Chapter 3
EVGENY
“Boss?”
Dmitri’s voice jerks me back from wherever I’ve been, staring out the window at buildings climbing toward the hills that ring Los Angeles. The day is clear enough that I can see the mountain peaks beyond.
But that isn’t the view I was lost in.
“What?”
I can’t keep the irritation out of my voice as I turn from the window.
“I asked how today’s meeting went. You came straight up here to your office and shut yourself in. If Anya hadn’t told me otherwise, I’d think the meeting went south.”
“If you already know how the meeting went, why are you asking?” I shove his feet off my desk. “Get your feet off my desk.”
My second-in-command knows I hate it when he sits at my desk like this, and the shit-eating grin on his face says he enjoys my annoyance. Dmitri is immune to my growl that sends other, lesser beings running for cover.
“I will if you ask nicely.”
“Get the fuck out of my chair.”
He does as I ask, but so slowly I know he’s needling me. “What are you so grumpy about? Anya said the meeting with Councilor Evans went well. I already authorized the money to be sent to him. It sounds like we almost have the development project in the bag.”
Dmitri rises from my chair but doesn’t go far. He leans back on my desk and crosses his arms, a smirk pulling at one corner of his mouth.
What am I so grumpy about? That I can’t get a certain pair of dark brown, almond-shaped eyes out of my head.
I can’t forget that deep-honey color I could fall into and never want to come up for air.
That I’d almost fallen into last night. I can’t get the way her skin felt against my lips, or the way her full, kissable mouth took up residence in my dreams, out of my head.
It was a mistake letting the mystery woman go last night. I should have insisted on going home with her, or taken my own car, or even had her up against the wall in one of the bathrooms. Anything to get her out from under my skin and out of my head, orbiting my thoughts like the sun.
The woman is torturing me, and we were together for all of half an hour.
Fairy tales aren’t real, and neither are rom-coms. Except I felt the world shift the moment I looked into her eyes.
Damn it. Now I’m thinking about her again instead of focusing on far more important matters.
“Kirill found something big and dirty on Councilor Sharp.”
In a snap, Dmitri has my attention again as I drop into my chair. “How big and how dirty?”
Dmitri’s smirk only grows, his eyes glittering with something almost frightening. “Big and dirty enough to turn his resistance into all the support we need.”
That gives me pause and a great deal of satisfaction.
“I tell you, brother, this development will pay off in a big way. No one will be able to touch Kucher Enterprises after this.” Dmitri’s smile matches my own satisfaction, a feeling I smother as quickly as it appears.
“We still have to be awarded the actual bid. It’s not done until it’s done,” I growl, turning on my computer as I reach for the plain manila folder my assistant, Anya, left on my desk. On it, she’s placed a sticky note that says only “Found Him” in her neat handwriting.
Dmitri’s grin falters, and then he rolls his eyes as he pushes himself up from my desk. “You can’t give yourself one moment of peace, can you?”
“My job isn’t peace. My job is to ensure the continuation of the Bratva.”
Dmitri doesn’t look surprised by my response, and just as he’s immune to my glare, he more often than not knows what I’m going to say before I say it. There are only two others in the world who know me as well.
“Okay, well, on that note—”
I’m about to flip open the folder from Anya when Dmitri reaches behind him and slides another under my nose.
“What’s this?”
“It’s the information on the shitheads fighting in my club last night,” he says.
I set the first folder aside for the second.
“The two guys we know, the guys who started all the shit according to the cameras, are Sokolinaya. The third guy is just some random kid.”
Dmitri summarizes what’s in the folder while I leaf through it and the included images, containing black-and-white stills of the fight, the two Sokolinaya lowlifes with the kid. The three of them are tangled in a brawl on the dance floor, and a figure is streaking toward them.
It’s her.
“We checked on the kid just to make sure he wasn’t part of something.”
Dmitri’s voice pulls me back from thoughts of soft, warm skin beneath my palms, and a spark shoots straight to my already-tented crotch.
“He’s from East LA. His father is a defector, came here in the seventies and owns a bookstore now. The kid has a few siblings.”
