Chapter 15 – Ivan
IVAN
Isat in the darkness of my quarters, the glow from the indirect light casting shadows across the room. Shorty was Isabella Salvini. Not Mirabella. And not only that, she was the hacker known as Iset.
And I kissed her.
My lips still burned from that kiss. I ran my thumb across my bottom lip, remembering the taste of her, the way she’d responded with equal ferocity.
It had been anger and frustration that drove me to grab her, to silence her defiance with my mouth.
But something else had taken over—something I couldn’t afford to feel. Something I shouldn’t let myself feel.
“Focus,” I muttered to myself, taking a swig of coffee that had gone cold a while ago. I grimaced and set it aside.
I pulled up the folder Nina’d copied earlier onto my laptop—Grey’s documentation, not the official file on the Paraskia’s server.
As if the fact that there were two versions of her file wasn’t suspicious enough, Grey’s folder contained a slew of references, photos, documents, even voice memos.
I opened her file and scanned through the first page—all information I’d already memorized.
Isabella Maria Salvini. Twenty-three years old. Twin sister to Mirabella. Daughter of Alfredo Salvini, now deceased, and Mariella Salvini, also deceased. A footnote stated her IQ of 169, but nothing more.
One-sixty-nine. The girl was a fucking genius.
Not that it would explain Grey’s obsession.
I scrolled to the next page which was already different from the official version.
My phone beeped—a message from Anton.
Still no movement.
Grey was still in Verona, to where we tracked the jet, which was good.
I focused back on the file. Why was Grey so fixated on Iset?
What had she discovered or done that made her such a priority target for Grey because I even checked with some of my contacts in the organization, and the Paraskia’s interest in her was still only to use her as leverage to get Vince—and the Salvini family back into the organization.
Nothing more.
Somewhere in the distance was the faint sound of a door closing. My brothers and sisters were somewhere around, or sleeping. I still didn’t know why they were here on the island—still didn’t know what Grey had planned with them here.
I scrolled deeper into her file, searching for anything connecting Grey to Isabella or her activities as Iset.
I broke another toothpick and threw it at the growing stack of broken toothpicks in front of me—evidence I was far from calm and collected.
There were so many pieces of the puzzle, and instead of solving at least some, the pieces multiplied right before my eyes.
My fingers paused over the keyboard. There had to be something I was missing. Grey never acted without purpose, and his interest in Isabella went beyond professional. It was personal, almost obsessive.
I grabbed my phone.
It didn’t even take a single ring before Nina picked up the call. “Can you send me everything the Paraskia has on Iset?”
“Sure,” she said, ended the call, and a second later, the official file arrived with a ding.
I opened the file, clicked through to a section labeled “Subject History,” and froze. The earliest date stamp was 2008. Isabella would have been only eight years old.
“Why 2008?” I muttered, leaning closer to the screen.
Something about the timeline nagged at me—Isabella’s surveillance began in 2008, the same year as…
My fingers stilled on the keyboard.
The same year as the raid on the underground fighting ring. The raid that had saved me and the others.
I switched back and forth between the official file and Grey’s file.
They looked pretty much identical. Both contained surveillance photos—grainy at first, then progressively clearer—of two young girls with dark hair pulled into pigtails in school uniforms. Isabella and Mirabella, unmistakably.
One picture showed only one of them, sitting cross-legged on a library floor, surrounded by books far beyond her age level.
Another captured her at a computer terminal, face illuminated by the screen’s glow.
Was it her performance in school that had gotten her on the radar?
My stomach clenched. The Paraskia Syndicate had extensive documentation on a lot of people, but I’d never encountered someone who had been under surveillance since they were a child.
Until her.
They had been watching Isabella long before she became Iset. Long before she should’ve been on anyone’s radar—beyond a side note in her family’s file.
Or had it only been Grey watching her—which was somehow way creepier. I cross-referenced with her official file, and sure enough, even though there were way fewer details about her childhood years in there, she’d officially been on the Paraskia Syndicate’s radar all her life.
