Page 43 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

“Moscow,” I said. “Before we came to Las Vegas, when we were… ” I paused on the word ‘children’ because it had a weird weight that surprised me. “Young. Mikhail used to take us to the river in the summer. The Moskva. We’d go in the early morning before the city was properly awake.”

She was looking at me with the full attention I’d noticed she brought to things she was actually interested in. “That’s very specific.”

“It was specific.” I looked at the table and then decided to look back at her. “My father was—not present, in the ways that registered at the time. Mikhail compensated.” I paused. “He used to tell me that the river didn’t belong to anyone. That it was the one thing in Moscow that the men with power hadn’t found a way to own yet.” I realized that I’d never said this out loud. “I don’t know what Mikhail knows. He was seventeen.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “He was trying to give you something he understood mattered.”

“Yes.”

“That’s… that’s quite a brother to have.”

“He is the reason the Golovin Bratva is what it is. Everything that functions, functions because Mikhail built a structure that could sustain weight.”

She smiled at that.

“He loves you,” she said.

“I suppose so.”

“Does he say it?”

I looked at her. “Golovin men don’t… ” I stopped because the end of that sentence was going to be ‘express things in those terms,’ and I could hear how it sounded before I finished it. “He shows it,” I said instead. “Consistently. Over many years.” I picked up my glass. “I’ve been taught that’s sufficient.”

She laughed. It was a light, beautiful laugh that brightened her face and made her presence feel even more homely.

“You’re different here,” she said.

“You’ve said something like that before.”

“I mean different from the poker room.” She tilted her head slightly. “Different from the first days. You’re—” She seemed to locate the right word. “Less armored.”

“You’re a variable I’ve recategorized,” I said.

She raised an eyebrow.

“That’s a compliment,” I said. “In the most functional sense.”

“Functional sense,” she repeated. But the corner of her mouth was implying a smile.

We ate. The music shifted through two more tracks, and I found myself listening with more of my available attention than dinner conversation typically warranted.

She was fast. Faster than the warmth suggested, faster than the sunshine surface of her communicated to people who read sunshine as lightness. Underneath the warmth was something precise and quick that she must have learned.

I thought about the questions she’d asked during the storm—not fearful questions, strategic ones, wrapped in the vulnerability of the moment.

The evening had a warmth I was reluctant to alter. That explained why I moved our empty plates away and didn’t do anything to break the silence.

I watched the gradual softening of her posture over the course of twenty minutes, the book she’d picked up after dinner tilting by degrees, her feet tucked under her and her head finding the cushion. Then the book came to rest against her chest, and her breathing changed.

She fell asleep on the couch.

I sat across from her and just looked at her, despite having told myself not to.

She was younger this way, or rather, more purely herself, without the layers of professional competence and survival. Still, the warmth she radiated didn’t leave.

Someone was circling her. Someone patient, with resources, with the kind of determination that came from a long-held interest rather than a recent one. Someone who had found a thread in her history and was pulling it, carefully, with gloves on, from a distance they’d calculated.

They thought she was available.