Page 4 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

Not to tonight. Not to the gala or the champagne or the charity donors with their flutes and their laughing mouths. This was connected to something older, something that had waited.

The thing I had run from and renamed myself to escape and built an entire careful, beautiful life on top of, as though beauty were a foundation rather than a decoration.

As though I could plan my way out of something that had never agreed to let me leave.

Chapter Two

Alexei

The cards never lied.

People lied. Numbers lied when you let someone else arrange them. Faces lied as a matter of professional survival, and I had built a career—an empire, some would say, though I preferred the less romantic word, ‘operation’—on the reliable human tendency toward deception. But cards didn’t lie. Cards simply were. Four suits. Fifty-two possibilities. An infinite arrangement of outcomes that rewarded discipline and punished sentiment, every single time, without exception.

I had understood this at eleven years old, watching my father play in a back room above a restaurant in St. Petersburg that smelled like borscht and cigarettes. By fourteen, I was playing myself. By seventeen, I had outgrown every opponent my father could produce, and my father—a man not easily impressed by anything that hadn’t cost him something—had looked at me across a felt table and said, ‘You don’t feel the game, Alexei. You think it.’ As though that were a flaw.

It wasn’t a flaw. It was the entire point.

Tonight, the casino was operating at the calibrated frequency I preferred. Not loud or frantic. The controlled hum of serious money moving between serious men who understood the etiquette of controlled spaces. Low music, something Eastern European, piano-led, chosen for its tempo, which discouraged impulsiveness. Amber light, warm enough to relax but not so warm it suggested safety. Tables of six, no more, each one staffed by a dealer who had been trained, tested, and retested until their shuffles were mechanical perfection.

I designed this room the way an engineer designs a system: for efficiency, predictability, and the maximum sustainable extraction of revenue over time. Not a casino in the garish sense—no slot machines, no showgirls, no tourists photographing themselves in front of things that didn’t belong to them. This was a room for people who played seriously. People who understood that the point of the game was not the spectacle but the outcome.

My rules here were simple, and they were absolute.

No cheating—not from players, not from dealers, not from the house. I had no interest in a rigged game. A rigged game was a short-term profit and a long-term liability, and I didn’t operate in the short term. No uninvited guests, no outside weapons beyond what my security had cleared, and no—under any circumstance, with no exceptions, ever—trafficking of any kind within these walls. Not goods. Not substances beyond what our licensed bar provided. And not people.

That last rule wasn’t strategic. It was the only one that wasn’t.

I was standing near the east wall, a glass of Scotch in my hand that I’d been holding for forty minutes without drinking, when Dan materialized at my left shoulder. My right-hand man had a talent for this, appearing without announcement, like a weather system that had decided to become a person. Broad, silent, with eyes that catalogued everything in a room within seconds of entering it.

“Table three,” he said quietly.

I’d already seen it. The player in the grey suit had been running his thumb along the inside of his left sleeve for the past forty minutes—a tell so obvious it was almost insulting. “Give him one more hand to stop on his own.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then he doesn’t play in this room again. Have Vasily explain it to him.”

If he resists, he doesn’t leave. Not vertically, anyway.

I didn’t need to say the final repercussion out loud. Everyone knew.

Dan nodded once and moved away. I watched the grey suit player without appearing to—a skill that had taken years to develop, the ability to look at one thing while seeing something else entirely. The man won the next hand, celebrated with subdued pleasure, and then—before Vasily had even reached his shoulder—seemed to adjust something privately and folded his hands on the table with the defeated posture of a man who had just decided the risk wasn’t worth it.

Good.

I preferred corrections that didn’t require scenes.

Dmitri found me an hour later.

He always found me eventually. My younger brother had many qualities, some of them genuinely useful—a gift for reading people that he consistently squandered by using it for entertainment rather than strategy, a disarming charm that opened doors even I couldn’t, and a recklessness that, occasionally, produced outcomes that caution wouldn’t have permitted. But patience was not among his qualities. He circled a room like a man waiting for something interesting to happen, and when nothing happened fast enough, he tended to manufacture the interesting himself.

“Quiet night,” he said, appearing at my side with his collar open and a smirk that didn’t match the boredom behind it.

“Profitable night,” I corrected. “There’s a difference.”

“You say profitable like it’s the only word that matters.”

“Most other words are decorative.”