Chapter Four
Dmitri
I knew she’d be followed the moment she walked out of my building.
I could have stopped her. It would have taken just one word to the men downstairs, one lock engaged on the elevator, and she’d have stayed in that penthouse whether she liked it or not.
I thought about it for the length of time it took her to cross the living room and reach the door, weighing the satisfaction of keeping her safe against the certainty of what it would do to whatever fragile thing existed between us if I forced her hand.
Val already believed I was trying to cage her.
Proving her right seemed like the fastest way to lose whatever ground I’d gained by not touching her, not pushing when she’d told me to stop, not being the man she expected me to be.
So I let her go, and I hated myself a little for it. Then I got in my car and followed her cab at a distance, close enough to matter and far enough that she wouldn’t notice.
I could call it instinct. I could attribute it to every year I’d spent learning to read danger before it showed itself properly.
Either way, the moment I watched two men I didn’t recognize slip through the side entrance of her building less than a minute behind her, every quiet hope that I’d been overreacting collapsed.
I was out of the car and moving before I’d finished processing it, phone already against my ear, Roman’s voice sharp and immediate on the other end.
“Her building. Now. Bring two men, quiet, no sirens.”
“Dmitri, what—”
“Now, Roman.”
I didn’t wait to hear whether he understood. I took the stairwell two steps at a time instead of the elevator. I heard her scream before I reached her floor, and something in my chest came apart in a way I didn’t understand.
By the time I cleared the stairwell door, one man already had a hand around her arm, and she was fighting him with the desperate violence of someone who’s never had to fight.
The second man stood a few feet back, weapon half raised, watching the hallway rather than her, which told me he was the one running this and she was simply the job.
I shot the one holding her before either of them realized I was in the hallway. He dropped, Val stumbled free, and I didn’t slow down long enough to feel anything about the kill before I closed the distance on the second man and put him into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster.
He went down easier than I wanted him to.
Some professional part of my mind distantly noted that I should have kept him breathing long enough to ask him questions, that I should have found out who’d sent him and how they’d known where she lived, that I should have handled this the way I’d handled every other threat.
But I finished him fast and turned toward Val instead.
She was pressed against her own front door, shaking hard enough that I could see it from six feet away, her eyes fixed on me with an expression I didn’t like at all.
It was not gratitude. It was not even fear of the men on the floor.
She was looking at me the way you’d look at something that might have proven every reason you had to be afraid of it.
That look cut deeper than it should have.
“Val.” I kept my voice low, the way I had in the poker lounge hours earlier, though I doubted it would land any better this time. “Look at me. It’s done. You’re safe.”
She didn’t answer. Her mouth opened, and nothing came out. Her legs looked close to giving out completely.
Just then, Roman and two more of my men arrived, moving with the speed and efficiency of people who’d cleaned up worse messes than this one.
Roman started in on questions the second he cleared the stairwell—who were they, did I know who’d sent them, what was I planning to tell the other residents about the two dead men in the hallway—and I ignored every word.
None of it mattered more than getting Val out of the hallway with blood on the carpet before whatever was holding her together finally broke.
“Handle it,” I told him, already moving Val toward the stairs with a hand at the small of her back. “I’ll deal with the rest later.”
“Dmitri, we need—”
“Later, Roman.”
He knew better than to argue further.
I got her down to the car before her knees gave out, catching her against my side. Seeing her this way again, shaking and silent, settled a kind of quiet fury in me that had nothing to do with the dead men and everything to do with the ones who’d sent them.
I didn’t take her back to the penthouse.
As I watched her stare out the window without seeing any of it, I decided the last place she needed to be right now was another version of the room she’d woken up in that morning, however comfortable it was.
So I took her to a small restaurant tucked into the ground floor of one of our properties.
The place was nearly empty, featuring warm light and low music, with the smell of garlic and bread already emanating from the kitchen as they prepped for the day.
I steered her toward a booth in the back corner, away from the windows, and she sat down like her body had simply run out of ideas about what else to do.
She didn’t speak for a long time. I watched her hands, wrapped around a glass of water one of the staff had set down without being asked, tremble so much that water sloshed dangerously close to the rim every time she tried to lift it.
A woman from the kitchen brought food without either of us ordering anything.
“Eat something,” I urged when she simply stared at the food for over a minute.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You will be, once your body remembers it’s still alive. Eat anyway.”
She looked at the plate again, like it belonged to someone else. I reached across and slid it another inch closer to her, close enough that avoiding it would have taken more effort than picking up a fork.
“Dmitri.”
“Eat first. Talk after.”
She didn’t argue, which told me more about the state she was in than anything she could have said.
She picked at the food at first, clearly not tasting any of it, and then as the minutes passed, color began creeping back into her face.
I watched it happen, some of the tightness behind my own ribs easing with every bite she actually finished.
I wondered why her getting some color back in her face mattered to me the way it did. There was no answer I could come up with.
