Chapter Five
Valentina
It had been four days of living inside Dmitri Golovin’s penthouse, and I still hadn’t decided whether I was a guest or a prisoner.
The city outside still glittered, while my own life had suddenly become something I barely recognized.
A security detail walked me between rooms now, quiet men who didn’t make eye contact but never allowed more than ten feet between us.
The raid dominated every local news channel I flipped past, anchors speaking in grave tones about an underground gambling ring and a federal operation gone violently wrong, careful never to use the Golovin name outright even though everyone in the city knew exactly whose building they meant.
I flinched at the sound of the elevator now.
I flinched at doors closing too hard, at trays dropped in the kitchen, at anything that carried even a distant echo of that night.
Sleep came in fragments, when it came at all. I’d drift off exhausted and wake up an hour later with my heart slamming, certain that gunfire was still going off somewhere close before the quiet of the penthouse reminded me of where I was.
What unsettled me most, though, wasn’t the flashbacks or the constant hum of fear under my ribs.
It was him.
I’d expected, once the flirting stopped serving any purpose, that whatever waited underneath it would be colder. Maybe cruel or at least indifferent. Instead, living under the same roof as Dmitri revealed a version of him I didn’t expect.
He still disappeared for hours at a stretch, returning some nights with his knuckles split and the same careless smirk, offering no explanation and expecting none of my questions either.
And yet he noticed things nobody else in my life had ever bothered to notice.
He noticed when I pushed food around a plate instead of eating it.
He noticed when a car alarm outside made my shoulders lock up and would say something absurd and unrelated just to give my mind somewhere else to go.
More than once, he noticed I wasn’t fine—and he simply looked at me until I stopped pretending.
I learned the rhythm of his nights, despite myself.
Dmitri barely slept. I’d wake at 3 am for water and find him standing at the wall of windows overlooking the Strip, a glass of whiskey in hand.
He drank like a man trying to outlast boredom rather than enjoy it, and there was something almost sad in watching him do it, though I kept asking myself why that thought bothered me the way it did.
Once, he caught me watching him from the kitchen doorway. He’d simply raised his glass in my direction without a word, like an acknowledgement that neither of us needed to talk about being awake at that hour.
He’d developed a kind of patience I hadn’t seen from him before the raid.
He still teased. He still pushed at my boundaries the way he always had, testing to see how far a joke could go before I pushed back.
But there was something softer, more tender, underneath it now.
Something that hadn’t existed when all he’d wanted from me was a reaction.
One evening, he found me curled up on the couch with the television muted, staring at nothing in particular—and apparently decided he’d had enough of watching me do it.
“Get up,” he said, already crossing toward the door. “We’re going somewhere.”
“I’m not really in the mood to go anywhere.”
“You’re not in the mood to do anything, which is exactly why we’re going.” He held a hand out, not quite an order, but not quite a request either. “Trust me for twenty minutes. If it’s terrible, I’ll bring you straight back.”
I went because staring at the same muted channel for another hour sounded worse than whatever he had planned.
He took me down to one of the private lounges.
It was the same kind of room I’d worked a hundred nights before, except this one sat empty and dark but for a few gold lights.
I realized that, without the crowd, noise, and tension of watching wealthy men lose fortunes, it actually looked beautiful.
Velvet chairs. Polished felt tables reflecting soft light off the glass wall.
I’d never once, in over two years of working rooms like this, seen one at rest.
“What are we doing here?”
“Teaching you poker.” He pulled out a chair at the nearest table, gesturing for me to sit across from him. “You’ve spent years serving drinks to men playing this game. Might as well know what they’re actually doing.”
“I don’t think card games are going to fix whatever’s wrong with me right now.”
“They’re not supposed to fix anything.” He started shuffling, quick and practiced, the cards moving in his hands like they belonged there. “They’re supposed to give your brain something else to do for an hour. That’s all.”
I sat to humor him, but I found myself unexpectedly grateful for it within the first ten minutes. He explained the game patiently, more patiently than I’d have guessed he was capable of, walking me through hand rankings, betting patterns, and the art of reading another player’s tells.
I made mistakes constantly, and he laughed at most of them in a way that was not unkind. And the one time I correctly called his bluff on a hand I shouldn’t have won, he praised me with what sounded like genuine surprise.
“You’re cheating,” I accused him, halfway through the second hour, after he’d taken yet another pot off me with a hand I was certain had been worse than mine.
“I don’t need to cheat you. You fold every time you get nervous, and you get nervous constantly.”
“That’s not a tell; that’s just me being a normal, cautious person.”
“It’s absolutely a tell,” he argued, fully smirking.
It was the kind of smirk I’d spent six months learning to distrust and was starting, against my better judgment, to actually enjoy.
