“This way,” Sergei said in my earpiece. “East service corridor. We have it clear.”
I pulled Sofia forward. The service corridor door was ahead.
“Viktor.” Her voice was exactly level. In the middle of this—the noise and the smoke that was beginning to filter in from somewhere, the gunfire that had moved from outside to inside, the Grand Ballroom of the Golovin Casino in the organized chaos of a targeted strike—her voice was level because she was choosing it.
“I have you,” I said.
The door was twelve feet away. Sergei on the other side. My hand on her wrist and my body between her and the room.
The war that I had been managing from a distance had arrived. It was here, in this room, wearing the shape of everything I had tried to prevent—the footage on the screens, the breach points, the resources Cruz had spent to reach into the most secured event the Golovin family had staged in three years.
He had spent all of it on Sofia.
Which meant she was worth more to him as a weapon against me than she had ever been as a simple witness. Which meant the marriage, which I had built to shield her, had done the opposite of what I intended—had elevated her value, had confirmed to Cruz that she was the precise point at which Viktor Golovin could be made to feel something, and that Viktor Golovin feeling something was the most significant vulnerability this family had produced in a decade.
I had made her a target by trying to protect her.
The thought landed as I pushed through the service corridor door.
Sergei sealed it behind us. The ballroom noise reduced to the muffled quality of something on the other side of steel.
“We have three vehicles in the south structure,” Sergei said. “Clear route as of forty seconds ago.”
“Move.” I still held Sofia’s wrist. She was breathing hard, and she looked at me in the corridor light with those dark eyes that did not flinch.
“Are you—” she started.
“Fine.” I checked her face, her hands, and the dark red dress for anything that shouldn’t be there. Nothing. Intact. “You?”
“Fine.” She said it the way I said it—clean and automatic.
We looked at each other for one second in the service corridor while the war we had tried to prevent moved through the ballroom behind us.
She was the most valuable target on the Strip.
And she was looking at me with the ring on her finger, her eyes level.
“Then we move,” I said.
We moved.
Chapter Thirteen
Sofia
The guest room at the Golovin estate was the quietest place I had been in weeks.
That should have been a relief. It wasn’t. Quiet, I had learned, was not the same as safe. The window looked onto the estate’s eastern garden, dark at this hour, the carefully maintained hedges just visible in the security lighting that ran the perimeter. Outside the room, the house moved—I could hear it, muffled and directional, the specific sounds of an operation in motion: footsteps in corridors, the low frequency of male voices in conference, a phone ringing somewhere and being answered immediately.
I sat on the edge of the bed in borrowed clothes, looking at the wall and thinking about the Grand Ballroom. The screens flickering. The footage. That wave of gasps that had moved through the room like weather, and Viktor’s arm around me, before I had finished turning toward the sound.
The footage.
I reached into my bag.
The bag had come with me through the service corridor, through the vehicle extraction, through the drive to the estate with Sergei in the front seat and Viktor beside me with his jaw set.
The false bottom was something I had put in myself. Not sophisticated—I was not a woman with sophisticated tradecraft, I had not been trained in anything, I had learned what Ilearned through necessity and having to figure things out alone. A thin panel, barely four millimeters, fitted to the bag’s base and held with two small magnets. Adequate for casual searches. Inadequate for professional ones, but the professional searches had not come because Viktor’s people were looking for external threats, and the threat inside was wearing his ring.
