Chapter Seven
Sofia
The summons came through Marco, which was clearly deliberate.
A note, handwritten, was delivered to me between tables. It read:
There was no signature.
Marco handed it to me, wearing the expression of a man who had been instructed not to answer questions and was sincerely grateful for the instruction, because answering questions would have required knowing things he had apparently decided he preferred not to know.
I read it twice, then folded it. I put it in my apron pocket.
I knew the handwriting. I didn’t know how I knew it—I had never received anything written by Viktor Golovin before tonight—but there was something about it. The control. Each letter exact, no wasted motion, the pen applied with an economy that looked like his voice sounded.
I should have read that note, understood immediately what it was, and gone directly home. I should have clocked out, walked to the bus stop, sat in my apartment, and let Viktor Golovin wait in Suite 14-C until he understood that I was not a woman who responded to summons.
I went ten minutes past 11 pm.
Suite 14-C was at the end of the hall.
I knocked once because I was not going to just walk in. But then, I pushed the door open before whoever was inside could respond.
The room was large and elegant. It felt wrong to call it a room, the same name I called the small space I slept in in my apartment.
It featured floor-to-ceiling windows on the far wall overlooking the Strip, Las Vegas spread out below in all its neon excess, the lights of the city trembling against the glass.
A sitting area, a bar cart, a table with two chairs that faced each other like an argument waiting to happen.
I noted there were no visible exits except the door I’d come through.
Viktor stood at the window. Jacket off, sleeves rolled to the elbows—the same way he’d been in that poker room, and I hated that my memory went there immediately, that those two images had fused in my mind in a way I couldn’t fully separate.
He turned when I came in. Dark eyes, wearing the stillness that I had stopped interpreting as calm.
I walked three steps into the room and stopped. The Strip glittered behind him. He looked, framed against it, exactly like what he was—something dangerous wearing expensive clothing, existing comfortably in a world that had been built to contain and display danger.
“You summoned me,” I said. “Here I am. Talk.”
He talked.
I discovered that it was what I hadn’t fully prepared for—that he would simply tell me.
No negotiation, no gradual pressure, no careful architecture of implication designed to make me draw my own conclusions.
Viktor sat in one of the chairs at the table, forearms on his thighs, and told me about Rafael Cruz with the same unadorned directness with which he told me everything, as if the facts were the facts and decorating them was someone else’s problem.
The man he had killed that night. Who the man had worked for. What the disruption of his death had cost, and what that cost had prompted. Nine words on a piece of paper. A dark-haired waitress. Cruz’s people, methodical and patient and currently pointed in a direction that ended at me.
I sat in the other chair without deciding to sit. The Strip burned behind him, and I listened, feeling the information settle into my body.
“How long?” I said when he stopped.
“Before they identify you specifically? Days. Perhaps fewer.”
“And then…?” I prompted.
“They’ll want to know what you know. After that—” he didn’t finish the sentence, because he didn’t need to.
I looked at my hands on the table. Then looked back up at him. “You could have told me this days ago.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He held my gaze. “Because I was still deciding.”
“Deciding what?”
“What to do with you.”
The honesty of that landed without warning, in places I hadn’t thought to defend. I breathed through it. “And now you’ve decided.”
“Yes.”
“Then tell me,” I said, forcing my voice to be calm, “so I can tell you what I think of your decision.”
Viktor looked at me for a moment. Then he said, “Marrying me.”
The room was very quiet.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Marriage. Legally registered. Public enough to establish the connection, conducted quickly.” He said it as if the words were simply information being transferred.
“In the world I operate in, a wife is protected territory. Cruz’s people move against you; they move against me.
They move against me, they declare war on this family. It ends the threat.”
I stared at him.
Then I laughed.
It came out sharp and genuine, just the involuntary sound of a mind encountering something it couldn’t process through ordinary channels. I laughed for several seconds in a soundproofed suite of the Golovin Casino while Viktor Golovin waited like he had expected this and was prepared to outlast it.
