Chapter 8
Kasimir~
I was still angry, but not like I’d been earlier this morning, and that was a good thing. When Zoya had confessed about Marcelle approaching her about the money, it’d taken everything in me not to get the woman’s address, then show up to dismember her while alive.
Everything in me.
Luckily, Viktor had been able to talk me down once I had ordered Zoya upstairs, and once Viktor had left, I’d gone upstairs, then had made it Zoya’s responsibility to keep me from murdering the entire city.
With her body not available to me, I had made her sit in my arms, telling me every fucking detail of her life from the moment that she could remember walking on her own.
I had forced her to talk me down by leaving no stone unturned about her life, and now I was fairly certain that there wasn’t anything about the woman that I didn’t know.
She had also fallen asleep in my arms afterwards, and once I had put her to bed, I had called my father and brother, demanding a meeting, and they’d both been wise enough to agree. In fact, Viktor had gone straight to my father’s after leaving my house this morning, but that had been expected.
So, with Zoya sleeping and a note to let her know where I was, I was at my father’s house with my brother and sister-in-law, and while Viktor didn’t like Aurora leaving the house much, the auction was her baby, and so she deserved to know what was going on.
It was also comical how my brother and my father were doting on her like she wasn’t a seasoned killer.
“Well, considering how thorough the vetting process is, we know all that we need to know to find this Marcelle Jensen outside of work,” Viktor remarked. “I can’t see this being too difficult a situation.”
“What do you have on the woman?” my father asked.
While all of us were standing inside my father’s library, Aurora was sitting comfortably, and that’s why my father had chosen his library to meet.
The chairs in here were a lot more comfortable than the ones in his office, and everyone was coddling the carrier of the future Korolev heir, which they should since she’d already reached her eighth month of pregnancy.
At any rate, Aurora opened the folder that she’d brought with her, always prepared.
“Well, since Kasimir and I had last spoken, we had already figured that it had to be Marcelle, so I had already pulled everything that I could on her because I wasn’t about to let the deception slide,” Aurora answered.
“And from what I’ve been able to gather, Marcelle Jensen is thirty-one, has worked at Ruby Red’s Diner for about three years, and she lives alone. ”
“Family?” I asked.
“Both of her parents are alive, but they live in Utah,” she answered. “Three years ago, they’d chosen to retire, buying a goat farm, and doing God knows what up there.”
Viktor chuckled, though he was still all about business. “So, they retired and moved at around the same time that Marcelle began working at Ruby’s. Is it a coincidence?”
Aurora shook her head. “No, it’s not. Before that, it shows that Marcelle had a couple of waitressing jobs while in college, but that’s all.
College had also turned out to be a bust, and from what I could deduce from the paper trail, her parents had been helping her with her bills up until they’d decided to retire, leaving Marcelle no choice but to get a job and keep it. ”
“Siblings?”
“None,” she answered. “It’s just her, which explains why she has some entitlement tendencies.”
“What about the men in her life?” my father asked. “If she has no brothers, then who were the two men who attacked Zoya and her mother?”
“Her father has one brother, which gives her two cousins from his side, but both are women,” she went on.
“As for her mother’s side of the family, she has one brother and one sister, giving Marcelle three cousins on that side, but two are women, leaving just one male heir.
As for the possibility that it was him and a friend, he’s in the Coast Guard and currently lives in California. ”
“And the father and uncles are too old to have done this,” my father surmised.
“When Zoya had been questioned by the police, they had asked her to guess their ages, and she’d said somewhere in their thirties,” I confirmed.
“No boyfriends?” Viktor asked.
“Well, while her credit report can’t tell me that, her lease and all the utilities are in her name only,” Aurora answered. “Her bank accounts are also in her name only. Poppy was very thorough when I asked her to get me everything that she could on the woman.”
Poppy Montgomery was the best hacker that we had on the payroll, and not only was the woman sharp as a dagger, but she was loyal as fuck.
She had come to work for us when her sister had gotten caught up in a drug deal gone bad, and while Ruin Montgomery was now doing well, Poppy had sold her soul to us, and we’ve been taking good care of it ever since.
“What did her social media give you?” Viktor asked.
“From the pictures that she posts, she appears very single and very ready to mingle,” Aurora drawled out.
“Now, while I’ve got nothing against a woman doing what makes her happy, Marcelle’s not inclined to delete pictures of previous dates before posting about her current dates. It’s all there for anyone to judge.”
“So, then...what?” my father asked. “Are we now tasked with pulling up all the guys that she’s slept with to narrow it down?”
We all glanced at each other until Aurora cleared her throat. “Well, as to that...I have a solution that will work faster than tracking down all the men that she’s slept with.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Let me take care of her,” she stated, and I inwardly winced as soon as the words were out.
“No fucking way,” Viktor bit out as I’d expected.
“I still have a few more weeks to go, Viktor,” she said, her voice that of a mother trying to talk some sense into her child. “It’ll be fine.”
“If you think that I’m going to let you kidnap-”
Aurora put her hand up to stop him. “I am not kidnapping anyone. I’ll leave that up to you guys to figure out. However, since she’s a woman, I’d feel better getting the answers from her myself, and not only for Zoya and her mother, but for me also. It was my auction that she compromised, remember?”
“Baby, you can’t-”
“Viktor, you act like I’m going to have to do anything strenuous,” she said, interrupting him again. “Once she realizes who has her and why, she’s going to sing like an opera diva.”
“Aurora, no,” he said, and he wasn’t fucking around. “Just no.”
My sister-in-law arched a brow. “Do you really want to torture a woman?”
“As opposed to my pregnant wife doing it?” he retorted. “I’ll manage.”
Aurora went to stand up from her chair, and all three Korolev men reached for her to help her, and once she was steady on her feet, she slapped the folder against Viktor’s chest, and he had no choice but to take it.
As if they were the only two people in the room, Aurora said, “I was the one who gave my word that nothing would happen to Zoya, and even though it wasn’t at the hands of Korolev, it happened because she got involved with us, and I am not about to let that go, Viktor.”
Just then, my brother’s face softened, and I knew why. Aurora had said that Zoya had gotten involved with us, claiming herself as a Korolev once again, and that always weakened my brother.
“The auction also falls under my authority, and that is not anything that I am taking lightly,” she went on.
“So, even if you want to ignore how this does involve me, the last thing that I’m going to let people think is that pregnancy has made me soft somehow.
In fact, I’d love for everyone to know that I am still able and willing to put in the work, even at eight months pregnant. ”
“You’re fucking insane,” my brother said, but you could also hear his love for her in every word. “You are so out of your damn mind, baby.”
“Make the plans, snatch that bitch up, then come get me,” she ordered. “If I wasn’t pregnant, we wouldn’t even be discussing this, and you know it.”
“And what the fuck am I supposed to tell your father and brothers when they find out that I’m letting you torture people while ready to give birth?” he drawled out.
Aurora let out a lyrical laugh at that. “My father and brothers know who I am, so they won’t be surprised in the least.”
“Iisus Khristos,” my father muttered, and I couldn’t help but smirk at him taking The Lord’s name in vain because I knew that, deep down, he admired the hell out of his daughter-in-law.
“Let me think about it,” Viktor sighed, already relenting.
Knowing that she’d won, Aurora looked over at me, asking, “How’s Zoya doing?”
“She’s doing her best,” I answered with a shrug.
Aurora gave me a terse nod as she added, “Well, call me if you or she needs anything.”
Honestly, what better sister-in-law could I have asked for?