Chapter Twelve
Yuri’s report landed on my desk at eleven in the morning as I stood by the window watching the city sprawled beneath me. I swirled the glass of whiskey in my hand before lifting it to my lips and taking a sip.
I’d been so busy with work that I didn’t have the time to look at the CCTV footage from her place. The Bratva had a pressing land dispute with the Irish that needed my full attention. It was a welcome distraction, actually. One I didn’t think I needed.
“Boss,” Yuri called from behind me, the scent of his cologne mixing with that of mine in the air.
“Do you have it?” I asked, lowering my glass as I turned to face him.
He set the document together with a flash drive on my table. “I’ve compiled everything she’s done within the last few days. And in that drive, you’ll find the sped-up version of the footage from her apartment.”
“Good.” I sank into my chair, glass on the table.
Yuri paused. And although he hadn’t said anything yet, I could sense his urge to speak.
“Is there something on your mind?” I asked without looking up at him.
He hesitated. “Forgive my asking, Boss.” Another brief pause. “What’s so different about this girl?”
I glanced at him without a word.
“I mean, she witnessed our operation,” he continued. “She even had a meeting with Daniel Whitfield—a man who was willing to tell her what he knew about our underground business.” He rubbed his forehead, a hint of confusion in his eyes. “I can’t understand why she’s still breathing.”
I held his gaze for a few seconds. “She’s still breathing because I allow it.”
“But, Boss, that girl is unpredictable,” he said. “First she met with Whitfield. Who’s she going to meet up with next? Someone from the press?”
“She is someone from the press,” I said flatly.
“You know what I mean, Boss.”
“Tell me, Yuri.” I exhaled softly. “Why do you think she met up with Whitfield?”
He thought for a moment. “Because he reached out to her.”
“Why did he reach out to her?” I asked him. “What was the subject of their discussion?”
“Offshore accounts tied to shell companies.”
“Did she, at any moment in their conversation, mention what she witnessed at Meridian Solutions?”
A pause.
“No.”
“Has she, in fact, contacted anyone and told them about what she witnessed?”
Another pause.
“No.”
I leaned back in my chair. “What does that tell you, Yuri?”
“That she’s smart.” His reply was swift. “And smart people can be dangerously unpredictable.”
“You’re right. She is smart,” I said. “And that’s why I wanna know what she intends to do in this dire situation.”
“You’re getting too close, Boss—too involved,” he said unapologetically, although his tone was polite. “She already knows what you look like because you revealed yourself to her under a false identity.”
“False identity,” I repeated.
“You said it yourself; she is smart,” he replied, his gaze dropping to the document on my table. “She’s begun looking into you already. And we both know that it’s only a matter of time before this blows up in our faces.”
My expression remained neutral. “Let me worry about that, Yuri.”
He straightened, inclining his head slightly.
“Anything else?”
“No, sir.”
“You’re dismissed.”
He gave a faint nod and walked out of my office.
Yuri was the only other person outside my family who had the guts to tell me to my face when he thought I was wrong about something. He was never out of tone. And he never confronted me or questioned my decision until it was absolutely necessary.
For that, the man had my respect.
Yuri was right to question what I was doing because even I didn’t know the actual fuck was wrong with me.
If Aria were someone else, the situation would’ve been taken care of from day one. But there was something about her that was different. Something that kept pulling me to her like fuckin’ steel to a magnet.
And the worst part was that I liked it. I liked the feeling of being drawn to her. It was as intriguing as it was unsettling.
I cracked my fingers and decided to delve into the documents on my table. On the first page of Yuri’s report, he’d written:
“Subject continued research overnight. Active until approximately 5 a.m. Searches included charity event archives, business registries, and a cross-reference of R.T. Confidence level: moderate to high that subject has identified initials.”
I read it twice, my brows furrowing with amusement and a hint of concern. She really was smarter than I gave her credit for. And now I was starting to wonder whether revealing myself was such a good idea after all. Even under a false identity.
In the silence, I sat with the kind of focus that arrived right before a decision I needed to make correctly the first time.
From what I gathered, she had R.T.
She had a gala photograph, blurred enough to be useless in any court but apparently clear enough to make a connection she trusted.
She didn’t have Anton Vasylenko yet. Yuri’s notes confirmed that much—no searches on the consulting firm. Yet. No flags on the fabricated website. Yet. Nothing to suggest she’d connected the stranger from the coffee shop to the name now circled in her notebook.
Knowing her, that gap wouldn’t last.
I had two paths available to me, and I turned them over with an unhurried precision. I could stop her now—remove the threat cleanly, as my lieutenant proposed. If any other variable had gotten this close to the structure in fifteen years of building it, it would have been taken care of by now.
Yuri was already waiting for that instruction. All I needed to do was say the words, and it would be done.
But I didn’t have any interest in “cleaning up” this mess. None whatsoever. Instead, I decided to keep playing this little game with her.
I tightened the leash, rerouting two of her sources within the hour.
The first was simple—a compliance contact at a regional bank who’d been flagged in her search history as a likely next call. This was someone who could plausibly confirm the holding structure if pressed the right way.
A single conversation, conducted by a man who did not exist outside of that conversation, ensured the contact would suddenly find himself unavailable for the foreseeable future. He’d be called away to handle a family matter that had not, until that morning, existed.
