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But then my eyes met hers as she looked up from the dress she’d just adjusted, and I realized it hadn’t. If anything, it had made the wanting worse. I found myself glancing at the papers still scattered across the desk, at the chaos she’d left in a room that had never held disorder, and instead of irritation, I felt something closer to reluctance at the idea of clearing it away.

Camila sat still on the edge of the desk, her dress mostly in order, her hair loose from whatever pins she had in it. The confidence she wore like armor on the casino floor had thinned into something raw.

I didn’t want her to leave.

The realization shocked and irritated me more than anything Yuri had pulled off her hard drive. I did not repeat mistakes. I did not let curiosity outlast its usefulness, and a suspicious waitress with a deleted search history qualified as exactly the kind of mistake I’d spent years training myself not to make.

I realized I hated the thought of her walking out that door.

“Come back to my penthouse,” I said.

I hadn’t planned to say it. I heard the words leave my mouth with the same detached surprise I might have felt watching someone else make a reckless trade, and I didn’t take them back.

Camila looked at me for a long moment, her face expressing something I couldn’t quite read— calculation, or want, or both tangled together in a way even she might not have been able to separate.

“Okay,” she said, simply.

The simplicity of it affected me more than it should have. I’d expected hesitation, a negotiation, or some flicker of the same caution I felt pressing at the edges of my own decision.

We left through the private elevator, and I felt more than saw a ripple of attention from the staff still on shift—a pit boss’s eyes flicking toward us and away too quickly, a bartender’s conversation stalling mid-sentence, a cocktail waitress near the private cage doors going very still before catching herself and moving on. Word would move through this building by morning the way it always did, table to table, floor to floor, until every dealer and every busboy had some version of the story. I didn’t particularly care. There had been a time, not so long ago, when I would have found that kind of attention intolerable, a loss of control I’d have corrected before it spread any further. Tonight, it barely reached me.

My focus stayed entirely on the woman beside me. On the strange, unfamiliar feeling I hadn’t allowed myself for longer than I could remember and wasn’t certain I wanted to name.

The elevator doors closed. Camila leaned her head back against the mirrored wall and closed her eyes, and I memorized the line of her throat the way I memorized numbers that mattered. Neither of us spoke. I didn’t need her to.

I had no way of knowing yet exactly what she carried into my world that night. I only knew, as the elevator rose, that I had chosen her anyway, fully aware of the risk and entirely unwilling to turn back from it.

Chapter Seven

Camila

For a moment I just stood there on marble so dark and polished it looked wet under the recessed lighting. Floor-to-ceiling windows ran the length of one entire wall. The Strip spread out below in a river of gold and neon that made the whole room feel like it was floating above the city rather than sitting in it. Everything else was exactly what I’d have guessed if anyone had asked me to imagine where Nikolai Golovin went home to at night—sharp angles, no clutter, nothing soft. A single bottle of scotch sat on the bar cart, unopened. No photographs anywhere. No mess, no half-read book left face-down on a cushion, nothing that told me anything about the man beyond what I’d already learned the hard way.

I still couldn’t quite believe I was standing here.

Hours ago I’d been planning to rattle him, to prove I held the upper hand in whatever game we were playing. Now I was barefoot in his penthouse with my dress wrinkled by his desk and my pulse still not fully settled from what had happened on it. Somewhere underneath the disbelief sat a colder, more useful thought I couldn’t quite silence: this was closer than I’d ever been. This was the opening I’d spent four months chasing.

“Bathroom’s through there,” he said, already unbuttoning his cuffs, his voice quieter here than it was on the casino floor, like the apartment itself demanded less of him. “I won’t be long.”

He disappeared down the hall, and the second the door clicked shut behind him, my whole body changed gears.

The tablet sat on a desk, its screen dark and a leather folder beside it. My hands found it before I’d fully decided to move, fingers steady in a way they shouldn’t have been given how unsteady the rest of me still felt. The tablet wasn’t locked, which told me he trusted the silence of his own home enough to stop being as careful here as he was everywhere else.

I scrolled through financial statements, transfer logs, and numbered accounts I recognized from my months of half-built spreadsheets and dead ends.

There!

A laundering trail tied directly to the fight club, the account number I’d never been able to trace past a wall of shell companies, laid out on the screen before me.

My hands started shaking around the same time my breath did. I photographed the page twice, angled the camera carefully, and checked the images again. Down the hall, the water shut off and started again a beat later, and I forced my hands to steady.

This was it. This was everything I’d worked the last four months toward—the piece that would finally connect Golovin money to the missing fighters, to the trafficking underneath the casino glamour, to whatever had actually happened to my brother.

This should have felt like winning.

It didn’t.

My stomach turned in a sick twist that had nothing to do with the fear of getting caught, and I hated myself for it even as I put my phone back into my purse. I thought of his hand at my jaw an hour ago. I thought of the way he’d touched me like it meant something to him. I thought of Mateo’s photograph in a file I hadn’t looked at in three days.