Chapter 15
Lev
Idon’t make it two steps before I stop in the corridor, pressing my palm flat against the wall.
Fuck.
That was too close.
My hand is shaking from the effort it took not to touch her.
Every muscle in my body screamed at me to close that last inch between us, to taste that mouth that keeps throwing insults at me like weapons, to prove to her that her body knows exactly what it wants, even if her mind refuses to admit it.
I wanted to wrap my hand around her throat and squeeze until she gasped for breath.
But I didn’t.
I gave her the choice, and she didn’t take it. That should be enough to kill this obsession stone dead.
It isn’t.
It makes it worse.
I punch the wall lightly and head downstairs, my jaw tight enough to crack teeth.
Locking myself in my office, I drop into my chair, staring at the bank of screens without seeing any of them.
My cock is hard enough to hurt, and my hands want to be on her so badly I have to grip the armrests to stop myself from going back upstairs.
I force myself to focus on the screens instead.
Nathaniel Mercer. The blonde prick from the club.
The handler who tried to kill Varvara. Any of these would be more productive than sitting here obsessing over a woman who’s terrified of me and simultaneously can’t tell me to fuck off when I get close.
I pull up the CCTV footage from the club again and scrub through it frame by frame. The blonde man enters after me. He moves through the crowd with purpose, scanning faces. Looking for someone.
Not me. He didn’t know I was there.
So, who spooked him?
I stop the frame and zoom in on his face. Mid-thirties. Clean-cut. Expensive suit but not flashy. The kind of man who blends into places like Chyornyy Barkhat without effort. I run facial recognition software against my database of known operatives, informants, and criminals in London.
Nothing.
“Fuck,” I say, sitting back. “Who the fuck are you?”
I scrub a hand over my face and force myself to think logically instead of like a man who wants to fuck a woman who should be off-limits.
The dropper made the hand-off with Varvara because something went wrong. Either he spotted surveillance or the handler didn’t show where they were meant to meet. That means the original plan fell apart, and he improvised.
Badly. He picked the wrong woman.
I switch cameras and follow him. He doesn’t look at her until the last second. He is professional enough to know how to make a handoff under pressure. Not professional enough to spot me tracking him.
I scan through the rest of the crowd and spot the handler immediately. I’ve never seen her face before, but I know.
She looks too much like Varvara for it to be a coincidence.
“You have got to be fucking with me,” I say.
This wasn’t a case of getting spooked; this was total mistaken identity. He had a description of the handler—presumably had never met her—and instead he spotted Varvara and made the drop to her as if she was the one all along.
I sit back in my chair. So that means the handler witnessed the drop-off gone wrong and headed out to the alley to confront Varvara about the USB drive when she saw her head out for her break.
But I got in the way.
I lean forward and scrub through more footage, tracking this woman who looks enough like Varvara to fool someone working off a description. Dark hair, petite, similar build. From a distance or in a crowded club, the mistake makes sense.
I isolate her face and run it through my database.
Nothing.
“Come on,” I say, refining the search parameters. I run it again, this time broadening the scope to include international databases I shouldn’t have access to but do anyway.
Still nothing.
Whoever she is, she’s good at staying off the radar. That level of anonymity takes effort and resources. This isn’t some low-level courier. This is someone who knows how to disappear.
I pull up the alley footage next, watching the shooting. There is one angle, and that is it, over the service entrance to the club. So that is almost useless. I try to hook up to any other businesses in the area, but nothing shows the shooter.
While that processes, I pull up the feed from Varvara’s building. The man I stabbed is nowhere to be seen now, but I rewind to when he arrived. He shows up on foot, no car, no backup visible. Amateur hour. He walks straight to the front door and picks it like I did.
I zoom in on his face and run it through my system. This time, I get a hit.
Alexey Smirnov. Low-level enforcer. Works for whoever pays him enough. No loyalty, no finesse, just brute force and stupidity. The fact that he was sent to Varvara’s flat tells me whoever hired him doesn’t consider her a serious threat anymore. They’re testing to see who I am.
I make a note of his known associates and current employer. It’s a shell company, naturally, but I can trace it back with enough digging.
A ping on the bank of monitors makes me look up. Mercer. I’d practically forgotten about him.
Standing up, I move to the monitors and study the flagged data.
Mercer’s phone pinged a burner number three times in the last hour.
Short calls. Under thirty seconds each. I pull up the location data for both phones and overlay them on a map.
Mercer is at work. The burner is moving through East London, the same area where the rental was returned.
“Interesting,” I say.
I set an alert to track both numbers and switch back to the mystery handler. I need a name. I need to know who she works for and why Voronov operations are worth risking her life.
My phone buzzes. Baron.
I answer immediately. “Yes, Pakhan.”
“You had better be working on Mercer and not trying to find this ghost handler.”
“I can do both. The handler is just as important. I’m pretty sure the drop off was mistaken identity.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. I spotted the handler on the CCTV at the club. She looks similar to Varvara. The smug guy fucked up.”
“So that means he is either dead now or being set up to try again.”
“Exactly. The question is, who does the handler work for, and why didn’t he know who she was outside a description which could be any number of women in that club?”
“You’re going to find out?”
“I am.”
“Lev.”
The warning in his voice is unmistakable.
“I said I can do both. This won’t compromise the Mercer case.”
“It had better not.”
