Chapter Three
Valentina
I woke to silence. Silence that I knew was wrong even before I could pinpoint why.
My body had learned to wake up to the slightest noise, from the hum of the casino through the thin apartment walls to sirens a mile down the Strip.
But this silence had weight to it.
The cool, filtered air smelled faintly of cedar and something expensive. For several seconds I lay still with my eyes shut, waiting for my mind to lead me to an explanation. But it refused.
Then it all came back at once.
Gunfire. The doors splintering inward. Screaming that hadn’t sounded human until I realized it was coming from men in three-thousand-dollar suits diving under card tables like animals.
Blood, more blood than I’d ever seen outside of a TV screen, spreading dark and glossy across the floor.
And Dmitri, standing over a man who was no longer moving, gun still raised, a stranger wearing a familiar face.
I sat up so quickly the room tilted.
My hands went first to my own body, checking to confirm that none of the blood on that floor had belonged to me. And that was when I noticed a second absurdity—I wasn’t wearing my uniform. Someone had put me in soft cotton pajamas. They were pale blue, clearly expensive, and clearly not mine.
Someone undressed me while I was unconscious. Someone had made a decision about my body without asking me a single question first. That made the fabric feel dirty against my skin.
Panic climbed up my throat so fast that I nearly missed the sound of footsteps.
“You’re awake.”
Dmitri stood in the bedroom doorway holding two mugs of coffee like this was any ordinary morning, like hours ago he hadn’t put a bullet through a man’s skull just feet from where I’d been standing.
His hair was still damp and dark under the low morning light coming through floor-to-ceiling windows. Apparently, he’d showered.
“Where am I?”
“My penthouse.” He said simply, crossing the room. He set one mug down on the nightstand within my reach and kept the other for himself. “You passed out after the raid. I brought you somewhere secure.”
“Who changed my clothes?”
Something in my voice must have carried the accusation clearly enough because he stopped, and the entertained expression he wore like a second skin actually faltered.
“My housekeeper. Nadia. You’d been unconscious for almost two hours, and you were still in the uniform. It looked uncomfortable, so I asked her to change you into something you could actually sleep in.”
I searched his face for the lie and didn’t find it. Dmitri had never once, in months of unwanted flirting, sounded like this. No teasing. As if he understood how thin the ground was under both of us this morning and had decided not to test it.
“I want to go home.”
“Eat something first.”
“I don’t want to eat. I want to go home.” My voice cracked on the last word in a way I hated, and I hated it more because I could tell he’d noticed.
I looked around the room instead of at him. The penthouse was enormous, all clean lines and dark wood. Understated luxury that didn’t need to announce itself the way the casino downstairs did.
I gazed again at the floor-to-ceiling glass. My eyes lingered on the skyline, high enough up that the Strip’s noise didn’t reach us at all. It hit me slowly that this was more than simple wealth. This was something else.
It was the kind of power that could absorb a gunfight, a raid, and several deaths and still produce a relaxed and indifferent calm by morning. That frightened me nearly as much as the shooting had.
Then I noticed the stack of clean towels folded at the foot of the bed and a glass of water someone had left on the far nightstand, condensation still beading on the outside like it had been poured recently.
Someone had thought of my comfort on a night that had ended with a man dead on a casino floor.
It should have felt like kindness. But instead, it felt like I’d become a problem someone competent was managing.
“You can’t go home yet,” Dmitri said, setting his coffee down and folding his arms, and the shift in his tone told me he’d been waiting for me to say it. “Not until we know more about who did this.”
“I’m not part of whatever this is. I work there. I pour drinks. That’s the extent of my involvement in your family’s business, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
“I understand that. It doesn’t change the fact that people saw you in that room last night.”
“Then I’ll tell the police I saw nothing. I’ll say I fainted before anything happened. I’ll say whatever keeps me out of your family’s business permanently.”
“It’s not the police I’m worried about.” His voice stayed level, patient in a way that made my skin crawl in irritation.
“Someone planned that raid to hit our legal floor and the private game in the same ten minutes. That takes real intelligence into our operation. Whoever’s behind it isn’t finished just because their men are dead.
And right now, they don’t know who saw what.
You’re a loose end to them, whether you want to be or not. ”
“So what, I’m supposed to just accept that I’m in danger because you say so?”
“Yes,” he answered with no hesitation at all.
“I don’t belong to your world, Dmitri. I never asked to be part of it. I pour drinks for men like you because it pays better than anything else I could find, not because I want any part of what happens after the cards get put away.”
“Danger doesn’t care whether you belong to it or not.” Something tightened in his jaw. “You think the men who did this are going to check your employment file before they decide whether you’re worth silencing?”
“Don’t.” The word came out sharper than I meant it to.
“Don’t stand there acting like you’re protecting me.
You brought me here without asking. You had someone change my clothes without asking.
Now you’re telling me I can’t go home, also without asking.
That’s not protection, that’s control but with manners. ”
His eyes went hard, something flashing behind them fast enough that I almost regretted the words the second they left my mouth. For a moment neither of us said anything; the silence between us was loud.