The only saving grace I had was thinking I would never see the mystery woman again, and in time, these obsessive cravings would fade. But now I have her name, address, and far more information about her and her family than I ever thought I would know.
Eva Volkova.
“The bookstore is in one of our properties, and they’ve been behind on rent. We’re close to kicking him out, and I know Sergei is looking forward to fixing it up and renting it for double or triple the price.”
I know where the bookstore is, right in the middle of an urban renewal zone. Our numbers guy, Sergei, must be salivating at the thought of what he can do with the property once the bookstore is out.
“The kid appears to be tied to Tsepov. He owes him money. A lot of it.”
Something stirs and stretches in the back of my mind, my hackles rising in warning.
The woman had seemed innocent enough, trying to save her brother.
But what if it was all some kind of play to get under my skin and do damage from the inside out?
What if she’s working with Tsepov to clear her brother’s debt to him?
The same sense of danger ripples over my skin.
“Do we have a problem?” I ask, meeting Dmitri’s eyes.
He shakes his head. “No, I don’t think so. Seems like it was exactly what it looked like. We’ll keep an eye on it, but we can file this one away as closed.”
“Good.”
I toss the folder into the trash, my attention returning to the one Anya left on my desk as I flip it open. I still don’t know what “Found Him” means, and it takes me a moment of reading to understand what is in front of me. Then I go still.
“Found him,” I repeat.
Dmitri arches an eyebrow at me, his gaze sweeping the neatly stapled sheaf of papers. “What?”
I’m out of my chair, triumph and a rush of anticipation for the hunt surging through my veins. “They found the hacker.”
From the corner of my eye as I pivot toward the door, I see Dmitri’s eyes widen before he scrambles after me.
“Seriously? The one we keep having to kick out of the systems?”
“That one.” My growl is feral, even I can hear it this time.
Dmitri is on my heels as we stalk through the Kucher Enterprises offices, and he makes the call to get a team together. My car is waiting by the curb, and the driver checks the surrounding area before opening the door to let us inside.
“I can’t believe we caught the bastard. He’s been slipping our net for weeks.” Dmitri shifts his big frame into the seat, looking like a bear in a too-small cage. “I have to hand it to him. He’s damn good. Takes a pair to try to take us down like that.”
His laughter shakes his shoulders, but I can see his eyes are bright with the thrill of the hunt, a flash of metal under his suit jacket proof he’s ready to take care of this annoyance.
I, too, am more than ready to dig this particular thorn out of my side.
There’s no telling how much he’s discovered about the Bratva’s business or why he’s after us.
But I plan to use any means necessary to pull the information from the guy.
Hopefully, he’s smart enough to tell me what I want to know right away, and his death will be much faster and less painful if so.
When we pull up to the address, I’m surprised to find it’s an old postwar tract home, small, single-story, pitched roof.
It’s falling apart. The faded sage-green siding is dirty and peeling from sun and salt damage, moss and mold stain the exposed brick, the shingles are curling and falling off, and the crisscrossing wood over the windows is broken or even gone in some cases.
“Looks like a place a hacker would live,” Dmitri says before squeezing out of the back of the SUV.
“This does not look like a place a successful hacker would live,” my driver mutters in heavily accented English, his baleful glare on the house.
“I suppose not,” I agree. Though he’s successful enough to hack into our security, which isn’t easy. Not with the system I have in place.
I only understand where the money is going when my men find a basement in the seemingly empty house. Multiple towers hum with power underneath a wide desk on one wall, their expensive monitors a bright glow in the windowless room.
Given the all-clear from my men, I move to the monitors, each with multiple windows up in a chaotic array of the hacker’s work.
“Evgeny.”
I join Dmitri where he stands and bend to peer closely at one of the screens, his mouth set in a grim line. I understand when I look closer. Bratva files. Damning files. Files that tie the Kucherov Bratva to Kucher Enterprises.
And me.
A noise catches us off guard, and everybody in the room swings toward the figure emerging from a doorway so deep in shadow we’d missed it.
For a moment, time freezes. The figure’s attention locks on us, on our guns, and ours locks on him.
