Page 7 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
She stirred something in me that I did not have a clean word for. Something adjacent to anger and adjacent to hungerand not quite either. Something I had, as I had told myself, spent years managing into silence.
I thought about it plainly.
She is a witness, she is a complication; the clean solution is permanent removal, this is not a difficult calculation.
And then I watched her look up at the mezzanine—she had done it three times now, I had counted—and meet my eyes with that steady, furious, unbroken regard, and the clean solution lost its appeal with a completeness that was itself alarming.
I did not want her removed.
I wanted her where I could see her.
Mikhail would want a rationale. My own standards would want a rationale.
She is a witness.
That was the rationale. Witnesses at a distance were unpredictable. Witnesses in proximity were observable, controllable, and their choices available for interception before they became problems. The logical approach to a witness who could not be eliminated was containment. Close containment. The kind that left nothing to chance.
This was a strategy. This was exactly the kind of operational thinking that had made me better than anyone else at my job as the head of casino security.
I believed this.
Or I chose to believe it, which was not the same thing, and I was experienced enough with my own mind to know the difference. I chose it anyway.
Sofia Reyes disappeared into the far section of the floor. I watched her go—the set of her shoulders, the particular way she moved, already known to me with a familiarity I had not earned and had not asked for.
The decision settled into place within me.
I would keep her close.
Chapter Three
Sofia
Fear, I had learned early, was a luxury.
Not the feeling of it. That part arrived whether you could afford it or not, lodged itself in your chest, and made itself at home without asking. But acting on it was the luxury. Rearranging your life around it. Calling in sick, staying home, keeping the blinds down, and waiting for something to change. That required the kind of financial cushion that had never once in my life been mine.
The rent was due in two days. My electric bill had been deferred once already. Elena had covered my half of our shared gym membership last month without saying a word about it, and I had let her because the alternative was canceling, and the gym was the one hour of the day that was purely mine. I could not afford another thing that Elena quietly absorbed on my behalf. I could not afford it financially, and I could not afford it in the currency of my own self-respect, which I had always guarded more closely than money because money could be earned back.
So I went to work.
I stood in my bathroom at 9:30 pm, and I applied my eyeliner, drawing it sharply. I pressed my lipstick on in my usual saturated red. I looked at myself in the mirror for a long moment. Twenty-four years old. Golden-brown skin, thick black hair pulled up high, cheekbones my mother had calledtu mejor herencia(your best inheritance). Uniform fitted and pressed.
Viktor Golovin did not get to have my job. Viktor Golovin did not get to have my rent money or my electricbill or the particular look on Elena’s face when she thought I wasn’t watching and was quietly, carefully worried about me. Viktor Golovin had already taken something from me—the easy, functional blankness with which I had previously walked through those casino doors—and that was already too much.
He did not get anything else.
I picked up my bag, and I left.
Eva, one of my colleagues whom I could call an acquaintance, leaned against the doorframe and watched me restock my tray. “You sure you’re ready? Marco said you were sick. You could have taken tonight off.”
“I’m fine,” I said it cleanly, no edges on it. “It was a stomach thing. It passed.”
She looked at me like she was reading the sentence behind the sentence.
“Okay,” she said finally. The word was gentle.
“How’s Giovanni?” I asked because redirecting her toward her boyfriend was reliable, and I was not above using reliable tools.
