identify you specifically? Days. Perhaps fewer.”
“And then…?” I prompted.
“They’ll want to know what you know. After that—” he didn’t finish the sentence, because he didn’t need to.
I looked at my hands on the table. Then looked back up at him. “You could have told me this days ago.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He held my gaze. “Because I was still deciding.”
“Deciding what?”
“What to do with you.”
The honesty of that landed without warning, in places I hadn’t thought to defend. I breathed through it. “And now you’ve decided.”
“Yes.”
“Then tell me,” I said, forcing my voice to be calm, “so I can tell you what I think of your decision.”
