5. NIKOLAI #2
Trina blinked, stiffening. “No, sir. Just…she doesn’t know how to act around the Cipher crowd yet. Case in point…yesterday.”
“She’s not allowed to serve me anymore?”
“Carmine made that clear.” Trina hesitated, lowering her voice. “She’s lucky he didn’t fire her. She’s na?ve, Mr. Volkov. Sweet, but green as hell. That smile lets her get away with murder. Plus, she hasn’t been trained to take care of our…more exclusive clientele.”
“Hmm.”
She fidgeted, then stepped back. “Let me know if you need anything else.”
I nodded once, and she vanished.
Lyla disappeared into the back as well, so I turned my focus back to the screen, but my thoughts kept straying.
Everything I touched lately turned to blood or stress.
My mother was fucking the man trying to dismantle what remained of my father’s legacy—Alexey Melnichenko.
He was like a goddamn vulture, circling what was left of the Volkovi Notchi.
And while she played matriarch to our enemies, I was here in Manhattan trying to resurrect fractured ties on the West Coast and hold the line between old alliances and newer syndicates that barely tolerated each other on the East Coast. All of them were watching me like they expected me to slip up at any moment, like they wanted to see if I’d fail harder than my father had.
Luca Genovese was keeping them off my back, for now.
The man was as cunning as he was brutal—he’d consolidated the Genovese, Moretti, and Byrnes families under one East Coast umbrella.
What had once been separate factions were now functioning as one brutal syndicate, and I needed their loyalty and respect if Luca and I were going to hold this new syndicate together.
I needed a power structure here in the US to help ensure those from the Volkovi Notchi had reason to stay loyal to me.
They had to be given financial incentives to resist being swayed into switching sides and aligning with Melnichenko.
Not for personal power. Not for ego.
But for Anastasia. My sister. The only person in this life I loved without condition.
She was pregnant and living a safe, normal life far away in Tacoma, Washington, hidden away from the mafia world, as long as I could keep it that way.
But peace never came free. We’d spilled so much blood to buy her freedom at that fucking wedding.
Frankie Moretti’s skull had been blown open, my Aunt Elena had been shot dead in her seat, and many high-ranking men had been cut down just to make a statement.
That was the cost of her freedom.
And I’d keep paying it to keep her safe.
I wasn’t trying to rule the underworld; I was just trying to clean it out—strip the rot, purge the men who trafficked women and funneled fentanyl into high schools.
Luca and I had aligned on that mission: dismantle the Central American gangs who were poisoning this country with blood money and American corpses.
The worst of these groups—MS-13—was from El Salvador, headed up by Ciro Delgado, one of those cartel-backed fuckers who smiled like a politician and murdered like a butcher.
He had several notable US politicians in his pocket.
Government contracts. Distribution routes disguised as charities.
And he was crawling through this city like a roach.
But even with all the chaos and challenges I was currently facing, my eyes kept drifting back to the little blonde in the pink sweater.
She leaned in close to her customers when she laughed.
Her hand amicably brushed people’s shoulders and arms with practiced ease.
Southern charm, warm and casual. Perhaps she was angling for tips—or maybe it was just her nature.
She seemed like the sort of girl who smiled because she wanted to, not because she had to.
I couldn’t tell. She didn’t move like someone who carried secrets—but then again, everyone had secrets.
Just then, one of the regulars—some midlevel finance prick in an expensive coat—reached out like he owned her and tried to squeeze her ass.
She pivoted fast, dodging the touch with a quick, agile spin that turned into a laugh and some joke that defused the moment. Professional. Perfectly executed. She made sure he didn’t feel slighted. Kept him smiling. But my stomach seized up as if I’d just swallowed glass.
Heat surged behind my ribs—something possessive, ugly, and unfamiliar. It was a dangerous spike of jealousy I didn’t fucking appreciate. I didn’t do jealousy. I didn’t give a damn who a woman talked to or slept with.
I clenched my jaw as my fingers flew across the keyboard.
Back to The Sacrifice .
I needed to know what the hell she was doing there. Was she a bartender, bookkeeper, stripper?
The more I dug, the worse it looked. The password-protected site was just a curtain.