“You’re insane,” I said when I could speak. “You are genuinely—you have lost your mind. You watched me, you have people sitting outside my building in rotating cars, and now you want to—” I stopped. “You think you can buy my silence with a ring?”
“I’m not buying your silence. I’m offering you a structure.”
“A cage.”
“A shield.”
“From a war you started.” I got up from the chair.
I needed to be standing. I needed the three steps that put me near the window, something to do with the energy climbing through me that was fury, and something else.
“You killed a man in your own casino, and I was in the wrong hallway, and now the solution is that I marry you. Do you hear yourself?”
“Yes.”
“And you think that’s reasonable.”
“I think it’s the only option that keeps you alive without—” a fractional pause— “collateral damage to people adjacent to you. People like Elena.”
I swallowed.
“If you disappear, she looks for you. If she looks and finds the wrong thing, she becomes visible to people who currently have no reason to look at her.” He held my gaze steadily. “Mikhail’s household would be disrupted. That has consequences.”
The fury tightened. “You’re using her as leverage.”
“I’m explaining the full scope of the situation.”
“You want to own me,” I accused, my voice lower.
He didn’t deny it.
I crossed the room. Toward him.
I stopped in front of him and looked down at where he sat and felt my breath come shorter than it should have.
“I would rather burn,” I said, “than belong to you.”
Viktor rose.
He did it slowly, which was worse than if he’d done it quickly, because slow meant controlled, and controlled meant he’d decided, and a man who had decided was a different problem from a man reacting.
Then he was standing in front of me, and the height difference was immediate and unavoidable. And I held my ground by the stubbornness that was apparently one of my few consistent qualities.
“You already belong to the danger you walked into,” he said. “The question is whether you belong to it alone.”
I shoved him.
Both palms, flat against his chest. He caught my wrists.
Not hard. Not painful. But completely.
I had touched him before. I knew the warmth of him, the solidity, the way he existed in space with a density that most people didn’t have. I thought I knew all about it already.
I was wrong.
His hands around my wrists, his face six inches from mine, and his breath even and slow while mine had stopped cooperating entirely told me so.
“Let go,” I said.
He let go. Immediately, stepping back and releasing me with the same controlled deliberateness with which he had caught me. The immediate absence of his hands was its own kind of information that I resented receiving, not that I would ever admit to anyone.
I should have stepped back. I should have put distance between us.
I stepped forward instead.
I tilted my chin up and looked at him. I watched something happen in his face, a shift below the surface of his control where the control was working hardest, visible only because I had spent enough time watching for it.
“Don’t,” he said quietly. “Sofia.”
My name in his voice.
I identified heat in my own body.
“Or what?” I questioned, my voice just a whisper.
He kissed me. There was nothing gentle in it, nothing tentative or exploratory. It was a decision executed. His hand came up and caught my jaw. His mouth was on mine, and the kiss was brief and fierce. My lips caught his, moving with equal fervor.
He pulled back.
His hands moved to my hips—both of them, grip firm, not quite gentle, present in a way that was itself a statement—and he held me there for three seconds that I experienced with a distinctly irrational clarity.
And then he said, “Tell me to stop.”
I said nothing.
He walked me backward until the back of my knees met the edge of the low settee beneath the window, and I sat.
He stayed standing for a moment, looking at me in the shifting neon light from the Strip, and his expression had finally come undone enough that I could see what was underneath—not softness, nothing as simple as that.
Something more controlled than softness and more dangerous.
I could see the attention of a man who had decided what he wanted and was no longer exerting the energy to conceal it.
He went to his knees in front of me.
The breath left my body.
I had understood, in some functional way, where this was going.
What I had not understood was the way Viktor Golovin knelt.
He knelt like it was a choice fully made, like it cost him nothing and meant everything.
His hands moved. My uniform skirt, my stockings, the careful and entirely unrushed removal of the space between his mouth and my skin.
