Page 45 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

The street level below was not visibly alarming—no marked vehicles, no uniform presence, nothing that would register to a tourist walking past as anything other than an ordinary morning on the Strip.

But I had spent years learning to read the invisible logistics of organized spaces, and what I was reading was people stationed where they weren’t usually stationed and movement patterns that had been altered at short notice.

Something had happened. Or something was about to happen.

Or maybe both.

I made coffee myself with the machine on my counter, the good beans Mira kept stocked, the process giving my hands something to do while my brain worked.

I was on my second cup when I heard voices in the corridor—not enough to parse words, but the cadence of urgency moving past the door quickly and then gone. I went to the door and opened it.

The corridor was empty. But from the stairwell at the far end, before the fire door swung closed, I caught a fragment of a sentence from a voice I didn’t recognize

‘... federal presence confirmed at two of the…’

The door closed.

The word ‘federal’ resounded the loudest.

I found Sofia on the fourteenth floor by accident.

I had been trying to reach the elevator, not to leave, and the elevator had opened to reveal Sofia standing in it with her phone in her hand and a serious expression like she was handling things.

She looked at me. I looked at her.

“Get in,” she said.

I got in. The doors closed. She pressed a floor I didn’t know she had access to, somewhere above the guest levels, and stood with her phone active and her gaze forward. I stood beside her and did not ask questions.

The elevator stopped. She led me down a corridor I hadn’t seen before—narrower than the guest floors, functional rather than appointed—and into a room that was clearly not a suite. A conference room with a table, chairs, and a window that looked out over the roof of an adjacent building. Viktor was there. Dmitri was there, standing near the window with his hands in his pockets, his usual looseness replaced by something more contained. Anya was sitting at the table with her phone face-down in front of her.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Then Dmitri looked at me. “You heard.”

“I heard federal,” I said. “In the stairwell. And I know that something is wrong and that nobody in this building appears to be willing to tell me what it is.”

Viktor looked at Sofia.

“She lives here,” Sofia said, her tone a mild argument in itself.

“The federal agents are conducting a routine examination,” Viktor said, clearly knowing that what he was saying was partially true. “They appear quarterly. This quarter’s visit is just differently timed.”

“Viktor,” I said. “Make it clear, please.”

He looked at me with the measured skepticism he’d been carrying since the wedding, which I had decided early on was simply his method for anything that had been introduced into his brother’s life by circumstances he hadn’t controlled.

“Someone has filed a complaint with the gaming commission. Multiple complaints, layered. It triggered an accelerated review.” He watched my face. “It’s manageable.”

“Where is Alexei?”

“Managing it,” Dmitri said from the window, and there was no trace of the usual lightness in his voice.

I looked at the window. “Is there anything I can do?”

The question surprised them; I could see that.

They had apparently been expecting me to ask different questions.