Behind it? Layers of digital armor—proxy reroutes, rotating IP cloaks, and a firewall architecture that pulsed like a living thing.
Military-level countersurveillance to monitor anyone pinging the site while it was cloaked in strip-club branding.
It was the kind of infrastructure I usually only saw on black-market exchanges and offshore weapons caches.
This wasn’t some cash-only grindhouse on the edge of Midtown.
Whoever ran The Sacrifice had serious reach and no intention of being found.
Which meant they were protecting something—or someone.
I’d been involved in the underworld long enough to know what this level of security usually hid—and it sure as hell wasn’t lap dances. My guess—drugs, trafficking, high-roller blackmail.
Maybe mafia. But my instincts said worse—Mara Salvatrucha.
And she worked there?
I frowned and fired off a quick message to Luca:
You ever heard of The Sacrifice club? 11th Avenue and West 45th, Hell’s Kitchen. Looks like high-level tech on the backend of their site. I need intel about a girl who works there and a sitrep yesterday.
I didn’t wait for an answer but dove right back into analyzing her digital footprint, peeling back layers one by one.
But something felt off.
Lyla Laine Oakley.
“Hmm.”
I continued my search, pulling up local news archives, anything with her name. Then I found it—an obituary from two years ago. Drunk tourist. Head-on collision on a winding Tennessee road. Three dead.
Including Lyla.
The real Lyla.
My eyes narrowed.
The photo beside the obituary showed a girl who looked like the one in front of me—but not exactly. Standing beside her in the photo was a younger version of her. Same eyes, same mischievous mouth. Identified in the caption as Lacey Grace Oakley.
Not Lyla.
Lacey.
I scraped Tennessee’s vehicle registration database. Lacey Grace Oakley was twenty. Barely.
Too young to be living in this city alone.
Too na?ve for the kind of men who lurked around clubs like The Sacrifice.
Too untarnished to be tangled up in a world of pole routines, private rooms, and men who just wanted to take whatever they could get from her.
It didn’t line up—that fresh-faced wholesomeness, the easy way she smiled, the way she brightened a room. None of it belonged in the same sentence as “strip club and stolen identity.”
Not unless she was hiding something.
Not unless it was all an act—and if it was, I wanted to know who had taught her to lie that well.
In my world, twenty wasn’t too young for a woman to be claimed. Arranged marriages happened all the time. But innocence like hers? That was rare.
If she really was untouched—if no one else had gotten to her first—that would change everything.
And now I had to know just how far that innocence really went.
She did have her secrets, though. This woman serving coffee and breakfast across the room from me was living under her dead sister’s name, and she was way out of her depth.
What the fuck?
My attention snapped back to the image in the obituary—two sisters, their arms wrapped around each other, smiling with abandon. Pure joy. Now one of them was buried under a headstone, and the other was here, living halfway across the country, lying about who she was.
Had she come to Manhattan chasing something?
Or escaping it?
Had some asshole promised her the world and left her broken and alone?
I didn’t know. But I wanted to.
I glanced up from the screen. She was wiping down a nearby table, but her eyes kept darting my way. She pursed her lips as a flicker of uncertainty crossed her face, just enough to betray that tension I’d seen before.
She’d noticed me watching her.
Good.
Because I wasn’t going to stop.
Not until I knew every goddamn thing about her.
By the time I hit Central Park South, the tension had crawled up my neck and settled behind my eyes like a pressure headache that wouldn’t quit. With every step I took, my curiosity and bafflement about Lyla’s situation grew.
What the fuck was a girl like that doing working in a place like The Sacrifice?
She didn’t belong in a world that chewed girls up and spat out corpses.
She had no place in those rooms full of men who lasciviously tracked a dancer’s every move, their mouths agape, cash at the ready.
The men that frequented those places didn’t care if the women ended up trafficked, as long as they got their rocks off.
Did she even understand how fast a girl like her could disappear in this city?
They’d steal her name, wipe her record, and ship her off to some foreign shit-pit with no extradition. She’d be sold. Used. Broken. Over and over until there was nothing left.
The more I thought about it, the faster I walked.