I moved back to Grey’s file and scrolled farther, finding detailed assessments of her academic performance, psychological evaluations conducted without her knowledge, and notes about her “exceptional pattern recognition and problem-solving abilities.” One report highlighted her testing in the 99.
9th percentile for mathematical reasoning at age nine.
But it was the next section that made my blood run cold.
A series of “intervention recommendations” dating back years.
Someone had been subtly manipulating her environment—arranging for certain teachers to be assigned to her classes, monitoring her internet usage, even influencing which summer programs she attended.
“Subject shows natural aptitude for complex logical and strategic thinking,” read one note from when she was eleven. “Recommend continued observation without direct contact. Potential future asset.”
They’d been grooming her. Watching. Waiting.
I noticed a pattern of seemingly random events in her life—a scholarship that was awarded to her, a mentor who suddenly moved away, a computer club that lost its funding—all carefully orchestrated to direct her path. To shape her development in ways she never realized.
Why would anyone invest so many resources in monitoring a child? Unless they knew something about her potential. Unless Grey had known all along what she would become. But how could he?
And obviously, he’d never made the connection between Isabella and Iset until recently.
So how did she get on the Paraskia’s and Grey’s radar?
I switched back to the official file, but there was nothing in there.
Back to Grey’s file. I scrolled backward, worked my way to the very beginning of her file.
Before everything else, there were two numbers: an internal case number and another number. I didn’t give it much attention at first, but maybe it was important.
I searched for the case number in the official database and froze. It was our case, the case of when the Paraskia Syndicate took out an underground fighting ring in Moscow and found a bunch of children who were forced to fight and held in basements like animals.
I searched for the other number from Isabella’s file. It led to an image of a file that had been heavily redacted, but one section remained intact: “Anonymous tip received from juvenile informant, age estimated 8-10 years old, in a park in NYC.”
How could I not have known this detail? My heart rate accelerated. I clicked on the following image.
A photograph appeared—a small scrap of paper with a URL scrawled in uneven, childish handwriting. Below it, a simple message: “Bad men hurt children here.”
I stared at the handwriting, and suddenly, everything clicked into place.
My hands moved mechanically, pulling up the picture of a handwritten birthday card from Isabella Salvini’s official file.
I put both images side by side. The looping Es, the way the Ds tilted slightly to the left, the distinctive way she crossed her Ts—there might be a couple of years in between both images, but it was a very close match.
Isabella Salvini had been the child who reported the fighting rings.
The realization hit me like a physical blow. That was the reason why they started tracking her. She was the reason for the raid. The reason I had been rescued, the reason Grey and the Paraskia had found us.
The images came rushing back with brutal clarity.
The underground bunker with its dirt floors and concrete walls.
The makeshift cage marked with dried blood.
The stench of sweat, fear, and disinfectant that never quite masked the underlying rot.
The memory of my fourteen-year-old self, standing barefoot in the center of that ring for the first time, knuckles split and bleeding, facing another child with the same hollow eyes.
“Face the room. Fight or starve,” they’d told us.
The room. My stomach clenched at the memory—a windowless closet where they’d locked us up for days.
I’d been in there twice. By the third fight, I’d learned to become someone else when I stepped into that ring.
Someone without mercy. Someone who survived years in that basement.
Who fought for his life on a regular basis.
Someone who was barely more than a wild animal when they found us.
It had been just another fight day. Just another day I had been prepared to die, protecting Mila and Nina, who were huddled on one side with Anton and Roman flanking them.
I could still hear the guards shouting as they burst in that day. The raid had been pure chaos—flashing lights, shouting, gunfire.
Grey had appeared like a superhero, calm amid the storm. With raised hands and a kind voice. He’d met us at eye level. Treated us like human beings.
I hadn’t thought about that day in so long. Had never given any deeper thought into how they’d come to find us.
We’d been rescued because someone—a child—cared.
I leaned back and crossed my arms. And not just any child. It had been Isabella—at eight years old—who had set us free with a scrap of paper, a scribbled message, and a URL most other eight-year-olds wouldn’t have been able to memorize.