Page 29 of Immaculate Corruption (Romanoff Bratva)

I risked her life in an effort to save it.

How does that make any fucking sense?

When Arya yells out the code, I shove aside my doubts and regrets and start heading inside. There’s no time to change the plan. It’s happening, whether I think it’s still a good idea or not.

It’s well after midnight, so the lobby is mostly empty. The people working the teller stations are turned around watching a screen in the corner of the booth, which I realize is a security feed. They’re watching Arya’s show.

The people milling around in the lobby are craning their heads to catch a glimpse, too.

Arya quite literally has all eyes on her.

I use the phone to hide my face from the cameras lined up along the right wall inside the lobby. The cameras to the left, just as Arya told me, are angled lower to the ground. “If you stay in the center of the lobby,” she said, “and hide your face on the right, you might as well be a ghost.”

She paid attention to every detail.

Arya may not want anything to do with the mafia lifestyle, but goddamn, she’d make one hell of a mob queen.

As I approach the “Staff Only” hallway Arya told me about, I look up just in time to see Arya herself, standing on a table.

Topless.

She’s far away, just a smudge, but it can’t be anyone else. I feel two emotions at once. The first is the insane, chemical attraction I’ve felt for her since the moment we met. I want to take her down on that card table and fucking devour her—in front of everyone, if necessary.

The other is the insane, chemical jealousy I feel for her anytime anyone else so much as glances in her direction. I want to go around to every man in the room one by one and rip their fucking eyes out from the sockets.

But I have a job to do. Both the jealousy and the attraction will have to wait.

So I turn down the hallway, keeping my head low.

The security checkpoints in the lobby are cleared, the guards no doubt responding to the chaos inside. I slip through without a single hitch. And if there are cameras in the staff hallway, I have to hope everyone is too busy watching the impromptu strip show in the other room to pay any attention to me.

The hallway is long and curved, wrapping around the outside of the main casino. At the end of the hall, there are only two doors.

An emergency exit and an office door.

Everything past here is a mystery I don’t know what I’m walking into or who will be waiting for me.

Grabbing my gun from my hip and taking a deep breath, I push open the office door. I find myself in an entryway of sorts that branches off into other staff spaces. All of them are labeled. There’s an employee lounge, a restroom, a kitchen. And, at the back, a large metal door with a coded handle that says “SECURITY.”

As I approach, I notice the door is propped open with a wooden doorstop. I say a silent prayer of thanks and push the door open.

This time, the room is dark except for the glow of a wall of screens.

Three bodies are hunched over the screens, pointing at the scene below.

I don’t spend much time look at the screens, but I do see a lot of movement in one of them. It looks like someone is being carted away, kicking and screaming.

Good girl.

The hunched over man in the middle is wearing an expensive suit. I can see cigar smoke drifting up from his mouth. The shadows on his left and right look almost identical. Same black suit, same haircut, same corded earpiece leading up to their ear.

The two on the flanks are guards.

And the man in the middle…

That’s D’Onofrio.

I lift my gun and take the first guard out with one silenced shot.

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