I didn’t slow down even after reaching my building. My boots struck polished stone as I crossed the quiet lobby. A scan of my palm triggered the security panel, and I entered a passcode before leaning in for the iris scan. Only then did the private elevator recognize me and open with a soft chime.
This place was a luxury fortress perfect for someone like me, a man with myriad secrets and money to burn.
The view from the penthouse was postcard-perfect—Central Park lay sprawled out before me under a clear noon sky—but I didn’t stop to admire it.
I walked past the chef’s kitchen. The scent of last night’s chili con carne still wafting faintly in the air.
I moved past the gallery-lit walls lined with large-scale Ansel Adams and Edward Burtynsky prints—landscapes, rivers running like veins through canyons, mountain ridges carved in light and shadow.
Stark, natural, and violent in their stillness. Just like the world I lived in.
I headed straight into my hacker’s nest.
The glass doors frosted behind me after I entered, ensuring my privacy. I dropped into the leather chair at the main desk and hit a sequence of keys to activate the array. The screens flickered to life. Six panels. Global intel feeds. Live surveillance in Moscow, Manhattan, and the Maldives.
But right now all I needed was her.
Lacey Grace Oakley.
I pulled the file I’d created for her at Cipher and started digging once again.
The girl wasn’t a ghost—she was just buried beneath the identity she’d stolen.
Two years ago, Lyla Laine Oakley had been pronounced dead at the scene of a car crash in Cosby, Tennessee. Her parents too. The only survivor listed on the estate transfer was Lacey Grace Oakley. Younger sister. Eighteen at the time.
I followed the trail.
Bank account activity flatlined after the funeral.
A new checking account had been opened earlier this year, in March, using her sister’s ID.
A quiet switch, subtle enough that most banks wouldn’t flag it unless someone was looking.
There had been minimal deposits since then, just enough to get by.
She had a small nest egg from the sale of her family’s home—more money than most people her age had—but she hadn’t touched it.
Not a cent. The girl was disciplined—either too proud to use it or too scared that she might need it to survive one day.
The last transaction on the account was a single bus ticket to New York in April of this year.
I found images next.
Not current. Not posted on any social media sites.
Just cached fragments caught by search engines before the originals had disappeared.
A pair of smiling girls on horseback. A video of Lacey singing at some mountain fair.
A few clips from an aerial routine at a place called The Dixie Stampede.
In all of them, her blonde hair was shiny and bouncing, her blue-green eyes full of joy and passion.
She had no idea what life was about to throw her way.
Lacey had her arms around her sister’s neck in many of the photos, like she’d never imagined life without her.
Now she had become her sister.
There were some current images on new social media accounts—Lyla Laine reborn.
I scrolled through profiles filled with footage of her aerial routines, studio headshots, and tagged photos from open-call auditions here in the city.
There were a handful of group shots with the same two people in them.
One was a lean guy who was often pictured without a shirt, displaying his sculpted torso and an array of tattoos.
The other was a woman who could’ve passed for a big sister.
Lyla clung to them in many of the pictures, laughing with that easy closeness people like me didn’t understand.
She seemed especially friendly with the guy—in a lot of the photos, he had his arms around her waist, with his cheek resting against her temple.
It was affectionate in a way that didn’t read as platonic. My jaw tightened.
I didn’t find any sort of images or videos of her from The Sacrifice, but I could envision her there anyway.
That tiny, strong body spinning over the heads of monsters.
I stood and moved closer to the display, cycling through everything I’d found. She was petite but strong. Unscarred. Untouched. Not even one tattoo.
My pulse thudded in my neck.
She didn’t even know she was mine yet.
I’d never stalked a woman.
Didn’t need to. Didn’t care enough.
But she’d changed that.
And now I would follow her anywhere. No hesitation. No shame. Just the gnawing need to know where she was going—and who might be waiting there.
I had meetings lined up all afternoon—one with a Cypriot company laundering money for the Volkovi Notchi, another with a group of Turks moving arms through eastern ports for us—but I didn’t give a fuck.
I picked up my phone and canceled them all.
I glanced at the time. She’d be clocking out at Cipher soon.
I scanned the employee schedule again to confirm, then shut down the monitors. The lights dimmed around me, the room going still.
I wasn’t done with Lacey Grace Oakley.
Not even close.