Chapter Sixteen
Dmitri
The estate sat high above the Strip, monuments of glass and stone meant to remind anyone standing on its terraces how far above the ordinary city they'd climbed, literally and metaphorically.
We used it for exactly this kind of night—occasions that required the family's wealth to be seen rather than merely felt.
Tonight I'd invited everyone who mattered.
From politicians who owed us favors and casino executives who needed reminding where their loyalty was to financial partners who'd want to understand exactly what my marriage meant for the alliances they'd built their fortunes around.
This wasn't just a wedding reception, even though that was what the invitations said.
It was a declaration.
Val stood beside me for most of the evening, visibly overwhelmed beneath the composed surface she was working hard to maintain.
I stayed close to her the entire night out of plain awareness, not out of the possessive insecurity Vale had tried to accuse me of weeks earlier.
Every conversation happening around us carried weight beyond its surface pleasantries.
Nobody in that room was simply congratulating me on a marriage.
They were quietly recalculating power structures across the entire Strip, watching to see exactly how this changed the balance our family had spent generations building.
Some of them looked at Val with open curiosity, trying to place her, trying to understand what qualities had earned her the Golovin name.
Others watched with the kind of careful assessment reserved for anything that shifted the ground they'd been standing on comfortably for years.
A handful didn't bother hiding their resentment at all, old money circling new arrangements the way it always did, threatened by anything it hadn't personally approved.
I ignored all of it. I'd learned years ago that reacting to a room's undercurrents only fed it.
A state senator I'd known for years approached us near the bar, shaking my hand with the warmth of a man who understood how much his political survival depended on staying useful to my family.
"Dmitri. Quite the announcement tonight.
" His eyes moved to Val, though he was careful enough to keep his assessment brief. "Mrs. Golovin. A pleasure."
"Senator." Val's voice came out steady and poised, with nothing in it betraying the exhaustion I knew she was carrying. "Thank you for coming."
"Wouldn't have missed it. Your husband doesn't extend invitations lightly, from what I understand." He smiled. "I imagine there's quite a story behind how the two of you met."
"There is," Val said, giving nothing more than that. I’d watched her perfect that pleasant deflection of hers over the last hour.
The senator laughed and moved on toward the next cluster of guests waiting for his attention. Val exhaled slowly once he'd gone, her shoulders dropping half an inch before she caught herself and straightened again.
The evening went on with music threading carefully through conversation and champagne circulating at the pace that kept guests loose without letting anything slip too far toward carelessness.
Underneath the surface, criminal alliances dressed themselves up as ordinary business networking, the same way they always did at events like this, everyone performing legitimacy for everyone else's benefit.
When I told my brothers about the reception, they’d agreed—more like Mikhail said, and they agreed—that I should hold the party with myself and Val being the sole hosts.
They agreed that it made a more powerful statement if I was seen without any of my older brothers and, besides, it was my wedding reception.
Not that their security teams and right-hand men weren’t coordinating on the security of the whole estate.
Val handled herself considerably better than I'd expected, given everything.
I watched her navigate conversation after conversation with grace.
Only I could see the way her hand found the stem of her champagne glass and gripped it too hard whenever someone's question edged too close to territory she wasn't ready to discuss.
And then I would intervene and steer the person, whoever they were, towards others.
"You're doing well," I told her quietly, during a brief lull as we crossed toward the terrace for air.
"I feel like I'm performing a play I only got the script for this morning."
"You're performing it convincingly."
"That's not entirely reassuring, somehow." She glanced up at me, a wry expression on her face.
“You look breathtaking tonight,” I told her, bringing my hand to her waist.
She was wearing a black silk dress that stopped right on her knees, the cinched waist area covered in sequins. It was sleeveless, and her earrings dangled close to her jaw, bringing attention to her beautiful face.
“You said that like a dozen times already,” she remarked, chuckling lightly. “You also said you would have insisted on another dress if you knew this was what Isla bought for me.
“Hm. And that remains true. But having a private viewing after the reception is a comfort.”
“Don’t think about it. I’m exhausted.”
“We’ll be home soon. I promise. I took her hand and squeezed it. My chest swelled with something I wasn’t sure I could describe as she sighed in relief and brought her head to my shoulder.
For a stretch of time after that, standing together near the terrace doors, everything felt stable. It felt like something closer to an ordinary evening than the carefully staged theater it actually was.
Then the lights went out.
It happened instantly. Every light in the estate died at once, the music cutting mid-note into a silence so complete and sudden that it felt fundamentally wrong.
Guests began shouting almost immediately, stumbling in the sudden dark, reaching for exits that had gone invisible along with everything else in the room. Champagne glasses shattered somewhere nearby. Someone screamed, and chairs scraped along the floors.
I pulled Val behind me before I'd consciously decided to move, years of training overriding whatever confusion the rest of the room was drowning in. My mind was already registering exits and distances.
