Chapter 38 Natalia
NATALIA
By the time I make it into the casino, I’m running on fumes, adrenaline, and pure desperation.
The place is all gold light and polished surfaces and the constant electronic chiming of slot machines.
People laugh. Glasses clink. A cocktail waitress glides by in black silk and a sultry smile.
Nobody here knows that Luca is somewhere in this city with my father and my brother, or that Boris is dead on my father’s marble floor, or that my mother was murdered twenty-three years ago and everything I thought I knew about my life has been ripped open like bad stitching.
I keep walking.
I catch my reflection in a mirrored column and do a double take.
My hair is snarled, yanked loose from the fight on the stairs.
There’s an angry mark around my neck from where Boris grabbed my collar, and my sleeve is torn at the shoulder where he hauled me backward.
My eyes are red and swollen and a little bit feral.
I look like someone who just crawled out of a car wreck. Which, emotionally speaking, is about right.
A man in a dark suit steps into my path before I make it any further.
He’s huge. Not a bouncer exactly, though he could pass for one. Security, definitely. The kind that does more than escort drunks to the curb.
“Ma’am,” he says. His voice is polite, but only on the surface. “Can I help you with something?”
“Yes.” I hear the shake in my voice and stop to clear my throat. “I need to see Lorenzo Andretti.”
The man barely looks at me. “That’s not happening.”
“Tell him Natalia Kozlov is here.”
That gets his attention.
His eyes flick over my face again, sharper this time, taking in the wrinkled clothes, the messy hair, whatever is still written on me from the last hour.
“Wait here,” he says.
“No.” My pulse is a drum in my ears. “You tell him now. Tell him it’s about Luca.”
The man’s eyes narrow. Then he turns his head slightly, one hand lifting to the wire at his ear.
He says something under his breath, too low for me to make out.
A pause.
Another quiet sentence.
When he faces me again, his expression is unreadable.
“This way.”
Relief hits so hard my knees almost soften under me, but I lock them and follow.
We pass through a door that requires a keycard, then down a corridor that trades casino carpet for dark hardwood. The noise from the floor drops away like someone closed a lid on it.
An elevator. Another keycard. The guard doesn’t speak, and neither do I.
When the doors open, the difference is immediate. Dark wood paneling. Dim lighting. A hallway that smells like leather and something expensive I can’t name. There are two more men stationed outside a set of double doors, both armed, both watching me like I’m a package that might detonate.
The guard who brought me up nods to them. One opens the door.
And then I’m standing in Lorenzo Andretti’s office.
It’s large and quiet and ruthlessly elegant. Floor-to-ceiling windows behind a massive desk look out over the Vegas strip. A view meant to remind you who owns it.
Lorenzo sits behind the desk. I know him immediately.
He looks exactly like Luca’s drawings. The same hard lines in his face.
The same dark eyes that miss nothing. But drawings can’t capture what it feels like to stand in front of him.
The stillness. The authority. The sense that he does not need to raise his voice to make a room obey.
He’s not alone.
Luca’s brother Dario stands to his right, arms crossed, expression hard. His uncle Paolo is near the window, quiet and watchful. I recognize them both from Luca’s drawings. Two others flank the room, familiar for the same reason, though I can’t put names to them.
Every eye in the room lands on me at once.
Every hand goes closer to a weapon.
“Who is this?” Dario’s voice is flat and unfriendly.
“Natalia Kozlov.”
I say it before the guard can answer. I say it looking at Lorenzo, not Dario, because Lorenzo is the one who matters right now.
Lorenzo doesn’t move at all. His eyes narrow, just slightly, and I can feel him taking me apart. The bruises. The torn sleeve. The fact that I’m standing here at all.
“Tell me why I shouldn’t have you thrown out.”
No hello. No courtesy. No invitation to sit.
Okay. I don’t have time for any of that either.
“Because my father has Luca,” I say. I press my hands flat against my thighs to keep them from shaking. “And we need to get him out before it’s too late.”
The room shifts. Dario steps forward. Paolo’s hand drops from the window frame. The two men I don’t recognize both go still.
“And you know this how?” Lorenzo’s voice is sharp enough to cut glass.
“Boris. My father’s head of security. He told me they have Luca. That my father was going to kill him.”
“He told you all that and then just let you leave. To come here.” Dario’s tone says exactly what he thinks of that.
“He didn’t let me do anything.” The words stick. I force them out anyway. “He’s dead.” I swallow. The words taste like bile. “I killed him getting out.
I can still hear the crack. That last sickening sound, sharper than the others.
“How do we know this isn’t a setup?” Dario asks, looking at me the way you’d look at a snake that crawled under your front door. “You’re a Kozlov. Your father has our brother. And you just happen to show up with—”
I pull out the phone, open the photo, and hold it up.
Boris, crumpled at the bottom of the stairs. Head turned at an angle that necks don’t turn, eyes open, mouth slack.
Words don’t move men like this. Evidence does.
Dario stops mid-sentence. His eyes drop to the screen, and his jaw goes tight.
“He caught me in my father’s office and tried to drag me back to my room. I tased him on the staircase. He fell.” My throat tightens. “He didn’t get back up.”
Nobody speaks. I don’t let the silence settle.
“This is his phone.” I pull up the messages and set it on the edge of Lorenzo’s desk. “There’s a text thread between him and my father. They’re holding Luca at a place on Boulder, and there’s a message from about an hour ago that says Nikolai is starting on him.”
