Page 3 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
In that room, it was everything.
Viktor turned.
The movement was unhurried. He didn’t startle. He didn’t reach for the gun again. He simply turned, the way you turn when you sense a presence rather than hear one, and his eyes found me through the gap in the door as if he had known exactly where to look.
Dark brown eyes. Cold yet observant. They locked onto my face and didn’t move, and the assessment in them was so precise, so thorough, that I felt stripped down to something cellular. It was like he could see every thought racing behind my face, every impulse, every calculation, every piece of me that was deciding what to do next.
Fear. Shock. Fury that I was afraid. Recognition of all of it.
I expected the gun to come up. To my face or just in my general direction.
He didn’t raise it.
He took a step toward me instead. Each step measured, the body of the man he had just killed lying on the floor between us like a grotesque punctuation mark, a reminder of the specific nature of Viktor Golovin’s capabilities.
My heart was pounding so hard I was genuinely afraid I might pass out. Not metaphorically afraid. Actually, physiologically afraid, in a way where the edges of my vision had gone slightly strange, and my hands had developed a tremor that made the glasses on the tray click softly against each other.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t run.
I don’t know if that was pride or stupidity. Later, I would spend a long time turning that question over and never arriving at an answer I liked.
He stopped just short of the door. Close enough that I could see there was no sweat on him, no elevated color, none of the physiological signatures of a man who had just ended a life. He looked the same as he would have looked checking security logs or walking the casino floor. Controlled. Contained. Exactly himself.
“Leave.”
His voice was low. Not a whisper; it was quieter than a whisper, somehow, having the kind of volume that meant he did not need to shout to be heard. The word was controlled and almost gentle, and it scared me more than any amount of shouting would have, because it meant he was not threatened by me. Not alarmed. He had looked at me and made a decision, quickly and quietly, and the decision was to tell me to ‘leave,’ not to kill me. And the worst part was that I couldn’t tell if that was mercy or something else entirely.
I took one step backward. Then another.
The whiskey sloshed. One glass tipped, and the contents ran down the inside of the tray and over my hand, cold andsharp-smelling, and I thought, absurdly, of Marco’s face when I told him I’d spilled the order.
I turned, and I ran. Well, not a full run. I couldn’t exactly run in heels in the narrow corridor. But my walk was so fast it was indistinguishable from running in practice if not in form. My heels were too loud again, and I was convinced with every step that I would hear another shot, that the decision would be reversed, that I had miscalculated something in the compressed second during which I had looked at Viktor Golovin, and he had looked at me.
I went through the door to the main corridor. Then another. Then the noise of the casino hit me—the music, the voices, the slot machines, the ordinary hum of people spending money they may or may not have—and I almost went to my knees with the relief of it.
I dumped the tray at the nearest station and didn’t look at the girl staffing it when she called after me.
The bathroom was around a corner and down a short corridor, and I made it there in a minute that I would never afterward be able to account for. The door of the stall hit the side wall. I locked it and pressed my back against the cold metal and slid down until I was crouching, which was an awkward, undignified position in a pencil skirt and heels, and I stayed there.
The shaking that started in my hands moved up my arms and into my chest until my teeth were clicking together and I couldn’t make it stop, no matter how hard I pressed my palms against my thighs.
The smell of whiskey was still on my hand.
I thought about the body. The way it had fallen. I hadn’t heard it fall exactly, but I had felt the finality somehow. I thought about Viktor Golovin’s face and the way his eyes had found mine with such immediate, unhesitating precision, and I understood that I had seen something I was not supposed to see. That the man in that room with his gun loose in his hand and his sleeves rolled up was not the kind of man who made mistakes twice.
I was a mistake. The question was what kind.
I sat on the floor of that bathroom stall for what was probably four minutes and felt, under the fear, something else begin to form. Something harder. The particular anger that comes from being made small. From being made afraid, from having your ordinary life, your tired-feet-and-tight-smile ordinary life, suddenly revealed as something that could end in a service corridor on a Tuesday night.
I was not going to be silent.
The thought was quiet but absolute. I was not going to pretend I had not seen what I had seen. I was not going to become someone who swallowed fear and called it practicality. I had done too much of that already, in too many small rooms, for too many reasons that other people had told me were good ones.
Whatever happened next, I would not be quiet about it.
I stood up. Straightened my skirt. Found my reflection in the smudged mirror above the sink—eyeliner slightly smeared, lipstick still intact, which felt like a small, stupid victory—and washed whiskey off my hand.
Then I went to find Marco and told him I was leaving sick.