With a sharp intake of breath, the bowl of food in the figure’s hands drops, spilling liquid contents over the floor, and the figure darts back the way it came.
I don’t have to issue an order before my team is after the hacker, spilling through the doorway. A crash is followed by a scream and a cry of pain that quickly cuts off.
Dmitri reappears and gives me the all-clear, and the men make way for me in the tight space.
One of my men has the figure up against the wall of what turns out to be a small kitchenette hollowed out from what I imagine was a storage space. I gesture with my chin, and he jerks the figure around by the scruff of his neck before slamming him back against the wall.
Except it’s not a him, it’s a her.
It’s her.
She recognizes me in the same instant, those eyes growing round as dinner plates, the full, expressive eyebrows above them nearly meeting her hairline.
Fuck.
Eva Volkova is the hacker.
On the heels of my disbelief comes white-hot anger. It’s too much of a coincidence. The fight last night, she and her brother at Dmitri’s club on a night I’m there.
“You’re trespassing. Get out of here before I call the police,” the woman spits, the huskiness from last night gone from her voice, replaced by venom and more than a tinge of fear.
But she hasn’t felt true fear yet.
The guy holding her in place must see the look on my face because he hurriedly clears the way, switching places with me. His hand moves away, and she uses the moment to try to bolt, kicking out as she dives to the side.
She has bravado, but Eva has nowhere to go in the cramped room. In the next heartbeat, my hand is around her throat, yanking her back and pushing her against the wall, my fist closing until she stops squirming.
Now I see real fear in her eyes. I see it as all color drains from her face. I feel it in the way she freezes in my grip. I also see it when her attention slips to the scars on the side of my face I hid last night. Her eyes widen another fraction, and my anger grows hotter at the reaction.
“And what do you think the police will be able to do?” The purr rumbles in my throat as I master the rage-induced desire to close my fist and crush her windpipe. Her throat moves against my hand in a convulsive swallow, her eyes glued to mine like frozen prey.
“If you’re going to kill me, just do it,” she hisses. A flash of admiration for her bravado in the face of danger tugs a corner of my mouth up, as do her next words.
“Just do it somewhere else so my family doesn’t see it.”
“You think you have any bargaining power at all? You fucked with the Kucherov Bratva and thought you could get away with it?”
My smile is beastly, and she shivers, trying to pull away as I flash her a coldly wolfish grin.
“I was going to kill you, get rid of all the files you found, destroy your computers. Instead, I have a proposition for you.”
I can almost feel Dmitri’s stare on the back of my neck, wondering what the hell I’m doing. The smart thing would be to kill her and be done with it. But another idea has started to form, one that can turn this situation into an advantage for me. And I know exactly how to get her to agree.
“You come with me, work for me. Use your skills as I see fit.”
Her eyes narrow. “And my other option?”
“There is no other option, Miss Volkova. You work in exchange for the safety of your family. I believe you have two brothers and a sister, don’t you?
Your younger sister had orchestra practice today?
Your oldest brother had a shift at Enzo’s Pizza after his Business Analysis class, did he not? Your father visited Kashta for lunch?”
Eva’s eyes widen again, and she begins to shake under my hand, sweat beading on her forehead.
My smile disappears, and I lean close enough to whisper in her ear. “Do you want to know what happens to those who cross me? I’ll tell you if you ask nicely. I hope you have a strong stomach, because it’s not pretty.”
The woman’s breathing quickens, her pulse racing beneath my hand, and I pull back to look into her face.
“Choose now. Work for me or call my bluff and see what happens.”
“Fine, I’ll do it!” Eva can’t agree fast enough.
My hand remains on her throat for a moment more, our gazes locked, my grip tightening until her breath starts to rasp. She stumbles as I let her go, straight into the arms of one of my men.
“Bring her and all her equipment. I want it to look like she was never here. Kill anyone who comes through the door.”
“No!”
Her scream follows me out, and so does Dmitri. Though he doesn’t question me now, I know he’ll have questions once we’re alone.
I’ve just spared the life of someone who challenged the Bratva when anyone else would have been dead. But this will all fit into my plan.
As soon as I have more than a glimmer of one.