Page 40 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
The screens flickered about two hours later.
A single frame, there and gone, the picture breaking and reassembling. Three hundred people produced a brief collective pause, the conversation hiccupping, before the resolutionreturned and the room resumed. Technical anomaly. These things happened.
The second flicker lasted longer.
Music stuttered. Lights held, then dimmed for half a second.
The screens went static.
And then they came on.
Every screen in the Grand Ballroom simultaneously showed the grainy security footage, the timestamp burned into the corner, the poker room’s particular lighting quality immediately identifiable to anyone who spent time in this building.
The man on his knees.
My gun.
The ballroom understood what it was seeing in staggered waves—the people nearest the screens first, the comprehension moving outward, gasps spreading through the crowd the way sound propagates, each ring reaching the next. Conversations stopped. Someone said something in Russian that was not a question. Someone else moved toward the exit.
I was already moving.
Sofia was six feet from me. She had seen me and turned toward the screens with everyone else, and I watched her face register what she was looking at and then turn to find me, her expression stripped to something beneath all the layers she maintained.
I reached her in three steps. My arm went around her—not her hand, not a gentle guidance, my arm around her pulling her against my side with the full intent of my body between her and the room—and I spoke into the earpiece.
“Sergei. Status.”
Static. Then, “North perimeter breach—three points, they waited for the feed—” and then noise that was not static, that was something else, something that was coming from outside the ballroom and arriving fast.
The power cut.
The Grand Ballroom dropped into darkness. Someone screamed, not Sofia, and then the sound that I had heard in the earpiece was in the room, which was gunfire.
“Down,” I said against Sofia’s ear. Not gently. My hand on her head, getting her low, my body covering hers as the crowd around us became movement and noise.
“Viktor—”
“Stay with me.” I had her wrist. I moved us toward the east wall, away from the breach sounds which were north and west, scanning in the emergency lighting for my men who should be converging—there, Sergei at the far door, two of the contractors visible, the Bratva response beginning to organize itself.
A table went over nearby. Someone pushed through the crowd, and I shouldered them hard into the adjacent wall without releasing Sofia’s wrist, and they went down, and we kept moving.
She was keeping up—more than keeping up, she was moving with deliberate speed, not fighting my grip, reading the environment.
The screens, the power cut, the simultaneous breach at three perimeter points.
Tactical. Coordinated. Expensive in terms of resources.
Expensive for a target that required the resource expenditure.
Sofia.
The understanding came with a cold clarity. The footage was not the strike. The footage was the distraction, the cover, the noise that would ensure our security was looking at the screens and the breach points and not at the interior, not at the crowd, not at the dark-haired woman in red who was the actual—
“They’re coming for you,” I said.
She didn’t stop moving.
Two men materialized from the crowd on our left—not guests, the posture wrong, the movement wrong, the specific focus of people with a specific purpose. I put Sofia behind me, and the first one went down in four seconds, the second in six, controlled and surgical, and neither of them would be getting up immediately.
