Chapter 36
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SIX
KIRILL
The warehouse is tucked in an industrial part of Long Island City, the kind of place you’d never find unless you knew exactly where to look. I pull into the back lot and kill the engine, glancing over at Dinara in the passenger seat.
Feels weird to think of her as anything but Evelina, but I’m getting used to it. Especially now seeing her outside of Velour and in her nerdy hot girl element. Her hair is pulled back in a loose pony and she’s wearing slutty black-framed glasses that have me half hard.
“Did I tell you those glasses give porno librarian?”
She barks out a laugh. “I don’t know what that means.”
“It means I’d like to tip you over a desk and fuck you six ways to Sunday.”
“I’ll take that as a good thing.” She smiles and bats her pretty eyes at me. Then her attention shifts to the building ahead. “So this guy is your private tech dealer?”
I drape my wrist over the steering wheel and sit back. “Maurice specializes in equipment that doesn’t leave a paper trail. Anything you need, he can get it. No questions asked.”
Her face lights up. “Even military-grade processors? Custom liquid cooling systems?”
“Even those.”
She’s out of the car before I can open her door, practically bouncing on her toes. I follow her inside, watching her take in the rows of equipment lining the walls. Servers, monitors, graphics cards still in their packaging, hard drives stacked like building blocks.
Maurice emerges from the back, wiping his hands on a rag. He’s a bear of a man, former Soviet military who found his calling in the gray market tech trade after the Berlin Wall fell.
“Kirill.” He nods at me before his attention shifts to Dinara. “And you must be the specialist.”
“Actually, she’s my wife.”
He shrugs, unbothered. “The wife and the specialist. Good to know.”
I’d called ahead to give him a rough idea of what we needed, but I left out most of the details. Maurice doesn’t need to know about the Ghost. Dinara does. I gave her the rundown in the car on the way over here. She can’t prepare to fight the Ghost unless she knows what we’re planning.
My brothers think I’m crazy for trusting her. Maybe they’re right. But I believe her because I’ve seen enough liars to recognize when someone’s telling the truth.
“Dinara,” she says, extending her hand. He shakes it, his massive palm swallowing hers.
“Kirill tells me you need to build something special.”
Dinara nods.
“I need to track an extremely sophisticated cyber threat,” she says, all business now.
“Someone who’s been bypassing military-grade encryption, hijacking secure communications, and staying invisible across multiple networks.
To catch them, I’ll need processing power that can handle real-time traffic analysis across the entire city, pattern recognition algorithms running in parallel, and enough storage for at least six months of historical data. ”
Maurice’s eyebrows climb toward his hairline. He looks at me like he’s trying to figure out where the hell I found her.
“That’s not a small order.”
“I know.” She pushes her glasses up her nose. “That’s why I need the best. I’m thinking dual Xeon processors, minimum sixty-four gigs of RAM, enterprise-level SSDs in a RAID configuration for redundancy, and at least four high-end GPUs for the heavy lifting on the pattern recognition.”
Maurice lets out a low whistle. “You know your hardware.”
“I’ve been building my own systems since I was twelve.” She moves deeper into the warehouse, running her fingers along a server rack with the reverence most women reserve for designer handbags. “This is nice. Pre-configured or custom?”
“Custom. I can build you whatever you need.”
They fall into a technical conversation I can barely follow, throwing around terms like bandwidth throttling and distributed computing architecture. I lean against a workbench and watch her work, the way her whole face transforms when she’s in her element.
She’s explaining some complicated concept about packet sniffing when she catches me staring. Her cheeks flush pink and she pushes the glasses up again, a nervous habit I’m starting to recognize.
Maurice pulls out a tablet, scribbling notes while Dinara rattles off specifications like she’s ordering coffee. This is her territory and she owns it, which is sexy as fuck. I’ve been with plenty of women, but I’ve never been attracted to someone’s mind before.
She glances over at me again, and this time she catches the heat in my gaze. Her lips part and the air between us shifts, charged with the same electricity that’s been crackling since the moment she walked into Velour.
“So.” Maurice’s voice breaks the moment. “I can have this ready in a few days. Maybe two if I call in some favors.”