“Who were they?” she asked finally, once the plate was half empty.
“I don’t know yet.”
“You don’t… know?”
“Not yet.” I turned my glass slowly on the table, watching the condensation ring it left behind rather than her face.
“The raid on the lounge was coordinated well enough that whoever planned it had real information about our operation. Men showing up at your apartment less than twelve hours later means they either already knew who you were before last night, or they found out fast enough to act on it immediately. Neither one is good.”
“So this isn’t over.”
“No.”
She absorbed that quietly, staring down at what was left of her food, and I saw something in her expression finally give way.
She’d spent hours insisting she wasn’t part of my world, that danger didn’t have any real claim on her simply because she’d witnessed one bad night.
Two dead men in her hallway had made that argument considerably harder to believe.
“You were right,” she admitted, so quietly I almost missed it. “About all of it.”
“I didn’t want to be.”
That earned the first real look she’d given me since the hallway, like she hadn’t expected me to say that. I meant it. Being right about the danger she was in felt nothing like a victory.
“What happens now?”
“You don’t go home. Not until I know who sent those men and why, and not until I’m certain they’re dealt with. Until then, you’re under my protection. Under Golovin protection.”
I expected the argument. Some part of me almost hoped she’d fight me the way she had earlier that morning—sharp, certain, and furious—because at least that version had felt like her.
Instead she just nodded, slow and exhausted, entirely depleted of whatever fight she’d been running on since the raid.
“Is this what your life always looks like?”
The question caught me off guard. I opened my mouth, my typical answer already at the tip of my tongue—the deflecting answer I gave most people who asked me anything close to that question, something charming and evasive that would have gotten a laugh out of her any other day.
But looking at her face, open and stripped of every defense she usually had around me, I couldn’t quite make myself say it.
“Some version of it. Not always this way, but yes. Enough of it that I stopped noticing a long time ago.”
“How do you live like that?”
“You stop calling it living, eventually. It just becomes the shape your days take.” I hadn’t said that out loud to anyone before, and saying it now, to her, felt like handing her something I usually kept locked well out of reach.
She didn’t say anything for a while after that.
Neither did I. The silence between us wasn’t something I was used to with her.
There was none of the sharp, teasing tension that usually crackled whenever I got close enough to her.
This was quieter and heavier. It was the kind of silence that came from two people looking at how different their lives actually were.
If anything, watching her sit across from me in that quiet booth made the distance between her world and mine clearer. However, the difference felt less like a wall and more like something I wanted to close.
I didn’t tell her that.
My phone had gone off twice on the drive to the restaurant, both times Alexei, both times ignored.
I knew what he wanted. He wanted an accounting of exactly how much damage last night had done to the family.
He wanted assurance that whatever loose end I was currently protecting wasn’t going to become a bigger liability than the raid itself.
Alexei thought in ledgers even when the subject was blood.
It was one of the things that often made him impossible to talk to about anything that didn’t fit neatly into a column.
He called a third time, and this time I answered, keeping my voice low enough that she wouldn’t catch every word.
“You’re not answering your phone,” Alexei said, without any greeting at all, which was exactly how he always opened conversations he considered overdue.
“I’m handling something.”
“You’re handling the hostess.” It wasn’t a question.
Alexei rarely bothered with questions when a statement would do the same job faster.
“Roman told me what happened at her building. Two more bodies, Dmitri. That’s three men in 24 hours connected to one woman who isn’t family or anyone with a stake in our business. ”
“She’s a witness. Whoever’s behind the raid clearly doesn’t want witnesses walking around.”
“Then hand her to someone who can process that fact professionally instead of parking her at a table and feeding her dinner.” I could hear the edge under his usual flat calm, the tightness that meant he was choosing his words more carefully than he wanted to.
“I don’t need to tell you how this looks. ”
“I don’t care how it looks.”
There was a pause on the other end before he said, “That’s exactly what concerns me.”
“I’m on this, brother. I’ll call you in a few hours. Handle whatever needs handling with the police and the building.”
He let me hang up without arguing further. I knew it would come back around eventually, probably with Viktor weighing in as well, both of them lining up on the side of caution the way they usually did whenever I let something matter to me more than they considered reasonable.
I set the phone face down on the table and looked back at Val, who was watching me with an expression that suggested she’d caught more of that conversation than I’d intended.
“Everything alright?”
“Family business,” I said. “Nothing to worry about.”
“Okay,” she breathed, taking a slow sip of water.
By the time we left the restaurant, I’d already made a decision I hadn’t bothered running past her.
She wasn’t going back to that apartment. Not today, not soon, maybe not at all until I understood exactly what we were dealing with and made certain every person responsible had been found and handled permanently.
She could argue with me about it later, once she’d slept and eaten properly and had the strength to fight back the way I half wanted her to.
Tonight, she was staying with me. And whoever had sent those men to her hallway was going to learn, one way or another, exactly what that decision would cost them.