The second required more care. A university archive she’d been quietly trying to access—older corporate filings, the kind that predated digital records and required an institutional override to view in full.
I had the override revoked under a procedural pretext, a routine compliance review that would resolve itself in exactly the amount of time required to make the timing look unrelated to her specific request.
She would notice both.
She noticed everything.
But she would experience them as obstacles, ordinary administrative friction, rather than as a hand reaching directly into her life and rearranging it.
That was the entire architecture of what I’d built around her by now. Not a wall. A maze with no visible walls at all, simply doors that closed a half-second before she reached them.
I told myself this was containment. But was it really just containment, or was there something more?
***
I knew deep down that Yuri was right when he suggested that keeping my distance was better than getting involved directly. However, that force that always pulled me to her wouldn’t let me.
That afternoon, I left my office and tracked her to the university. She’d worn the jacket I’d placed a tracking device on the other night in the alley, which made her location much easier to pinpoint.
I didn’t go as myself. Too risky. I didn’t go as Anton Vasylenko either. Nor did I go as her mystery guardian angel.
The plan was simple: stay close enough to observe, the way I’d been doing for days now. Except I made less effort than usual to stay at a distance that would have satisfied my own rules from a week ago.
She sat in a corner of the university library. Three books were open around her laptop as she stared at the screen. Her blue eyes didn’t seem as bright today. They seemed rather tired and heavy.
I didn’t have to be a genius to know that that particular hunched focus was that of someone who’d had four hours of sleep and was running entirely on conviction instead of rest.
I took a seat at a table close enough to keep an eye on her without being noticed.
I observed in silence, drinking in every detail I could catch. The way her messy blond hair framed her face, the faint bags under her eyes. And the way she chewed the end of her pen without seeming to realize she was doing it.
I noticed everything, including the small, frustrated exhale she gave every time a search returned nothing useful.
She looked up twice. Both times, her tired eyes swept the room with the same hyper-vigilance I’d come to understand was part of her. Her gaze passed over me without catching.
I spied on her as she worked, oblivious to my presence. My eyes caught the exact moment frustration crossed into something sharper.
She slammed her hand flat against the table. Not hard enough to draw attention. But enough to keep her displeasure from venting out.
She was close. Closer than I’d let myself fully acknowledge in Yuri’s report. Not close enough to expose the structure. No. Not yet. But close enough that the gap between “not yet” and “now” had narrowed to something I could measure in weeks rather than months.
I should have found that more alarming than I did.
Strange how a part of me wanted her to stop and just get some rest. She was already pushing way too hard, and it was affecting her in ways that shouldn’t concern me, yet it did.
From my corner, I watched her for about thirty more minutes before deciding it was time to leave. Being around her had worked its magic again even though it was something I didn’t have a name for yet.
Quietly, I rose to my feet, took one last look in her direction, and then walked away.
***
Later that evening, I ran a deeper background check myself because I realized I hadn’t actually done thorough homework on her.
I told myself it was just standard procedure, but at this point, I no longer entirely believed my own explanations when it came to her.
Yuri had dug into her background before and had presented the files to me. However, with all that’s happened with Aria within the last week, I felt the urge to look into her myself.
There was something about her surname that always bugged me.
Bennett.
Yuri had run the name before, in the early days of identifying her as a threat. It had returned nothing of consequence then—a journalism student, unremarkable family, a father who worked in finance somewhere in the Midwest, nothing that intersected with anything that mattered to my world.
This time, I went deeper. Further back. Old advisory firm records, the kind buried under decades of mergers and dissolutions and name changes.
Bennett, Charles. Senior advisor, a now-dissolved financial consultancy, active roughly twenty-two years ago.
I read the name twice before the recognition arrived, slow and unwelcome, like cold water finding a crack it had been looking for.
Charles Bennett.
The name surfaced from somewhere old enough that it took me a full minute to place exactly where I’d encountered it.
Not in any current file. Not in anything I’d built myself. But in the organization’s earlier history, the part predating my own direct control.
A restructuring, more than two decades ago. A consultancy brought in to help reorganize a portion of the network’s holdings, back when the architecture had been cruder, more exposed.
This was before men like me had spent fifteen years refining it into something nearly invisible.
The restructuring had gone wrong—badly enough to cost the organization a significant position in two markets. Badly enough that the consultancy involved had been quietly, permanently removed from any future consideration.
I didn’t yet know if Charles Bennett was Aria’s father. Or if the two men were even the same person. In Chicago alone, there were hundreds of people bearing the name Charles Bennett. What were the odds of this particular person being Aria’s father?
I sat with the file open for a length of time I couldn’t have accounted for afterward. The cursor blinked on an unanswered search field, the question forming quietly in my unstable mind.
If the connection was real, she hadn’t stumbled into my world by accident at all.
She’d been standing at the edge of it her entire life, without knowing it. The same way I’d apparently been standing at the edge of something with her that I hadn’t yet found the correct name for either.
I didn’t act on it. Not that night.
I closed the file, sat back in my chair, and allowed myself, for the first time in a long time, to feel something closer to uncertainty than to control.
I kept the surveillance running through the night, just as every night before.
But I watched the feed differently now. Less like a man monitoring a threat.
More like a man waiting to find out exactly how deep a thing went, before he had to decide what he was willing to do once he knew.
Who are you, Aria Bennett? I thought to myself. Who are you?