Emergency lighting flickered on in scattered sections a few seconds later. It was dim and insufficient, throwing everything into an uneven half-light that made shapes and shadows equally impossible to trust.
This wasn't a simple technical failure. It wasn’t a single circuit failing; it was the whole system going down at once.
My earpiece crackled, security comms breaking through static in fragments. Perimeter breached. Multiple points. The muffled sound of splintering wood reached us even through the chaos filling the main hall. Someone was forcing doors somewhere deeper in the estate.
An intrusion, armed and coordinated.
"Stay behind me," I told Val, my hand finding hers and gripping tight enough to keep her anchored against my back as I started moving.
She didn't argue, her whole body trembling faintly even as she kept pace with me through the darkened hall. We moved past panicked guests too disoriented to move efficiently, stepping around a collapsed decorative column that had toppled somewhere in the initial chaos.
Roman found us near the far end of the hall, materializing out of the gloom with an expression of controlled urgency.
"Multiple entry points breached along the perimeter," he said, turning to guide us toward the nearest secured corridor. "East wing, service entrance, and the garden gate all compromised within the same ninety seconds. Whoever's doing this knows the layout. This wasn't improvised."
"How many?"
"Unclear yet. At least six confirmed, possibly more."
Gunfire cracked somewhere outside the main hall, three shots in careful succession rather than a chaotic spray. I identified the direction immediately, adjusting our route toward the secured lower exit Roman had already started clearing.
Val stumbled once, her heel catching against something in the dark, and I caught her without breaking stride, one arm looping around her waist to keep her upright and moving.
"I've got you," I said. "Keep moving."
She nodded, though I doubted she could see the gesture herself in the near-total darkness.
There was no room left in me for flirtation or the careless charm I usually wore through every room I entered.
No distraction, no performance. There was only the narrow, focused clarity that came from years of training for moments like this one, every unnecessary thought stripped away until only the essential mechanics of getting her out alive remained.
We passed through a service corridor lit only by the faint red glow of emergency exit signage, shattered glass crunching under our shoes where something decorative had come down during the initial panic.
I heard more gunfire behind us, further away now, one of my security teams engaging whoever had breached the east wing.
"Almost there," I told Val, feeling her grip on my jacket tighten further at the sound of the exchange.
By the time we reached the secured lower exit, Roman had already cleared a path toward the evacuation vehicles staged in the estate's private lower lot.
I pushed Val into the back of the first car without pausing to look behind us, slamming the door as the driver already had the vehicle moving before I'd fully settled into the seat.
Roman took the second car, already coordinating with the teams still working to regain control of the estate, his voice low and urgent through the earpiece even as our own car cleared the property's gates and merged onto the main road.
Only once the estate had shrunk to a glow behind us in the rear view mirror did I finally allow myself to look at her properly.
She was alive. Unhurt, as far as I could tell in the dim interior lighting—no visible blood, no obvious injury beyond a small scrape along one forearm where she must have caught it against something in the dark.
But her whole body was trembling in a way that went past simple adrenaline into genuine shock. Her hands were pressed flat against her knees like she was trying to hold herself together through sheer physical pressure.
"Val. Baby." I reached over, taking one of her hands gently, feeling how cold her fingers had gone despite the warm night outside. "You're safe. It's over."
"Is it?" Her voice came out thin, barely holding steady.
“We're out. My men's teams are already working to secure the estate fully. You're safe in this car right now."
She nodded, turning her face from mine to the window.
I sat there beside her, running through everything Roman had reported.
Nothing about tonight seemed like a robbery, or even a targeted assassination attempt against any single guest in that room. This had been staged and timed specifically to hit during the one event guaranteed to gather every important figure connected to my family's operation in a single location.
Whoever had done this hadn't come for money.
They'd come for a statement, something loud enough and public enough that every politician, executive, and partner who'd witnessed the chaos would carry the memory of it into future dealings with us.
And Val, sitting beside me, trembling in the back of the car, had just become part of that statement whether she wanted any of this violence or not.
I pulled her closer, feeling her finally lean into me.
My phone buzzed against my leg, Roman's name lighting the screen. I answered without letting go of Val.
"Status," I said, low.
"Estate's secured as of ninety seconds ago. Two of theirs down, one of ours wounded, nothing fatal on our side. Whoever ran this pulled back the second they made their point, didn't push for a prolonged engagement."
"Tells me they never intended to actually take the estate."
"Agreed.” He paused before adding, "I'll have full details by morning. Take her home, make her feel safe. And get some rest if you can manage it, boss."
I ended the call and set the phone down, turning my attention fully back to Val.
She’s now in this.
Whatever line had existed before tonight between careful maneuvering and open war, it had just been erased completely.
I intended to make certain Vale understood exactly what that erased line was going to cost him—whatever it took, however long it required to finish what he'd started tonight.