Page 21 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
Viktor looked at me for a moment. Then he said, “Marrying me.”
The room was very quiet.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Marriage. Legally registered. Public enough to establish the connection, conducted quickly.” He said it as if the words were simply information being transferred. “In the world I operate in, a wife is protected territory. Cruz’s people move against you; they move against me. They move against me, they declare war on this family. It ends the threat.”
I stared at him.
Then I laughed.
It came out sharp and genuine, just the involuntary sound of a mind encountering something it couldn’t process through ordinary channels. I laughed for several seconds in a soundproofed suite of the Golovin Casino while Viktor Golovin waited like he had expected this and was prepared to outlast it.
“You’re insane,” I said when I could speak. “You are genuinely—you have lost your mind. You watched me, you have people sitting outside my building in rotating cars, and now youwant to—” I stopped. “You think you can buy my silence with aring?”
“I’m not buying your silence. I’m offering you a structure.”
“A cage.”
“A shield.”
“From a war you started.” I got up from the chair. I needed to be standing. I needed the three steps that put me near the window, something to do with the energy climbing through me that was fury, and something else. “You killed a man in your own casino, and I was in the wrong hallway, and now the solution is that I marry you. Do you hear yourself?”
“Yes.”
“And you think that’s reasonable.”
“I think it’s the only option that keeps you alive without—” a fractional pause— “collateral damage to people adjacent to you. People like Elena.”
I swallowed.
“If you disappear, she looks for you. If she looks and finds the wrong thing, she becomes visible to people who currently have no reason to look at her.” He held my gaze steadily. “Mikhail’s household would be disrupted. That has consequences.”
The fury tightened. “You’re using her as leverage.”
“I’m explaining the full scope of the situation.”
“You want to own me,” I accused, my voice lower.
He didn’t deny it.
I crossed the room. Toward him.
I stopped in front of him and looked down at where he sat and felt my breath come shorter than it should have.
“I would rather burn,” I said, “than belong to you.”
Viktor rose.
He did it slowly, which was worse than if he’d done it quickly, because slow meant controlled, and controlled meant he’d decided, and a man who had decided was a different problem from a man reacting.
Then he was standing in front of me, and the height difference was immediate and unavoidable. And I held my ground by the stubbornness that was apparently one of my few consistent qualities.
“You already belong to the danger you walked into,” he said. “The question is whether you belong to it alone.”
I shoved him.
Both palms, flat against his chest. He caught my wrists.
