Page 24 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
But I didn’t say no.
Chapter Eight
Viktor
The briefing had been running for forty minutes when my phone rang.
It was Sergei. Sergei did not call during briefings—he messaged and waited since he understood that interruptions required justification proportional to their urgency. He called now, which told me before I answered what category of information was coming.
I stepped out of the room. The door closed behind me, cutting off the report on Cruz's eastern contacts mid-sentence, and I put the phone to my ear.
"Forced entry," he said. "Sofia Reyes’ apartment. Twelve minutes ago. Two men, masked, professional. They're gone."
"Sofia."
"Alive. Unharmed physically. My team is on-site."
I was already moving. "Status of the building."
"Clear. They exited through the service stairwell. We have partial footage—they knew where the cameras were." A pause. "And, boss? They left a message."
"Tell me in the car."
I was through the corridor and into the parking structure in ninety seconds. The briefing room behind me contained four men who had things to tell me that would need to wait. The Strip outside the structure was cycling through its permanent performance of abundance—and I pulled out of the structure.
"The message," I said, as I signaled with a finger for him to vacate the driver’s seat.
Sergei's voice was careful as he answered. "They told her she would be used. Their word. Paraded as a witness, threatened, broken, until you comply or bleed. Direct quote from her account to my man."
My grip on the steering wheel tightened. "Timeline on her account?"
"She called it in herself. Thirty seconds after they left. She didn't call the police."
She had alerted my men. Whether she had done it because she understood, instinctively, that the police were the wrong instrument for this problem, or because the men who had broken into her apartment had made it clear that the wrong call would accelerate rather than prevent consequences—either way, she did.
She had called us. She had calledme.
The light ahead turned red. I ran it.
*****
The drive took eleven minutes. It should have taken sixteen. I realized the five minutes I had compressed out of it only when I was already out of the car and moving, which told me that some portion of the drive had been conducted below the level of deliberate thought, on autopilot.
Four of my men were in the hallway outside her apartment. Two more inside. The door had been forced cleanly—professional, efficient, no unnecessary damage to the frame beyond what the entry required. The people Cruz had sentwere not sending a message through the door. They had sent it through what they'd said to her, which was more sophisticated and considerably more effective. It meant they had been briefed on her specifically, on what would land.
They knew who she was. They had known for longer than 48 hours.
I had been wrong about the timeline.
The apartment inside was, as I took it in quickly, moderately disrupted. I immediately saw furniture turned, two chairs overturned, and a lamp broken. The kitchen had been opened, searched, not ransacked. This had not been a robbery. It had been an installation of fear—just enough destruction to make the space feel violated without destroying it entirely, which was the more sophisticated play because it left her with nowhere to simply flee. The apartment was still hers. It was just no longer safe.
The smell of it—the particular smell of a space that has been entered by people who meant harm, something that was not quite violence but was violence's precondition—registered in my mind in a way that bypassed assessment.
Sergei met me in the hallway to the bedroom. He kept his expression neutral, which was his default, but I knew him well enough to read the slight tension at the corner of his jaw.
"She's in there," he said. "She spoke to Dmitri—gave her account, clear and coherent. No signs of physical injury. She's been sitting in the same position since we arrived." A pause. "She's been holding herself together. Barely."
I moved past him.
