Chapter Two
Dmitri
Underground poker was the only part of the family business that never bored me.
Alexei, my older brother, likes ledgers and boardrooms; Viktor, brother number two, likes walking into a room and watching grown men flinch before he says a word.
I liked this—the low light, the cigar smoke curling toward the vents, the electricity of a table full of men who’ve convinced themselves that tonight is the night their luck finally turns.
Nothing about the polished side of the empire ever pulls at me the way this room does.
Down here, the risk is honest. Men lose fortunes and sometimes more, and everyone at the table knows exactly what they are signing up for the moment they sit down.
Tonight, the table is heavier than usual.
Two of the men across from me run shell accounts for people who launder money through offshore fishing fleets—boats that never fish, invoices for catches that don’t exist. A third is a rival casino owner who flew in from Macau specifically for this game, more interested in reading the room than winning, the way men like him always were.
Roman briefed me on all of them this afternoon with his usual clipped precision, and I’d nodded along and only half listened, because I already knew the important part.
Money like this in one room always meant somebody, somewhere, was watching.
I felt the weight of it under my ribs even as I smiled and needled the man from Macau about his tell—a flicker at the corner of his mouth whenever he was bluffing—which he was too proud to admit.
And still, with all of the money and power at the table, I kept losing track of the game because of her.
Valentina moved through the lounge the way she always did.
Her tray was balanced, and her spine was straight, the way she’d perfected specifically to avoid being noticed.
It never worked, not with me in the room.
The other hostesses had learned, within their first month, how to fold themselves into whatever a wealthy man wanted from them—flirtation, sympathy, a laugh at the right moment.
Val had never learned that, or had simply refused to, and it showed in the stiff set of her shoulders whenever some drunk investor leaned too far into her space.
I watched her sidestep a hand that reached for her wrist near the bar, watched her redirect the man’s attention to his drink instead with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes, and felt something proprietary twist in my chest that I had no business feeling.
I told myself it was only sport. She’d said no to me with more consistency than anyone had in years, and I’d always liked a challenge. That was the story I kept telling myself, hand after hand, while glancing toward the bar between deals.
Midway through the second hour, something in the room’s rhythm changed even further, and I felt it before I could name it.
It wasn’t any single thing. The man from Macau’s tell disappeared, replaced by a stillness that had nothing to do with cards.
One of my security men near the east entrance touched his earpiece twice in quick succession, a signal we used for trouble rather than something that was merely unusual.
The dealer at table two dropped his eyes to the deck a beat too long between hands.
Small things. The kind of things that, alone, meant nothing, but together, meant I needed to be paying very close attention.
I set my cards down and let my eyes drift toward the side entrance without turning my head.
Nothing yet. Just the two guards standing where they always stood, one of them shifting his weight in a way that suggested, to anyone who’d spent a decade reading rooms for a living, a man bracing for something rather than simply tired on his feet.
Then the doors came apart—hinges screaming, the frame splintering under something heavier than a shoulder.
Six men, maybe seven, moved in fast with the kind of coordinated aggression that told me this wasn’t a robbery.
Robbers wanted the room’s attention on the money.
These men wanted the room’s attention on nothing at all; they wanted it over before anyone could think clearly enough to reach for a weapon.
Somewhere above us, muffled through two floors of concrete and carpet, I heard the deeper commotion of something breaking loose.
I heard voices amplified through a bullhorn and recognized the cadence of federal agents announcing themselves like they had all the time in the world, which, upstairs, in a legitimate casino full of cameras and lawyers, they probably did.
Two fronts. Coordinated.
Someone had planned this, down to the minute, to hit both the legal front of the business and the illegal one in the same breath. It clearly meant that ‘someone’ had real intelligence into our operation, not just some rival crew looking to make a name for themselves.
I didn’t have time to continue the thought.
The first shot went off before I’d even pulled my weapon from its holster, and the room detonated into the typical chaos that gunfire always brought with it—chairs scraping backward, men diving beneath tables that offered no real cover, someone screaming in a language I didn’t have time to place.
I drew my gun up and got moving, shouting orders at my security that came out concise and automatic, years of training taking over somewhere beneath the part of my brain that was still catching up to what was happening.
Two of the intruders went down fast, my men earning their pay in the space of about four seconds. A third caught one of our dealers across the shoulder, and the man crumpled against the table with a pained cry.
