Chapter Five — Elena
Viktor Golovin was not a man who offered options.
I understood this within approximately thirty seconds of him appearing in the backstage corridor after the evening show, filling the space with the kind of presence that didn’t announce itself because it didn’t need to.
He was large in the way of people built for specific purposes—broad through the shoulders, economical in movement, with dark eyes that swept the corridor once and catalogued everything in it before settling on me.
He was in a black suit, just like his brother, Mikhail.
Having thrown myself into girl-talks and asking questions out of masked curiosity, I had gotten Mikhail’s name.
My new co-dancers were also too eager to tell me about his brother, Viktor.
They also told me there were other siblings, and that they didn’t really know them.
Not that they knew anything much about Mikhail and Viktor, either.
“Ms. Morozova,” he said. “I need you to come with me.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Viktor Golovin,” he answered coolly. “Head of casino security. I need you to come with me now.”
He was not touching me, was not crowding me, was standing at a distance that could technically be described as respectful, and every instinct I owned was telling me that the respectful distance was a courtesy rather than a constraint—that it would evaporate the moment I indicated I intended to decline.
“Where are we going?”
“Somewhere secure.”
The non-answers landed in my stomach like stones. Around us, the backstage was its usual post-show chaos. And in the middle of them, a very large man in a very dark suit waiting for me to agree to something I didn’t understand.
I followed Viktor out of the casino.
The car was black and large and said nothing about where it was going.
I sat in the back and watched the Strip recede through the tinted window, the neon shrinking, the density of the city thinning by degrees. Viktor sat in the passenger seat and did not speak. The driver did not speak.
I knew Mikhail had something to do with this. I just didn’t know what exactly… yet.
We drove for twenty minutes. One moment there were lights and hotels and the specific human density of a place designed to never let you feel alone, and then there was desert. Dark and wide and quietly indifferent to all of it.
I watched it go by and tried to think.
The question of ‘why me’ had no comfortable answer, and I was still turning it over when the car slowed and turned through a gate, and I looked through the window and forgot about the question entirely.
A grand building rose from the desert with the settled authority of something that had been there long before the Strip existed and expected to be there long after.
It was all stone, dark glass, and wrought iron.
Lit from below, it looked like something between a fortress and a monument.
Wide steps led to an entrance flanked by figures I couldn’t quite make out.
The grounds were immaculate in the austere way of places that employed people specifically to keep them that way.
I stepped out of the car and stood in the dry night air and felt like a fish out of water.
Viktor led me up the steps without ceremony. The front door opened before he touched it.
Inside was even more grand, and way colder.
High ceilings. Dark wood and stone floors.
The kind of furnishings that were chosen for permanence rather than comfort.
However, it was warm, physically warm, the kind of heat that came from a building that had been maintained at exactly the right temperature by systems you couldn’t see—and it smelled faintly of something expensive and clean. Flowers, maybe. Something green.
I stood in the entrance hall and did not move, because the entrance hall alone was larger than my apartment, and somewhere in this building Mikhail Golovin was waiting for me, and I was trying very hard to assemble a version of myself that could handle whatever came next.
A woman descended the staircase.
She was perhaps thirty-five, elegant with her dark hair pinned back, a silk blouse, an assessing quality to her gaze that she made no effort to conceal. She looked at me the way a person looked at something they’d been briefed on but were now forming their own opinion about.
“Elena Morozova,” she said. “I’m Katerina Golovina. I manage the entertainment operations.”
She descended the last step and extended her hand, giving me a dry and brief handshake. “Mikhail is in his study. I’ll take you up.”
I could only nod in response, not because I was too intimidated to speak but because I had too many things to ask about at once.
I wiped the last of the glitter from my collarbone and followed her down a long hallway.
“Here we are.”
Katerina delivered me to a closed door and left.
I knocked.
“Come in,” Mikhail said.
He was at a desk by the window, standing when I entered.