The line goes dead before I can respond.
I stare at my phone for a second, then pocket it. He’s not wrong to warn me. I’m compromised as fuck, and we both know it.
I turn back to the screen and pull up the facial recognition software again, this time running the handler’s face through social media databases. It’s a long shot, but people are careless. They post photos, tag locations, leave digital breadcrumbs everywhere.
Nothing.
I’m not surprised.
I sit back again and refocus on Smirnov. Somehow, he has to lead back to this operation that wanted Voronov information.
I grab my phone and text one of my contacts who owes me a favour. He works in the kind of places where men like Smirnov get hired for dirty jobs. If anyone knows who’s bankrolling this mess, it’s him.
The reply comes back within minutes. A name. An address. A warning that I didn’t ask for but appreciate anyway.
Nikolai Popov.
I sit back and stare at the name on my screen.
Popov runs a smuggling operation out of the docks.
Small-time compared to Voronov operations, but ambitious enough to be dangerous.
He’s been trying to muscle in on our territory for months now, testing boundaries, seeing how far he can push before someone pushes back.
This is him pushing.
I pull up everything I have on Popov. His operations, his known associates, his weaknesses. There aren’t many of the latter. He’s careful, paranoid even. But everyone has a pressure point. I just need to find his.
My phone buzzes again. A text from Pyotr.
Lunch is ready. Should I bring it up?
I glance at the time. An hour has passed already. I stare at my phone and type back.
Yes. I’ll be up in five.
I save my work and lock the screens before heading out. My mind is already three steps ahead, planning how to approach Popov without starting a war that Baron doesn’t want yet.
But first, I need to deal with the woman upstairs who’s probably plotting seventeen different ways to murder me in my sleep.
I take the stairs two at a time and unlock the bedroom door, pushing it open without bothering to knock. Varvara is sitting on the bed now, legs crossed, staring at her hands.
“Where is my phone?”
“I took it.”
“Did you also kill it?”
“I did.”
“I want it back.”
“Why? So, you can call the Met?”
Her gaze shoots to mine. She knows the predicament she is in. She also knows the Met can’t help her.
“Lunch is coming,” I say, instead.
“Thrilling,” she mutters. “Does Pyotr also serve meals to other prisoners, or am I special?”
“You’re special.”
She glares. “Don’t be a dick.”
“You started it, I carried on. If you don’t want me to be a dick, don’t make me act like one.”
“That’s some serious gaslighting you’re doing there.”
“I’m a master at it.”
“I know,” she says. “Don’t do it. Don’t gaslight me. I’m not a na?ve little girl who doesn’t know when she is being manipulated.”
I stare at her for a beat, weighing my options. I can continue being a dick, or I can give her what she asked for and not be myself. That might be harder than it sounds.
A knock sounds at the door. Pyotr.
I open it and take the tray from him before he can step inside. He gives me a knowing look that I ignore and retreats back down the corridor.
I set the tray on the side table near the window.
“What is it?” she asks, with more interest than I’ve seen from her since she got here.
I lift the silver dome. “Lamb and potatoes with green veg.” I replace the dome. “Acceptable or do you not eat anything with a face?”
She baulks at me. “That’s a horrible way to put it.”
“Do you want it or do you want something else?”
“You mean I actually have a choice?”
“Of course you do. Pyotr might be offended…” I stare at her. She glares back at me. “Sorry, old habits.”
“I’ll eat the lamb. I’m not a vegetarian, nor do I have any other dietary requirements.”
“Good to know.”
She rises from the bed and moves towards the tray, sits in the armchair, and lifts the lid from the plate.
She inhales deeply and then tucks in. She is starving and misses good food. That means at some point she had good food to miss.
“Did your mother cook?” I ask.
She stops for a second before she nods. “How do you know my mother is dead?”
“I have a file on you. Father remarried three months after she died to your best friend. Twenty-five-year age gap. You cut off all communication the second you found out. They live up North now. Fairly well off. You struggle in London because your pride won’t let you do anything else.”
She doesn’t say anything, just shovels more food into her mouth so she has an excuse not to talk.
I watch her eat for a moment, leaning against the wall near the window. The silence stretches between us, not comfortable exactly, but less hostile than before.
“My mother was a brilliant cook,” she says finally, not looking at me. “She learned from her grandmother. Traditional Russian dishes mostly. Pelmeni, borscht, beef stroganoff. She could make anything taste like home.”
I don’t interrupt. She’s talking, and that’s rare enough to be valuable.
“After she died, my father...” She pauses, fork halfway to her mouth.
“Remarried,” I say quietly.
She clenches her teeth.
“He can’t be alone.”
“Is that what you tell yourself?”
She hisses. “No, that isn’t what I tell myself.
I hate him. I hate her even more. She knew how much my mother’s death affected me.
She just didn’t give a shit, obviously. She was too busy drooling over my dad and figuring out a way to get into his bed.
They make me sick. Both of them. They can both go to hell. ”
Her vehemence is gorgeous. She is furious, livid, and it’s real. Not some made-up defence mechanism as she has with me.
I let her vent. She needs it, and honestly, I want to hear it. I want to know what makes her tick, what drives that fury I’ve seen flashes of since the moment I spotted her in the park.
It’s the most honest I’ve ever seen her, but it doesn’t last long. She shuts down as quickly as she fired up.