I was moving toward the east side of the room, toward the man from Macau, who had more reason than most to be a target tonight, when I saw her.
Val.
She hadn’t moved.
Everyone else in that room, whatever their job, whatever their loyalty, had at least the sense to duck, to run, to get low behind something solid.
Val stood exactly where she was when the first shot rang out, frozen between two overturned chairs, a tray of half-full glasses still gripped in one hand, like her body hadn’t gotten the message that the rest of the world had gone to hell around her.
Her face had gone the color of the tablecloths.
Her eyes were huge and blank, fixed on nothing.
Not ten feet from her, one of the intruders was turning, weapon raised, pinning her in his sight. He apparently didn’t care who she was, only that she was standing between him and the door.
I don’t remember deciding to move. I only remember the weight of the gun in my hand and the narrow tunnel my vision collapsed into, everything outside of him and her going unclear and irrelevant at the edges.
I fired once, and he dropped before his finger had finished its pull, blood arcing across the polished floor in a pattern I’d seen more times than I could count.
This time, I thought about it.
Val saw all of it.
She saw the exact second the bullet went through him. She saw him fold. She saw the blood, close enough that some of it reached her shoes.
I’d killed more men than I could name or count over the years, and none of it had cost me a night’s sleep.
I wasn’t proud of that. I also wasn’t ashamed of it.
It was simply the arithmetic of the life I’d been born into, the price of the world I moved through.
But watching her face did something to me, something that felt uncomfortably close to shame, even though the man on the floor had earned exactly what he’d gotten.
Her knees buckled before I could reach her.
I crossed the last few feet at a dead run and caught her before she hit the ground, one arm hooking under her before her legs gave out entirely, the tray clattering somewhere behind us.
She was shaking with a tremor that ran the length of her whole body.
Her breath came in short pulls that didn’t give her enough air.
Her hand found the front of my jacket and gripped it.
It was probably just a reflex to hold onto something in a room that had become enveloped in chaos.
“Val.” I kept my voice low, though I doubted she could hear much of anything past the ringing the gunfire had probably left in her ears. “You’re alright. Look at me. You’re alright.”
She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking past my shoulder at the man on the floor. I turned my body slightly, instinctively, to block the view, though it was several seconds too late to do her any real good.
Around us, things were winding down. My security fanned out to secure the door as the last of the intruders were either down or bolting for whatever exit hadn’t been covered yet.
Someone was shouting for a medic for the dealer who’d taken a hit to his shoulder.
All of it was entirely secondary to the woman going limp against my chest.
Roman found me maybe ninety seconds later.
“We’ve got federal agents two floors up executing a warrant on the casino’s main office. Alexei’s people are already moving on it.”
“We should head to your office. I’ll give the full situation report,” he added when I didn’t respond.
“Not now.”
“Dmitri,” he called.
“I said not now.” I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t need to.
He huffed. “Who is she?”
“Nobody you need to worry about.”
That wasn’t true, and some part of me already knew it wasn’t true even as I said it.
I didn’t wait for Roman’s permission. I got an arm under her knees and lifted her. She made a small sound against my shoulder and her fingers tightened weakly in the fabric of my jacket, like she was afraid I’d set her down somewhere unsafe if she let go.
I wouldn’t. I understood that with a clarity that surprised me, carrying her past the wreckage of shattered glass and the wide, careful berth my men gave us without being told to.
Whatever this had started as, whatever game I’d told myself I was playing every time I crossed a room to talk to her, it had stopped being a game the moment I put a bullet through a man’s skull to keep hers intact.
She’d seen exactly what I was tonight. Most women who saw that part of me eventually learned to either romanticize it or run from it.
I didn’t yet know which direction Val would go, once the shock wore off enough for her to think clearly again.
For the first time in longer than I could remember, I found I genuinely didn’t know how I wanted that question to resolve.
What I did know was that letting her walk away from tonight untouched wasn’t a possibility anymore. Too many people had seen her in that room. Too many of the men still standing, both ours and theirs, now knew her face. They now knew she’d been close enough to watch a man die by my hand.
Valentina had walked into that room as a hostess nobody had reason to remember. She was walking out of it—or rather, being carried out of it—as a loose end. A witness. A liability with a face that dangerous men now had reason to look for.