Chapter Seven
Valentina
I spent most of the afternoon pacing the length of Dmitri’s penthouse, unable to sit still long enough to finish a single thought before the next one crowded in behind it.
Someone had used my name to access things I’d never touched.
Confidential records, restricted schedules, whatever else had fed into the raid that put dead men on that casino floor and two more in my apartment hallway.
I knew I hadn’t done any of it. Knowing that didn’t change the fact that my name was attached to it now, that it was now permanent in whatever files the Golovin organization kept on people who’d become liabilities.
I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t go to work, not that any part of me wanted to walk back onto that casino floor. I couldn’t even trust that the people around me believed I was innocent, and that uncertainty ate at me worse than the fear of the men who’d already tried to kill me.
What frightened me most was the possibility that Dmitri might not believe me either.
Just then I heard the sound of the elevator doors opening down the hall. Although nothing but silence followed the sound, I knew who it was.
Dmitri.
He’d been gone since morning for some meeting he wouldn’t fully explain. Every version I’d imagined of what might be happening downstairs had gotten steadily worse the longer he was away.
He came in quietly, and that told me more than anything he could have said out loud. Whatever had happened in that meeting had stripped something out of him that I’d gotten used to seeing, and the absence of it unsettled me more than I expected.
“What’s wrong?”
He didn’t answer right away, crossing the living room slowly. Even the careful way he chose his steps told me he was deciding exactly how to say whatever came next.
“We’re getting married.”
I stared at him for a long moment, certain I’d misheard him. I was certain the words had come out wrong somehow, and he’d meant something else entirely. “I’m sorry, what?”
“You heard me.”
“No, I don’t think I did, because that’s not a sentence that makes any sense right now.”
“Val.” He said my name carefully, and that was a bad sign and evidence against what I was hoping—that I’d really misheard him. “It’s the only way to keep you safe. If you’re my wife, you’re family. Nobody investigates a Golovin’s wife the way they’d investigate an employee under suspicion.”
The reality of what he was actually saying slid a few seconds behind the words themselves.
“You don’t get to decide this. You don’t get to walk in here and tell me I’m marrying you like it’s already settled, like I’m not even part of this decision, like I’m just a liability you need to manage.”
“That’s not—”
“Isn’t it, though?” My voice went higher than I wanted it to.
“Marrying you means I never get to be normal again. It means I’m permanently attached to all of this, the guns, the raids, the men showing up in my hallway.
I already lost my apartment and my job because of one night I didn’t ask for.
Now you’re telling me I have to lose the rest of my actual life too, just to stay alive? ”
He didn’t flinch. He just stood there and let me say every furious word without interrupting, which somehow made me angrier.
“If I don’t marry you,” he said quietly, once I’d finally run out of breath, “the organization will investigate you formally. Fully. And if enough of them decide you’re guilty, this doesn’t end with prison, Val. It ends with you dead.”
The words hit me physically. It felt like all the air in the room suddenly left.
“They’d actually—”
“Yes.”
“This is insane, Dmitri. You can’t just fix a problem like this by marrying it away. What happens six months from now, a year from now, when the danger passes, and you realize you tied yourself to someone you barely know because of one terrible week?”
“That’s not what this is.”
“Then what is it? Because from where I’m standing, it looks exactly like that. A convenient solution that happens to also solve your family’s optics problem.”
“It’s not convenient.” His voice sharpened for the first time since he’d walked in, something raw underneath the usual composure.
“Nothing about this has been convenient, Val. Convenient would have been letting security handle you that first night instead of carrying you out myself. Convenient would have been staying away instead of following your cab home. I could have made this easy on myself at any point over the last few days, and I didn’t.
None of this has ever once felt convenient to me. ”
“And did I fucking ask for any of it?!” I lashed out, my voice shaky despite being even louder than before. My breath came quick as I went on, “I was just a staff member doing my job. I didn’t ask to be pulled into all this, did I?”
The tears came before I could stop them, hot and humiliating. As I struggled to breathe, I felt everything I’d held on to for a week melt away.
Dmitri watched me cry, his expression clearly uncomfortable to the point of helplessness. He moved closer slowly, like I might startle and bolt if he approached too fast.
“Marriage protects you,” he said, his tone gentler. “Nobody inside this organization moves against the wife of a Golovin brother. Not without answering to us directly. Everyone in our world understands exactly what that would cost them.”
The tears stopped, but my breath still came unsteadily. Then I blurted out the question that had been circling my mind.
“Why do you even trust me? Everyone in there had reason to doubt me. Why don’t you?”
He shrugged like it was a question he didn’t have to think about to answer.
“I’ve spent my whole life around people who lie for a living.
Cheats, manipulators, men who’d smile at you right up until the moment they decided you were worth killing.
I know what that looks like, Val. I’ve made a career out of reading it correctly.
When I look at you, I don’t see any of that.
I see someone who’s honest. And terrified of chaos. ”
The simplicity of it did not go unnoticed by me. It was not the political explanation about optics and alliances I’d expected.
For the first time since the raid, I felt genuinely seen rather than simply protected.
He reached up and brushed the tears from my cheek, his thumb warm against my skin, and the touch shifted something in the air between us.