“Your shoulders come up half an inch right before you fold. Every single time.” Then he added, teasing, “More like you’re giving another shade of sexy. ”
“Half a what?” I chuckled, incredulous. “You’re making that up.”
“Watch.” He dealt again, and sure enough, three hands later, I caught myself doing exactly what he’d described, shoulders creeping up toward my ears the second my cards disappointed me.
I threw a chip at him in mock outrage, and he caught it out of the air without even looking, still grinning like he’d won something far more satisfying than a hand of cards.
“You’re better at this than you should be for someone who learned an hour ago.”
“Maybe it’s from years of watching men lie to each other across a card table. Must have picked up a few things.”
“Clearly,” he agreed, studying me with warmth behind his eyes, making heat climb up the back of my neck.
Somewhere in the third hand, I laughed at some ridiculous face he made losing a pot he’d clearly been bluffing on the whole time. He went still for half a second, something flickering across his expression that I couldn’t quite name, before the smirk came back.
“That’s….” he started, pausing like he was still trying to digest what he was about to say. “It’s the first time you’ve laughed, really laughed, since that night.”
I shrugged, not having a response.
After that, something between us shifted, subtle but undeniable.
I caught myself watching him in the gaps between hands, noticing details I’d spent months deliberately ignoring—the exhaustion beneath his usual confidence, the sharp, quick intelligence he hid behind recklessness, the loneliness tucked under all that easy charm.
We’d been at it for more than two hours when the storm hit, sudden and loud, rain slamming against the glass hard enough to rattle it faintly in its frame.
Neither of us moved to leave. The lounge felt sealed off from the rest of the world in a way that made leaving seem beside the point.
Watching lightning flash white against the neon skyline, the conversation between us slid into something more honest than either of us had planned on.
“Do you ever get tired of it?” I questioned. “All of it. The danger, the… constantly watching your back.”
“I don’t know how to live without it, honestly. It’s shaped every year of our lives since we were old enough to understand what our family actually did for money. Chaos is just the water I swim in. I wouldn’t know how to swim in anything calmer.”
“That sounds lonely.”
“It is.” He said it plainly, and something about his honesty undid me a little. “What about you? What shaped you before all this?”
I hadn’t expected the question to be turned back on me, and I found myself answering before I’d fully decided to. “I spent most of my life trying not to be a burden to anyone. I guess I still do. I think I built my whole personality around not needing anything from anyone.”
And then I went on. “Now I’m living in a penthouse with a security detail because a man I barely know decided I was worth protecting.” I laughed incredulously. “I don’t really know what to do with that.”
“You could start by letting yourself need something from someone for once. Might not kill you.”
“That’s rich, coming from a man who hasn’t slept a full night since I got here.”
“That’s different.”
“Is it?”
He didn’t answer right away.
“Maybe it isn’t,” he admitted finally. “Maybe we’re both terrible at the same thing for different reasons.”
“That’s the most honest thing you’ve said to me since I’ve known you.”
“Don’t get used to it. I have a reputation to maintain.”
But there was no real teasing left in it, none of the usual armor he wore even when he was joking.
Something in his expression went soft in a way I hadn’t seen before. The silence that followed didn’t feel uncomfortable. It felt charged.
He reached toward me slowly, and I let him, watching his hand rise without any of the panic I expected to feel. He brushed a strand of hair back from my face. My pulse picked up in a way that had nothing to do with fear.
I let my eyes drift shut as he leaned in.
Then his phone vibrated on the table between us, and I flinched, the moment shattering instantly.
He swore under his breath and answered it with obvious irritation.
Within seconds, whatever ease had settled into him over the last hour drained away.
His posture changed. His jaw tightened. He went quiet, listening to whoever was on the other end without a single interruption.
I watched the version of him I’d started to feel comfortable around disappear entirely, replaced by something colder and considerably more alert.
“When?” he questioned, voice clipped. “How long ago?”
Whatever answer came back changed his face in a way I didn’t like at all.
“I’ll call you back.”
He set the phone down slowly, staring at it for a beat longer than felt necessary. When he finally looked up at me, the fear that had lived under my ribs for days curled tighter than it had since the raid.
“What happened?”
He didn’t answer right away, and the silence stretched long enough that I already knew whatever came next was going to be bad.
“Someone accessed the lounge’s internal employee records tonight,” he said, his tone low and even, like he was choosing every word carefully before letting it out. “Personnel files. Schedules.”
“Oh….” My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to.
He held my gaze.
“They used your credentials to do it.”
“What?” I said, my voice just above a whisper.
I sat there for a long moment, the words refusing to fully land, the storm still hammering against the glass behind him. Whatever softness had existed between us an hour ago felt suddenly very far away.