Page 44 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
Chapter Fourteen
Viktor
I drove us out of the city myself.
This was not standard practice. Standard practice involved a driver, a follow vehicle, and a secured route pre-cleared by Sergei’s team. Standard practice existed for reasons that were operational and sound, reasons I had developed over years of understanding how quickly environments could become hostile. I set it aside because Sofia was in the passenger seat and I needed my hands on something, and because the 4 am desert highway required attention that the portion of my mind running threat assessment would not leave available if I didn’t give it something functional to do. But if I were to be brutally honest, standard practice had a way of taking the back seat whenever Sofia was involved.
She sat with her knees angled toward the door. Not away from me—the angle was subtle, and I did not think it was deliberate—but not toward me either. The ring, my ring, was on her finger. I had checked in the estate’s guest room corridor when she had come out with her bag and her borrowed clothes and that composed expression.
The desert opened up around us as the Las Vegas lights fell behind. That was the thing about driving east in the early morning hours—the city’s reach was longer than you thought, its light pollution persisting for miles, the sky remaining a particular washed orange well past the point where you could no longer see the Strip. Then it let go. Abruptly, in the way only deserts could, with the sky going dark and enormous, the starsappearing in number, the road ahead lit only by headlights and whatever the night offered.
Sofia looked out the window.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“A property I own. Forty minutes.”
“Whose name is it in?”
I glanced at her. The question was practical rather than conversational—she was still doing the threat assessment, working through the implications of their location and its security, and that particular functionality in her, the clear-eyed practicality, remained intact even now. “A holding company,” I said. “Clean. Cruz’s people would need two weeks to trace it, and they don’t have two weeks.”
She nodded, then looked back at the window.
I drove.
The property appeared as a gate set back from the road, no signage, the approach a gravel track that ran a quarter mile through desert scrub before opening onto the structure itself: low, wide, built into the landscape rather than imposed on it, the architecture of something designed to be invisible from the road and inhabitable in conditions that required privacy. I had purchased it three years ago for exactly this purpose and had used it twice. It was maintained by a service that came monthly and asked nothing.
I stopped the car, got out, and opened Sofia’s door before she had finished reaching for the handle.
She looked at me and said nothing as she got out.
Carrying my bag and hers, I led the way through the front door.
“Well, it’s…”
“Not like me this time, I hope,” I remarked, interrupting her as an attempt to lighten the air.
“It’s cozy,” she answered, chuckling as she looked around.
“You should relax. I’ll show you around when you’re rested.”
She didn’t argue.
She slept for four hours. I did not sleep. I sat in the main room with the lights low and the security system’s soft confirmatory lights blinking from the corners. I ran through everything I knew and everything I needed to know methodically.
The leak.
Someone had extracted footage from the Golovin system with the sophistication and access of a person who knew the system well. My people were running it. The candidate list was short; the confirmation would take time I currently lacked. What I knew for sure was that Cruz had the footage, Cruz had deployed it, and the deployment had been a distraction for an armed breach that had a specific target.
Sofia.
They had planned it with detail that required advance knowledge—the timing of the screens, the breach points coordinated with the second the security system lost its visual feed, the three teams inside and outside working in a sequencethat had been rehearsed. This was not improvised from a piece of footage that had appeared on screens. This had been built before the footage played.
The footage was the signal. The operation had been ready before it.
Which meant Cruz had been further along than I had assessed. Which meant the information he had about our operations was deeper than the courier network disruption had suggested. Which meant someone had been feeding him with more consistency and specificity than a single extracted video file could explain.
I watched the desert lighten at its eastern edge.
