Obsessed Bratva’s Pregnant Claim (Golovin Bratva #2)

Chapter One

Sofia

I would give anything to be covered in the blanket on my couch in my apartment right now. But the night was still early at the casino, and that meant work was still in full force.

The Strip never really slept.

It was something thousands of people said, but I knew to be true as a matter of firsthand experience.

As the skies got darker, it only changed its clothes, swapping the afternoon tourists and shrieking bachelorettes for something darker, something with more danger.

By midnight, the Golovin Casino exhaled a different kind of air.

The lighting changed. The music dropped a register.

The men who took the VIP floor seats after midnight were not the kind who took photographs or posted about their winnings.

They were the kind who could lose fifty thousand dollars in an hour and order another round of Macallan without blinking.

I knew most of them by now. Three years on this floor had given me a fluency in dangerous men that no school ever could.

My feet ached. My smile was automatic, somewhere between warm and untouchable. I had come to learn that if it was too friendly, they often thought it was an invitation. If it was too cold, they complained to management.

I have no time for complaining. There’s work to do.

I balanced the tray with the ease of someone who had done it ten thousand times, which I had, weaving between clusters of men in expensive suits who smelled of scotch, power, and something indefinably predatory.

The air smelled of cigarette smoke and cologne and underneath it all, faintly, money. Las Vegas had a specific perfume, and the Golovin Casino had bottled it.

I was halfway through a circuit of the floor when a hand closed around my wrist.

Not so hard. But the grip was undeniably proprietary.

“Hey.” The voice, heavy with a Dallas accent, was slurred at the edges. “How about you slow down, sweetheart. Keep me company for a minute.”

My smile remained on my face.

“I’ll have your drink out to you in just a moment, sir.”

“I don’t want the drink.” His thumb moved in a slow circle on the inside of my wrist. “I want the company.”

The tray in my other hand held four glasses of whiskey and two champagne flutes.

I had done the math quickly. I knew if I pulled away hard, one of us was wearing the drink.

If I made a scene, Marco, the shift supervisor, would materialize within thirty seconds.

Then the conversation afterward would be about my attitude, not the man’s hands.

“I’m afraid I have a full section tonight.” I let my wrist go slack until his grip loosened, then stepped back in a single smooth motion, as if it had been my choice all along. “Enjoy your evening.”

I was already gone before he could speak again.

“Whew,” I breathed.

That was survival in the Golovin Casino. It was not glamour or excitement. It was simply the constant, exhausting arithmetic of keeping yourself intact while making everyone else feel like they were the most important person in the room.

I deposited the tray at the service station, allowed myself exactly three seconds of pressing my palms flat against the cold steel counter, then straightened and went back out.

It was a few minutes to 1 am when Marco found me.

He appeared at my elbow the way he always did. He was wearing the particular expression he reserved for requests that were unusual but not quite unusual enough to refuse.

“Reyes.” He called, his voice low. “I need you to run a private drink order. Suite corridor, past the poker suites.”

I looked at him. “That’s a restricted area.”

“I know what it is.” He pressed a single card key into my hand, warm from his palm. “Somebody called it in specifically. Macallan 18, two glasses, neat. I need someone discreet.”

In Las Vegas street-speak, discreet meant female, which was also another name for less threatening. I had learned that translation in my first month.

I also knew the tips from those rooms could cover a week’s rent in one night.

“Fine,” I said.

He nodded and turned around like he did not doubt in his mind that I’d oblige, which I knew he did.

Sighing, I told myself I’d be in and out in four minutes. Tops.

The hallway beyond the poker suites was a different world.

The bass of the casino, that relentless, low-frequency pulse that became invisible as background noise after the first hour, faded behind me as soon as the door clicked shut.

The carpet here was brighter, even though the whole space felt darker in a way.

The lighting shifted from the casino’s deliberately optimistic warmth to something more subdued, more serious.

Security cameras blinked from their corners, small red lights like eyes.

My heels were too loud here. Every step announced me. I tried to soften my gait and only succeeded in feeling slightly ridiculous.