“Call in all the fucking favors because we need it by end of the day,” I bark, still focused on Dinara. “You know money’s not an issue.”
Maurice sighs. “Never is with you. I’ll have it delivered to the penthouse.”
We finalize the details and head back to the car. She’s practically vibrating with excitement as she buckles in.
“That was incredible,” she says. “I’ve never had a reason to build something this complex. By the way, I’m going to need like five of your best tech people to help me get this up and running.”
“Whatever you need.” I pull out of the lot and head toward the highway.
When I first briefed her on the Ghost, she grilled me for an hour about our security protocols, network architecture, points of entry. By the end she announced she has some theories about how the Ghost exploited our system, but once her computers are set up, she’ll know a lot more.
“You were twelve when you started building computers?” I ask, looking over at her applying a deadly shade of red lipstick in the mirror.
She nods. “My father didn’t have money for expensive toys, so when I wanted one, I had to figure out how to build it myself. Started with scraps from a junkyard and a manual I found at the library. Took me three months, but I got it working.”
“Impressive.”
“Pavel noticed what I was doing and bought me my first real system. Nothing crazy, but a start. After that, he’d bring me broken laptops, damaged hard drives, anything he could find.
I’d fix them up and sell them for parts money.
” She’s smiling, lost in the memory. “Eventually he realized I wasn’t only good at fixing things.
I could break into them too. Bypass passwords, crack encryption, find hidden files.
That’s when he had one of his hackers teach me the real skills I was after. ”
“Did he make you work for him in exchange?”
“Nah, that’s not his style. He wouldn’t give me a job with the Syndicate until I went to university, got a proper education first. When I graduated, he offered me one and I accepted because I wanted to. I don’t think of him as my boss. He’s more like a brother.”
Something wistful in her voice makes me think about my own family. The weight of being a Baronov, the expectations, the violence that comes with the name. I never had the luxury of choosing. This life chose me the moment I was born.
“Speaking of which,” she says, “I need to call my father. I talk to him once a week and he’ll worry if I don’t check in soon. Same with school. I have a few labs where the profs will notice if I’m not there. Not to mention my boss at Velour. He’s a bit of a dick that way.”
“School is taken care of.” I check my blind spot and merge onto the highway.
“Called the registrar this morning and told them you had a family emergency. You’re off the hook for the next month.
Told Oksana the same because she was worried about you.
Your boss though … you’ll have to make it up to him. Maybe with a lap dance?”
She giggles, tucking one leg underneath her as she shifts to face me. “Tried that once. Ended kind of … messy.”
“It got you the job, didn’t it?” My palm finds her thigh, warm through the denim. “You can call your father tomorrow, but I’m guessing you don’t want to tell him you married a Baronov and agreed to help hunt down a cyber terrorist.”
“Yeah, I’ll leave that part out.” She scoffs.
“My father and Pavel would freak the fuck out if they heard I was married. And not only that, into another bratva family.” She whistles through her teeth to make her point.
“Don’t worry, when this is all wrapped up I’ll give your mother’s ring back, of course. ”
Everything in me goes taut. “What do you mean … wrapped up?”
“When we…” My expression must be ice because she falters mid-sentence. “End this union. Get the marriage annulled or whatever. When our deal is fulfilled.”
“That’ll be never,” I clarify, since she seems to be confused about our arrangement.
“Yeah, right.” She rolls her eyes with a grin. She thinks I’m kidding, and I’ll let her believe it. But whatever she’s hoping for—to get the marriage annulled, or a divorce—none of it is happening. The thought of her leaving makes my chest feel like someone’s standing on it.
She grows quiet, watching the industrial skyline of Queens blur past. “What do you know about the Ghost? Beyond the technical stuff we talked about?”
“I told you everything I know.” I tighten my grip on the wheel, sifting through the details for anything I might have missed.
“There is one thing, though. Something they said when they took over our comms during the Pier 19 operation. Something about the past always coming back and them being very patient. Weird, right?”
“That sounds personal. Someone with a grudge?”
“The Baronovs aren’t short on enemies. But if it’s personal, why strike all the families in New York? They’re toying with us. They like the chaos, seeing us scramble, bleeding us dry. But if they wanted to own the city, at this point it wouldn’t take much.”