No jacket, which was the only concession to the hour—otherwise entirely composed, the white shirt immaculate, the watch catching the lamplight.
He looked exactly like what he was: a man entirely at home in a room that was built to make other people feel small.
I thought about telling myself I didn’t feel small.
I felt a little small. But that didn’t stop me from asking, “So why the hell am I here? I thought we established that my life wasn’t yours to decide over.”
“Sit down,” he said.
“I’d rather stand.”
He looked at me. Something moved in his expression—acknowledgment, perhaps, or the very slight adjustment of a person recalibrating. He gestured toward the chairs across the desk anyway, an invitation rather than an instruction. I sat, because my legs were unsteady and pride had its limits.
He sat across from me and put a file on the desk between us.
“The debt was not an accident,” he declared. “It was constructed. The initial lender, the terms, the placement of the offer within your social circle—all of it was deliberate. Designed to trap you in a cycle you couldn’t pay your way out of on a showgirl’s salary.”
I looked at the file. Despite some of the numbers being familiar, I didn’t understand what exactly I was looking at.
“Deliberate? For what? Why?”
“Because you were useful in a specific position.” He held my gaze.
“The man who built the mechanism is named Roman Volkov. He owns a rival casino operation and has been attempting to destabilize my business interests for some time. He needed leverage. He identified you as someone who could be made desperate and then positioned inside my operation.” He paused before going on.
“Your debt was sold to the loan sharks as an enforcement mechanism. When they collected violently, you would be sufficiently frightened to cooperate with anyone who offered you a way out.”
The room was very quiet.
“I was supposed to be a spy,” I said.
“An involuntary one. He would have approached you eventually—someone would have made contact, offered to make the debt disappear in exchange for small favors. Information. Access.” He paused. “You’ve not gotten to that stage yet—”
“Because you were in the alley,” I said.
“Yes.”
The cold of the revelation moved through me slowly, thorough and complete.
“My colleague,” I said. “The one who told me about the lender. Was she—”
“A go-between, most likely. Probably unaware of the full scope.” He said it without softening. “We’re looking into it.”
That damn ‘we’ again.
I pressed on. “Why am I here?”
“Volkov.” He said the name the way you said the names of problems you hadn’t finished solving.
“Eliminating the mechanism doesn’t eliminate the objective.
As long as you are identifiably connected to me without formal protection, you remain a pressure point he can use. The next approach will be more direct.”
“Then I leave Las Vegas,” I said. “I go somewhere else—different city, different name—”
“You’d be alone and vulnerable and he has the resources to find you. That is not a solution. That is a delay with a bad endpoint.”
I stared at him as I inquired, “So what is a solution?”
He was quiet for a moment. In the lamplight, his face was all shadow and sharp angles, unreadable in the way it always was. I had the distinct sensation that what was about to come out of his mouth was something he had decided before I walked through the door.
“Marriage,” he said.
The word landed in the room with the impact of something dropped from a height.
I would have laughed had my brain not paused to listen to the silence. To look for anything that indicated that this wasn’t real.
“As my wife,” he continued, “you would be protected under Bratva law. Any move against you becomes a move against me and against every structure I command. Volkov knows what that costs. He would not make that calculation.”
I said nothing.
“It is legal. Binding. Immediate.” He met my gaze. “It is also the only permanent solution I have.”
“No,” I said.
“Elena—”
“No.”
I stood. The chair scraped back.
“You cannot—that is not a solution, that is a sentence. You’re telling me that the way to protect me from being used as a weapon is to become your property instead.
” My voice was rising. I was aware of it and I couldn’t stop it.
“You slept with me and left me alone in a hotel room with an envelope of money like I was something you’d settled a bill with, and now you’re sitting here in your…
your manor… telling me that what I need is to marry you? Do you hear yourself?”
He was rigid in posture.
“You have no right,” I said. “You keep making decisions about my life like they’re yours to make. Like I’m a variable in your…your operational arithmetic—”