Page 22 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

“I’ve read mine.”

“I’d be worried if you hadn’t, boss,” he mentioned, chuckling without any sign of humor in his expression. “Then you know.” He opened his version anyway, turning it so I could see the summary sheet on top. “No active syndicates. No current debts in any network we can access. No ongoing surveillance from any organization other than White’s, which we already knew.”

I looked at the summary sheet. “The gaps before Phoenix.”

“I have a contact working on it. Could be another forty-eight hours.” He closed the folder. “It may not matter.”

“Everything matters.”

“What I mean is that the gaps in her record don’t change the threat assessment. White wants her to be visible. He wants her to be accessible. Whether her history before Phoenix is clean or complicated doesn’t alter what needs to happen.”

What needs to happen.

Dan was not a man who editorialized. He offered unsolicited opinions with the reluctance of someone who understood that the job description didn’t include opinions and was making an exception because the stakes warranted it.

I looked at him.

“According to Mira’s report,” he said, his tone factual. “She ate breakfast. She asked questions. She didn’t attempt to leave.” A pause that carried weight without words ensued for three seconds. “People who intend to refuse stop asking logistics questions. You taught me that, boss.”

I stood and moved to the window.

And then, a thought that shouldn’t be in my mind became the foremost.

The kiss.

I had been trying not to think about it with considerable effort since it had happened, which was itself a form of thinking about it that I found professionally irritating. The discipline required to not think about something was applied discipline, which meant the subject was present in the structure of my attention even when I wasn’t examining it directly.

Her hands in my jacket had been tight.

That was the detail my mind seemed to hold on to the most. That involuntary clutch of someone whose body had decided something before their mind had authorized the decision. She’d held on. Not for balance, not by the time the grip had registered in my awareness—she’d been stable, she’d found the floor, and she’d held on anyway for a half-second.

“Call Dmitri,” I said. “I’ll call Mikhail and Viktor. We meet in two hours. At the Golovin estate.”

“Done, boss.”

“Call my sisters, too. If they’re available.”

“Okay, boss.”

*****

The Golovin estate sat thirty minutes from the Strip in a neighborhood that communicated wealth through restraint rather than spectacle—no gates with gold crests, no fountains, no architecture that announced itself. Just space, quiet, and the kind of security that didn’t need to be visible to be absolute. It was somewhere that was, by the logic of our world, home.

My three brothers were already in the meeting room, which told me that my calls had communicated something of the gravity of the occasion without spelling it out.

Mikhail sat in the chair that was always his—at the head of the rectangular dark wood table. Even if he weren’t the Pakhan, the absolute ruler of the Golovin Bratva, Mikhail’s place was nowhere else around the table. Viktor’s chair, which was to the left of Mikhail’s, was angled slightly toward the door, positioned for full sightlines to both exits. Dmitric, my only younger brother and the self-nominated rascal of the family, took the seat next to the vacant one on Mikhail’s right. His chair was pulled back, and he had his ankle over his knee, wearing the looseness of a man who was genuinely delighted by whatever he suspected was coming.

“Don’t tell me this is a wrong poker client situation, Lex. I could kill you,” Viktor implored as I approached the table.

Dmitri chuckled.

“I should be on my way home this minute,” Viktor explained, giving Dmitri a ‘what’s funny’ look.

“Of course, he knows better than to call on us for such,” Mikail remarked.

“Ugh,” Dmitri practically groaned. “What’s with you married folks and rushing home?”

“You expect an answer to that question?” Viktor inquired, before directing his gaze towards me again.