It’s not like I’m walking into a horror movie scene.

I walked past the third door, and that was when I heard the male voices.

The tones suggested a conversation, more like an argument, that banned witnesses.

One of them was speaking in Russian, short, clipped syllables.

The other was speaking in a mixture of Russian and English, the English rising in pitch the way voices do when they’re scared.

I paused at the fourth door where the sounds clearly came from, even though it wasn’t my destination. The door stood open by a few inches, the latch not fully engaged, the kind of thing that happened when someone passed through quickly and didn’t wait to hear the click.

I should leave. Whatever was happening in that room was not my business. Whatever these men were discussing was not my problem.

Yet I remained rooted to the spot.

The tray was heavier than it had been at the start of the shift, or maybe that was my imagination, my body registering a tension my mind hadn’t fully caught up to yet.

It tilted slightly, and I corrected it, the ice shifting in its bucket with a small, crystalline sound that seemed catastrophically loud.

Again, I considered walking on.

But then one of the voices dropped lower, and something in the register of it, in the way it was calm in a way that almost felt inhuman, made recognition crawl up the back of my neck.

I knew that voice.

Not from a conversation. I had never spoken to Viktor Golovin in my life.

But I had heard him, from a distance, enough times that the sound of his voice had lodged somewhere in my memory.

Head of casino security. The man who walked through the VIP floor as the room reorganized itself around him, who never smiled and never wasted words.

The man who reportedly made every single person within ten feet of him acutely aware of how far they were standing from the exit.

A man who radiated control the way other men radiated cologne.

I edged forward. Just enough. Just to see through the gap in the partially open door, just to confirm what I already suspected, and then back away. Just to look.

Inside the private poker room, a man was on his knees.

He was bleeding from his mouth, or maybe his nose; the light was strange, and the blood was dark. He was speaking in broken fragments of Russian and English, the words tumbling over each other, some of them begging, some of them promising, some of them names I didn’t recognize.

Another man stood to the right of the door, his back partially toward me, his posture rigid with the kind of tension that meant he was trying very hard not to run.

Viktor Golovin stood directly in front of the kneeling man.

He had taken his jacket off. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows, precise folds, the kind of detail that registered even then, even in the middle of everything, because it was so deliberate. His expression was empty in a way that was worse than anger, not blank but settled. Decided.

He held the gun loosely. Like it was an extension of his hand rather than a thing he was holding.

The kneeling man said something. A name, I thought. Or a number. Some last bargaining chip was laid on the floor between them.

Viktor shot him.

One shot. Clean. The sound was not as loud as I expected, or maybe I had gone somewhere outside of sound, outside of ordinary sensation, because what I registered was less the noise and more the completeness of it.

The utter lack of hesitation. The body slumped sideways with an unmistakably final weight.

The blood spread slowly across the carpet, dark against dark.

Oh, God, I take back my words. This is nothing short of horror.

My breath caught so hard it actually hurt, like something had seized. The tray tipped. I caught it—I don’t know how, I guess from some automatic reflex that didn’t consult my brain—but the ice moved in its bucket, shifting against the metal sides with a sound that should have been nothing.

In that room, it was everything.

Viktor turned.

The movement was unhurried. He didn’t startle. He didn’t reach for the gun again. He simply turned, the way you turn when you sense a presence rather than hear one, and his eyes found me through the gap in the door as if he had known exactly where to look.

Dark brown eyes. Cold yet observant. They locked onto my face and didn’t move, and the assessment in them was so precise, so thorough, that I felt stripped down to something cellular.

It was like he could see every thought racing behind my face, every impulse, every calculation, every piece of me that was deciding what to do next.

Fear. Shock. Fury that I was afraid. Recognition of all of it.

I expected the gun to come up. To my face or just in my general direction.

He didn’t raise it.

He took a step toward me instead. Each step measured, the body of the man he had just killed lying on the floor between us like a grotesque punctuation mark, a reminder of the specific nature of Viktor Golovin’s capabilities.