5. NIKOLAI
Chapter five
C ipher was already humming when I walked in.
There was a line at the bar that stretched past the counter.
The customers were a mix of bleary-eyed professionals and overcaffeinated college types staring at their phones.
Even this early, the booths were full, the tables scattered with laptops and half-eaten pastries.
Someone had strung a garland of glittery paper ghosts above the pastry case, and there were cutouts of pumpkins and bats placed all around.
Americans had a holiday for everything—even one where grown adults dressed like children, begged for sugar, and pretended death was cute.
I’d never understood the point of it. But someone here clearly loved it.
Carmine didn’t strike me as the festive type, and Trina barely cracked a smile on a good day, just like the rest of the locals who worked here.
Which meant it had to be her . The blonde from yesterday.
Just as I moved toward the back, I saw her. This time, her eyes found mine the second I looked at her…and didn’t fucking look away.
She bit her lip, slowly, like she knew exactly what that did to a man. Then she dropped her head with a little show of submissiveness—only to peek back up through her lashes with a curve to her mouth that said she wasn’t sorry for a damn thing.
Ballsy.
Most people wouldn’t meet my eyes on instinct.
Particularly if they knew who I was.
Not if they wanted to keep breathing.
But this girl?
She scrutinized me with unapologetic boldness.
I slid into my booth in the far corner—the one I’d claimed a few months ago when I’d decided to stay in Manhattan for a while. High leather back. No one behind me. Full view of the room.
I opened my laptop and unlocked it with one swipe of my finger.
The custom OS booted without making a sound.
It had military-grade encryption layered over a proprietary kernel, something I’d written myself.
On the surface, the interface looked like a trading dashboard—something a hedge fund bro might use to monitor markets.
Behind the mask? Access to data vaults most governments didn’t even know existed.
I started my morning the same way I always did—scanning offshore ledgers for abnormal fund movements and checking open channels across four continents for anything related to me or those most important to me. My name wasn’t on anything traceable, but my fingerprints were everywhere.
But with her in the room, I couldn’t focus on the screen in front of me. Something about her commanded my attention.
I told myself I had work to do.
Instead, I watched her out of the corner of my eye.
She wore black jeans today—clean, no holes this time.
Up top, a soft pink sweater hugged her waist, the neckline dipping just low enough to tease the shape of her breasts.
Feminine. A little flirty without trying.
It would have looked ridiculous on most of the jaded, hardened, too-tired-to-care women who worked in places like this.
But on her? Somehow, it worked. Maybe because that softness wasn’t just in her clothes—it was in her.
In the way she smiled at strangers, as if they might smile back.
In the easy way she moved through the room.
There was a kind of light in her, and I didn’t know what to make of it.
Optimism like that didn’t exist where I came from.
I studied her more closely, noticing that she wore no makeup and that her blue eyes were shadowed with fatigue.
That wasn’t the kind of tired you could fix with a nap.
It was the kind of tired that came from hustling too hard and never getting a break.
The messy blonde bun twisted up on top of her head was her golden crown.
Despite her obvious exhaustion, she was stunning, though her cheeks were a little too hollow, like she skipped meals. That possibility gnawed at me.
She moved between tables with the kind of effortless grace that had to be either rehearsed or inborn.
One hand balanced a tray, while the other gestured as she chatted with an older couple like she’d known them for years.
Her laugh—light, unforced—carried above the low hum of the room.
She was too upbeat for someone who hadn’t slept, too happy for someone running on fumes.
Either she was the best actress in Manhattan, or that sunshine was genuine.
She passed by my booth, heading for a table by the window, and I let my eyes follow her. She must’ve sensed it. Her back stiffened. When she turned, her gaze met mine dead-on.
There it was again, that little flicker in her eyes—half challenge, half curiosity.
I wanted to know what the hell she was doing here, working morning shifts in a coffee shop where the mafia kept booths on reserve. There was no way she made enough to afford a decent place anywhere in Manhattan. What was her story?
She reached the table by the window and took an order. Then she wiped a table nearby. Her hands moved quickly, but she kept glancing my way, like she didn’t know whether to flip me off or flutter her lashes.
I clicked the trackpad of the laptop.
Let’s find out who you really are, sweetheart .