“Fine,” he said finally, his tone low and clipped. “Go home.”
He didn’t argue further, didn’t raise his voice, simply stepped back from the doorway to let me pass, and something about how quickly he gave in unsettled me more than a fight would have.
Part of me had wanted him to fight harder, had braced for the controlling pushback I’d half expected from a man used to getting his way.
Getting exactly what I’d asked for instead had left me strangely off balance, like I’d won an argument I hadn’t finished making.
I gathered the few things I had—my phone, my shoes, the black uniform someone had folded neatly over a chair—and moved past him toward the door.
He caught my arm at the last moment, almost gently, like he needed to say what came next before I was out of reach.
“You shouldn’t be alone right now.”
I looked up and found none of the recklessness I’d learned to expect from him over the last several months. What I found instead was something underneath it that looked almost like fear, though I couldn’t imagine what a man like Dmitri Golovin would have left to be afraid of after last night.
I pulled my arm anyway.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, and walked out before either of us could say anything that made leaving harder.
The drive home didn’t feel real.
Vegas had a way of carrying on regardless of what happened below the surface, and that morning was no exception.
Tourists were already crowding the sidewalks in shorts and sunburns, a wedding party was spilling out of one of the small chapels near the corner in a cloud of confetti and cheap champagne, someone’s music thumped faintly from an open convertible two lanes over.
None of it matched what was going on inside of my chest.
I kept my hands folded tightly in my lap the entire ride, watching them tremble anyway as I stared out the window at a city that had decided nothing worth remembering had happened eight hours ago.
I called Camila from the back of the car. She picked up before the first ring ended.
“Oh my god. Val. Are you okay? I tried calling you all night; nobody would tell me anything. I thought—”
“I’m okay,” I cut in, the lie smooth. “I’m on my way home now.”
“Where were you? Security wouldn’t say anything. I saw Dmitri carry you out and I—” She stopped herself, and I could almost hear her deciding how much to ask. “Did he hurt you?”
“No. He didn’t hurt me.” That much, at least, was true. “I’ll call you later, Cam. I just need to sleep.”
“Okay. But I’m serious, Val, whatever happened last night, we need to talk about it. Not over the phone. Call me the second you’re home. I mean it.”
Somewhere between hanging up and my apartment building finally coming into view, I told myself that the worst of it was behind me.
That Dmitri’s warning had been exactly what I’d accused him of—a man used to controlling everything, uncomfortable with the idea that I could simply walk out of his life and never think about him again.
That illusion lasted exactly as long as it took me to reach my building.
The hallway leading to my apartment smelled the way it always did, of someone cooking two doors down and the cheap industrial carpet cleaner they used every other week. For one full breath I let myself feel something close to relief. Home. Ordinary. Mine.
Then two men stepped out from the stairwell ahead of me, and every ounce of relief dropped straight through the floor.
They moved with a deliberate, unhurried step that told me, before either of them said a word, that they’d been waiting. One of them had broad shoulders and a set jaw, his eyes already fixed on me like he’d been shown a photograph beforehand and was simply confirming a match.
“Valentina.”
My name in this stranger’s mouth seemed like a physical blow.
I backed up a step, keys still clutched uselessly in my hand, my mind scrambling for an exit that didn’t exist in a hallway barely wide enough for two people to pass.
Every rule I’d absorbed over three years of working in a room full of dangerous men—stay calm, stay small, don’t give them a reason—evaporated the moment I understood no version of politeness could get me out of this one.
“We just want to talk,” the second one said, though nothing in his voice made that sound remotely true.
I turned to run and made it exactly one step before a hand closed around my arm hard enough to bruise, yanking me back with enough force that pain shot bright and sharp up into my shoulder.
I screamed, the sound tearing out of me before I’d consciously decided to make it, every image from the night before crashing back into my skull at once—gunfire, blood, the flat crack of a weapon discharging feet from where I stood.
I fought, twisting hard against the grip on my arm, nails raking uselessly against a hand three times the strength of mine.
Then the hallway exploded with noise.
The man holding me went down before I understood what had happened, his grip releasing all at once as he collapsed against the wall behind him.
The second man barely had time to turn before he was slammed into the opposite wall with a violence that rattled my neighbor’s door. I watched, frozen, as Dmitri finished him in seconds, his movements economical and merciless.
The hallway went quiet except for my breathing, which was ragged and loud in my ears.
Dmitri turned toward me slowly, chest rising and falling hard, something violent and unspent still burning behind his eyes. It took me a moment, standing there shaking against my door, to understand what his presence in the hallway actually meant.
He hadn’t simply worried about me from a distance; he had followed me the entire way home.
He’d known. He’d anticipated this.
He’d known and let me walk out anyway, arguing with him the whole time about control and a world I supposedly didn’t belong to.
He’d simply followed at a distance rather than forced the point, because some part of him had understood I needed to hear it from the men in this hallway before I’d believe it.
That should have made me angry. Instead all I felt was the cold understanding that I had been wrong—and that being wrong had very nearly cost me everything.