Dario picks up the phone. Scrolls. His face gets harder with each swipe. He passes it to Lorenzo without a word.
Lorenzo reads. His expression doesn’t change, but his thumb stops moving on the screen.
“There’s been movement at the Bratva warehouse on Boulder,” one man says from across the room. “More than usual.”
The room recalibrates. I can feel it. Something in the air shifts, like a current changing direction. Not trust. Not yet. But the math is starting to work in my favor.
“She could be wired,” one of the guys I don’t recognize says. Not hostile, just practical.
“Search me. I don’t care. Do whatever you need to do. But do it fast, because every minute we spend in this room is a minute Nikolai has with Luca, and my brother doesn’t play with his food. He destroys it.”
Lorenzo sets the phone down with terrifying precision.
“You understand,” he says, “that from where I’m standing, this is hard information to trust.”
“Yes.”
“You could be here because your father sent you.”
“No.”
Dario gives a humorless laugh. “Compelling.”
I turn to him so fast my vision blurs for a second.
“Do you think I don’t know what this looks like?
Do you think I don’t know what family I was born into?
” My voice wavers and hardens at the same time.
“But I am here anyway. I came here alone. I walked into your territory carrying proof that I betrayed my father and got Boris killed in the process. Either I’m telling the truth or I’m running the stupidest bluff in history. ”
Sweat slips from my hairline toward my temple, slow and obvious, and I don’t let myself break his stare long enough to wipe it away.
Dario doesn’t answer. He looks at Lorenzo. They all do.
“I found more before Boris caught me.” My voice wavers, but I push through it. “The Colombian shipment. When it’s happening. Where. I’ll give you everything. But please don’t stand here debating me while Luca is in danger.”
The room holds its breath.
Lorenzo’s gaze stays on mine for another long second. I don’t know what he’s looking for. Maybe the thing Luca always said his father could do: read a person down to the bone. See whether they’re lying, calculating, afraid, or something else entirely.
Whatever he finds, it’s enough.
“Boulder.” He turns to Paolo. “The vehicle modification warehouse. Let’s go.”
Paolo nods, already moving. “I’ll get a team rolling.”
“Dario, Alessio, you’re with Paolo. Full tactical. Matteo, get Enzo and whoever else is on call. I want a perimeter before anyone goes through a door.”
The room erupts into motion. Controlled, efficient, lethal. These men have done this before. Phones come out. Voices drop to operational tones. The machine turns over, and it turns over fast.
“Matteo.” Lorenzo’s voice cuts through. “Take Ms. Kozlov to the safe house on Warm Springs. Have someone stay with her until we have confirmation.”
The words are polite enough. The meaning underneath them is not. Keep me alive. Keep me out of the way. Keep me where they can find me if this turns out to be a trap.
“No.”
The word is out before I mean to say it.
Lorenzo looks at me.
“No?” he repeats.
“I left him once already. I’m not doing it twice.”
His mouth flattens. “That was not a request.”
Under any other circumstance I might have folded under that voice. My father trained that reflex into me young. Lower your eyes. Apologize before the man in the room decides you’ve become inconvenient.
But my mother is dead because she tried to run. Boris is dead because I refused to stay where I was put. Luca is on a concrete floor somewhere because my father found out about me.
No more.
“My father has Luca because of me. Because I wasn’t careful enough. Because my brother found the phone, and they were watching me, and I led them right to him.” My voice is shaking and I don’t care. “I’m not sitting in a safe house while other people fix what I caused.”
Dario looks up from the table. Paolo goes still again. Even Matteo pauses halfway through checking a magazine.
Lorenzo’s face does not change.
“You think that means you belong in a live-fire assault?”
“I think it means I’m done being handled.”
Lorenzo raises an eyebrow. It reminds me so much of Luca that the ache in my chest nearly buckles my knees.
“You’ll be a liability,” Dario says. Blunt as a hammer.
“I’m Anton Kozlov’s daughter. I can walk through the front door of that warehouse and every man inside will hesitate before pulling a trigger. Can you say the same?”
That lands. I see it register on Dario’s face, on Paolo’s. The tactical logic of it.
“She’s got a point,” Matteo says. It’s the first full sentence I’ve heard from him, and it’s so matter-of-fact that it almost makes me laugh.
Lorenzo is quiet for three seconds. They feel like thirty.
Finally he says, “If you get in the way, I will have you dragged out over your own objections.”
“Then I’ll try very hard not to get in the way.”
That does it. Dario barks out a short laugh that sounds more startled than entertained. Matteo drops his head like he’s hiding a reaction. Even Paolo’s mouth shifts at one corner.
Lorenzo does not smile.
He holds my gaze for one more beat. Then he nods, once, and turns to the room.
“Move.”
Chairs push back. Jackets are adjusted over holsters.
Dario is already on his phone, voice clipped.
Alessio checks his weapon with the calm efficiency of someone who’s done it ten thousand times.
Matteo holds the door open and looks at me with an expression I can’t fully read.
Not warm, exactly. But not hostile either.
I walk through the door on legs that barely hold me.
In the elevator, surrounded by men who wanted me dead a month ago, I press my back against the wall and shut my eyes.
Just for a second. Just long enough to see my mother’s face in that photograph, to feel the phantom weight of Boris’s body hitting the bottom of the stairs, to hear the crack of his neck echo through a house I will never set foot in again.
Just long enough to see Luca’s face. Because that is the one I cannot survive losing.
Then the doors open, and I open my eyes, and I go.