A few keystrokes later, I was inside Cipher’s internal network.
Carmine’s security protocols were a joke—standard cloud-based CRM with an off-the-shelf point-of-sale plug-in.
I tunneled in through a known backdoor, bypassed the admin credentials, and dumped the employee records. Took less than sixty seconds.
Found her file.
Lyla Laine Oakley. Tennessee driver’s license, issued eight months ago.
Social Security number, date of birth, hire date.
She’d been working here since April. Minimum wage with a tip share that would barely cover subway rides.
When I saw what Carmine paid her each week, a flicker of violence stirred under my skin.
How the fuck was she surviving on that?
Another thirty seconds and I had access to her bank info and rental agreement.
And then I found something I hadn’t expected.
A second employer.
The Sacrifice.
My fingers stilled on the keyboard.
I blinked, read it again.
The Sacrifice.
That didn’t sound good.
I ran a search. Not much came up at first—just a sleek, intentionally sparse website with a barely-there landing page. A moody background with a password-protected login portal. No names. No schedules. Just one line at the bottom: Private Members Club. Invitation Only.
Still, I knew exactly what I was looking at.
One image showed the silhouette of a woman mid-spin on a pole, her legs extended above a set of dimly lit velvet banquettes.
Another captured the blur of strobe lights hitting skin and sequins.
No logos. No name. But there was no need.
This wasn’t a bar. It was a strip club—one that didn’t want to be found by just anyone.
I ran a reverse-image search, hoping to find a performer tagged somewhere, a location match, anything.
Nothing. The metadata had been scrubbed clean. Whoever had built the site knew what they were doing. That kind of digital hygiene wasn’t cheap—or casual.
I ran a side trace on the site’s backend infrastructure and got a hit: 11th Avenue and West 45th Street.
The Sacrifice. Registered under a shell company based out of the Cayman Islands with a fake name that screamed front , the kind of name used by people with a lot to hide and the resources to make themselves vanish if anyone looked too close.
This was not just any strip club.
It was hidden. Quiet. Exactly the kind of place men like me avoided…or owned.
And my girl was working there?
That little girl in the pink sweater and ratty bun spent her nights on a pole?
I closed the screen halfway and looked back at her.
Something snapped in my jaw. I hadn’t even realized I was clenching my teeth until the pain cut through the fog in my head.
She shouldn’t be stripping.
She shouldn’t be waiting tables either.
I hated that I noticed the way the neckline of her sweater dipped in the front.
Hated that I could picture her spinning—the way her thighs would flex, how that sweetness could become something weaponized.
But mostly? I hated the idea of other men looking at her.
Touching her. Shouting at her from dark corners, mouths open, eyes tracking every grind her barely clothed body made.
She was mine .
The thought came uninvited. The word hit hard and settled deep, as though it had always belonged there. I hadn’t planned on claiming her. But the moment the idea crossed my mind, it carved itself in stone.
“Morning, Mr. Volkov.”
Trina’s voice cut through the red haze. She set my order down—black coffee in a double-walled ceramic mug and an open-faced lox on toasted rye with lemon dill cream cheese and capers. She never had to ask, which I appreciated.
“You’re early today,” she said, smoothing her apron.
I nodded, keeping my eyes on the blonde. “What’s her story?”
Trina followed my gaze. Her mouth twitched. “Lyla? She’s been here since April. Started on mornings yesterday. Carmine hired her the day she showed up in the city looking all desperate.”
“Literally?”
“Close enough.” She snorted. “She was staying in one of those scuzzy hostels. Then one of the girls she met here hooked her up with a cheap apartment over in Hell’s Kitchen. Small, a couple of roommates. Barely better than squatting.”
“Why’s she here?”
Trina leaned in, lowering her voice and rolling her eyes. “She’s got a thing for the stage—acting, dancing, the whole follow-your-dreams spiel. Says she’s gonna be a star.”
I didn’t respond, just continued focusing on Lyla across the cafe.
“She’s one of those Suzi Sunshine types. Always smiling. Always talking. Like, does she ever shut the hell up?” Trina muttered. “It’s annoying as shit.”
I sipped the coffee. “Sounds like you’re jealous. Not a good look.”