Page 4 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
Outside, Las Vegas was aggressively, unrepentantly alive. The neon lit the street in colors that belonged to no natural thing. The air was warm and dry, carrying the smell of exhaust and food truck grease and, beneath it all, the particular ozone smell of too much electricity running through too many signs.
I stood on the sidewalk for a moment and breathed it in.
My phone buzzed. Elena. Three messages, the timestamps ranging from eleven to just now, probably checking how the shift was going. Elena always checked. It was one of the things I loved about her and one of the things that currently made the phone feel like a grenade in my hand, because if I answered it, I would have to decide how much to say, and I didn’t know yet what was safe to say, or to whom, or about what.
I put the phone in my bag without opening the messages.
I had walked three blocks before I realized I was shaking again. It was less now, though more manageable. The kind of tremor you can walk through rather than the kind that sits you down. The heels were agony. I stopped at a crosswalk and pulled them off and walked in stockinged feet on the warm concrete, holding the shoes by their straps, and felt slightly insane and slightly more like myself for it.
I will not be silent.
The words kept coming back to me, quiet and stubborn, like a splinter. I turned them over as I walked, testing them. Because the alternative was what? Going home and sleeping and waking up and going back to that floor tomorrow night as if nothing had happened? Pretending that Viktor Golovin’s eyes hadn’t found mine with absolute certainty through that door, that he hadn’t seen my face as clearly as I’d seen his?
He had let me walk away.
That thought, too, would not leave me alone. He had looked at me, assessed me, made whatever calculation men like him made in seconds that normal people spent hours on, and told me to leave instead of raising the gun.
I didn’t know what that meant. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
The neon signs reflected in a puddle from an earlier street cleaning, trembling slightly on the surface of the water. Las Vegas. Beautiful and completely indifferent, the way only a city that runs on other people’s desperate hopes can be.
I pulled out my phone. Looked at Elena’s messages without reading them. Put it away again.
One foot in front of the other. That was what I knew how to do.
I told myself that by morning, I would have a plan. That I would know what to do with what I had seen. That the fear would settle into something workable, something I could carry without it carrying me.
There must be a way.
Chapter Two
Viktor
The man on the floor had a name I had already forgotten.
That was not cruelty; it was efficiency. Names belonged to people who had futures, and he had spent the last six months building himself a very thorough absence of one. He had stolen from us. He had talked to people he should not have talked to. He had, when confronted with the arithmetic of his choices, gone to his knees and offered me names I already had, numbers I already knew, and a performance of terror that told me everything I needed to know about the quality of his judgment.
He had forced my hand. I disliked that above all else.
I stood over him and felt the particular quiet that followed a decision fully executed. Not peace—I had never confused the two. Just the absence of friction. The problem had been identified. The problem had been solved. Whatever came next was administrative.
“Clear it,” I said.
Oleg moved immediately. He had worked for me for eleven years and had long since stopped asking questions. The other two men followed his lead, the choreography of cleanup so practiced it barely required supervision. I rolled my sleeves back down. Buttoned the cuffs. Retrieved my jacket from the chair where I had left it.
The carpet would need to be replaced. It was simply another item. The cost would be absorbed. Everything here was absorbed, eventually, into the ordinary operations of theGolovin Casino, into the unremarkable forward motion of the business, because that was what we had built this place to do. Las Vegas was the only city in the world that had turned appetite into infrastructure. Sin disappeared quickly here. We had simply learned to use the machinery.
I walked to the window. The Strip below was still alive with light, indifferent and relentless, moving at its own frequency. Floors of glass and steel between me and the street, and the street didn’t know. It never knew. That was the point.
Behind me, Oleg and the others worked in silence.
I should have been thinking about the body. About containment protocols, about the rival faction that had placed him inside our operation, about what his death would signal, and to whom and on what timeline. I had more than a few things that required my attention, and I was giving none of them my attention.
I was thinking about the girl in the hallway.
I had spent the better part of my adult life enforcing discipline over my mind and its thoughts—pruning sentiment, excising hesitation, reducing every problem to its component variables, and addressing them in order of priority. It had served me well. It had made me effective in ways that most men, even dangerous men, never achieved. Mikhail trusted me with everything because he knew that I did not feel the weight of it. I carried what needed carrying, and I set nothing down until it was done.
And yet…