Fear and something else blurred together until I couldn’t separate the two anymore.
I couldn’t tell whether my pulse was racing from panic or from the way he was looking at me right then, like I was the only thing in the room worth his attention.
When his lips touched mine, it didn’t feel like seduction. It felt like collapse, like every ounce of tension we’d both been carrying for days finding somewhere to go.
I kissed him back, my hands finding the front of his shirt. His tongue parted my lips and gained entrance into my mouth, deepening the kiss that started off careful.
Still, I didn’t pull away.
He walked me backward toward the couch without breaking the kiss, his hands finding my waist, careful in a way that felt deliberate rather than hesitant, like he was reading every small reaction I gave him and adjusting accordingly.
Nothing about the last two years of watching wealthy, careless men move through my life had prepared me for the intensity of someone paying this much attention to me.
His mouth moved from mine to my jaw, unhurried.
I felt something unravel low in my stomach that I hadn’t let myself feel in longer than I wanted to admit.
His hands were gentle as they moved from my face to my neck and my arms. The patience with which he touched me contradicted everything I thought I knew about him.
His eyes locked on mine as his fingers moved from my waist to the hem of my blouse.
My breath hitched in anticipation as the heat in his eyes told me what he was planning to do.
When his fingers hooked into the waistband of my joggers and went lower, he swallowed my gasp in a kiss.
I let him, some instinct older than fear taking over entirely.
His fingers were cool against my pussy, but the temperature difference wasn’t what made the hairs on my skin stand on end.
He rubbed my clit slowly, in circles, like that was all he wanted to do.
His lips left mine, but his eyes didn’t as he slid a finger into me, making my hips buck off the chair.
His other hand held me down as he added another finger.
My chest heaved, and I sucked in my lower lip.
When he started moving his fingers, I pulled him close, claiming his lips like they were a lifeline.
His fingers moved faster even as he dominated the kiss, his free hand cradling the side of my face.
My hands were all over his body, from his back to his shoulders, each movement of his fingers driving me to a higher state of pleasure and hunger at the same time.
For the first time in longer than I could remember, I let myself want something without immediately talking myself out of it.
I felt him lose some of his usual composure too, his breathing rough against my ear as we broke apart for air, his hands slightly less steady than before, like my responses were affecting him more than he’d expected them to.
There was something in the way I touched him back, tentative and trusting all at once, that seemed to catch him off guard.
I felt everything in my body tighten and quake as ecstasy bloomed and exploded all at once. He continued moving his fingers as warmth flooded my pussy and my breath came in gulps.
Then, as his hand moved further and his mouth found mine again, something in me went suddenly nervous, a different kind of fear rising up underneath the desire.
“Wait.” My voice came out shakier than I wanted it to. “Dmitri, wait.”
He stopped immediately, pulling back to look at me, concern replacing the heat in his expression. “What’s wrong? Did I hurt you?”
“No, it’s not that.” I felt my face go hot, the words sticking in my throat even though I’d already decided he needed to know. “I need to tell you something, and I’m scared of how it’s going to sound.”
“Tell me.”
“I’ve never done this before. Any of it. I’m a virgin.”
“What?” he asked, his voice quiet.
I nodded in affirmation.
He completely froze.
For a second, I genuinely thought he might laugh, that he might think I was joking given everything about the world he lived in. But he didn’t laugh.
He looked at me instead, and the vulnerability I hadn’t shown anyone in years seemed to slow him down considerably.
“Okay,” he said quietly.
“I grew up in a religious household. They would have been horrified at half of what’s already happened between us tonight. And beyond that, I just never met anyone I trusted enough. I couldn’t separate it from something deeper. I still can’t.”
I braced myself for disappointment when he didn’t say anything for a while. Instead, something in his expression went unexpectedly tender.
He leaned down and pressed a soft kiss to my forehead, his hand coming up to cradle the side of my face gently. “We can wait,” he said. “Until we’re married.”
In that moment, the word ‘married’ didn’t sound like a bomb.
The gentleness he exuded caught me completely off guard, more than anything else that had happened between us tonight.
I’d expected recklessness from Dmitri Golovin, expected a man who took what he wanted without much thought for what anyone else needed.
Instead, here he was, offering restraint I hadn’t known he possessed, patience that revealed something underneath all that careless charm I’d never once given him credit for.
He moved beside me on the couch, wordlessly pulling me into him. We stayed there a long while afterward, tangled together on the couch, my head resting against his chest while his fingers traced slow patterns along my arm.
“You’re not disappointed?” I asked, needing to hear it out loud even though his actions had already answered the question clearly enough.
“Why would I be disappointed?”
“I don’t know. It feels like the kind of thing men like you usually feel about women like me.”
He tipped my chin up gently until I was looking at him. “I’m not men like me, apparently, not anymore. Whatever you were expecting from tonight, I’m not sorry it turned into this instead.”
“Even the part where we’re getting married for reasons that have nothing to do with any of this?”
“Hm.” The smirk was on his face again, even though his eyes looked like he was thinking.
Somewhere in the quiet, holding onto a man whose entire world was built on danger and blood and things I’d spent my whole life trying to avoid, I realized something terrifying.
Part of me no longer wanted to run from him at all.