The heat from his open mouth made my insides dance with anticipation before his lips touched my core. Then his tongue moved over my clit, and my waist bucked off the chair. He held my waist down as he started to flick his tongue over my core, his eyes on mine.
“Oh, fuck,” I breathed, my chest already heaving.
Then his mouth closed over my core, and he sucked the tender flesh in.
“Oh,” I moaned, shutting my mouth immediately, holding on to a piece of self-control.
He continued, faster and even faster. He sucked and nipped and licked, making me writhe on the chair.
He took his time.
I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and looked at the ceiling. I felt the Las Vegas Strip burning on the other side of the glass behind me and thought about absolutely nothing coherent for an unspecified period of time.
The release, when it came, unmade me quietly.
Not loudly—I didn’t have it in me to be loud, the room felt too close for loudness, Viktor felt too close—but completely, a wave that started somewhere low and moved through everything, my hand still pressed to my mouth, my other hand having found his shoulder at some point without my conscious authorization.
He stayed where he was for a moment afterward. Then he rose.
He looked at me, and I looked at him, and neither of us said anything for several seconds. His expression was controlled again—almost. There was something remaining that the control hadn’t fully covered yet, something that looked at me with a directness that had nothing strategic in it.
He adjusted my skirt. The gesture was precise and impersonal, and somehow the most undoing thing he had done all evening.
I stood. My legs cooperated, which was generous of them.
“I haven’t agreed to anything,” I said.
“I know.”
“This wasn’t—that wasn’t agreement.”
“I know,” he said again, with the same evenness. He reached for his jacket. “Go home, Sofia. Think about what I’ve told you.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
He looked at me. “You’re good at being clear. I’ve noticed.”
I picked up my bag. My hands were steady, which was a victory I assigned significant value to.
*****
My apartment was dark as usual when I got home.
But this morning, I didn’t turn the lights on.
I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark with my bag still on my shoulder and the neon glow of the city bleeding through the gap in the curtains.
I thought about all of it—the proposal, the threat, the information about Cruz, the days of surveillance, Viktor’s hands on my hips, and the particular deliberateness with which he had—
I pressed my palms to my face.
The body does not negotiate. That was the thing I had been telling myself since the first night in that bathroom stall, since the first time I had stood close enough to Viktor to register his warmth and found my pulse doing something that had nothing to do with fear.
The body responds to what it responds to, and the response is not endorsement, and attraction to a dangerous man is a documented feature of human psychology with nothing romantic in it.
I had believed that. I had found it very useful.
I was finding it slightly less useful tonight, sitting in the dark with my body still humming in frequencies I hadn’t invited, replaying the particular expression on Viktor Golovin’s face when the control had slipped far enough that I could see underneath it.
He wanted me. That was not the question.
He had made that clear with a precision that left no interpretive room.
The question—the one I had been circling since I left the suite—was what to do with the fact that Rafael Cruz was apparently looking for a dark-haired waitress from the Golovin floor, and the only structure standing between me and whatever Cruz did with witnesses he found was a man who had told me, honestly and without decoration, that he wanted to own me.
And the other question—the one I was having more trouble with—was what to do with the fact that I had shoved Viktor Golovin in a private suite and he had caught my wrists, and I had stepped forward.
That I hadn’t said stop.
I lay back on the bed with my bag still on my shoulder and listened to the city outside. Las Vegas. The sound of it was always there, a low, constant hum.
Viktor had said, “You already belong to the danger you stepped into.”
The thing about that was, as much as it pained me to accept, he wasn’t wrong.
I had been living in danger since the moment I had walked down that hallway that night.
The surveillance, the cars outside my building—none of that had created the danger.
The danger had existed first. Viktor had put walls around it.
Walls were also a cage. That was still true.
But Cruz was looking for me.
And, whatever Viktor was, whatever last night had been, whatever the next conversation between us would be, Viktor was the walls.
I closed my eyes.
I didn’t say yes.
I thought about his voice saying my name.
But I didn’t say no.