10. Aleksandr #2
Intel on my operations. Guard rotations.
Names of my guests who come and go. The names of every person on my staff.
Their behaviors and details surrounding their personal lives.
Notes about the estate itself. All of it is neatly typed out, timestamped down to the second, and sent out to an unknown contact she’s labeled only with a number—1.
It’s… impressive.
Under any other circumstances, I might have admired the discipline that clearly went into this.
Most people observe the world through a half-attentive lens, filtering with whatever biases or blind spots they've accumulated since birth. Every single one of these entries speaks of the opposite. She hasn’t just been watching the way my Bratva operates.
She’s analyzed it in a way that is almost scary.
Noticing patterns and spotting inconsistencies that even I have overlooked over the years is striking.
An eye for detail like this isn’t a skill that can be taught.
Not fully.
This is raw talent that has been honed into a deadly weapon and is now being used against me in my own home. I lean back in my chair slowly, the weight of the truth settling in my bones like winter frost.
So.
My new wife is a spy.
A slow exhale leaves me, not born from anger, and certainly not of uncertainty. No, this is something else… a puzzle piece finally snapping itself into place.
Her watchful silences have always intrigued me far more than I ever allowed myself to realize. She mastered the art of pretending she wasn’t paying attention even when she was cataloging everything.
Lingering in doorways with her eyes lowered but never truly unfocused, drifting from room to room with that delicate, trembling-girl facade—I knew all of it had been a performance. One I had enjoyed unraveling at the time.
There was a certain pleasure in exposing her small deceptions and watching the facade crack as the real Katya slipped through in flashes of defiance she fought so hard to smother. It had been a game, one I controlled and believed I understood better than she did.
But never, not once, did I imagine the performance had been designed to throw me off her trail for an entirely different reason than the one I originally suspected.
I thought she had been trying to survive me, doing her best to navigate the home of a man she believed capable of terrible things and do whatever it took to prevent herself from provoking me.
It had been far too easy to chalk her behavior up to fear and the desperate, instinctual need to stay small and unnoticed in a place where power decides who lives and who doesn’t.
As I scroll further, the tone of the messages shift unexpectedly, subtle at first and then drastically.
What begins as crisp, clinical reporting gradually frays into something much more emotional and urgent.
Messages grow less detailed and observant, questions appearing at the end of the notes that have nothing to do with my estate at all.
Are you receiving these?
Please confirm.
I need to know you’re safe.
Hello??
The last two messages are practically trembling with panic. Every single one of the messages has gone completely unanswered. I tap the contact, revealing the full number behind the unanswered thread. The moment it appears on the screen, I’m not at all surprised to find I recognize it instantly.
Ramil Borchin.
I stare at his name for a long moment, my expression flattening. Ramil Borchin is not sloppy. He doesn’t vanish without reason. If he wanted to maintain contact with his daughter, he would have found a way, regardless of the avenue.
But he didn’t.
Not once.
Which means one of two things—either something happened to him or Borchin never intended to answer her at all.
My fingers drum on the armrest.
I’ll admit, I haven’t been keeping tabs on him at all since he brought me Katya.
Why would I?
The man delivered his last bargaining chip, the only currency he had left worth anything in this world, to me already. After that, his usefulness completely evaporated. I had no interest in maintaining a relationship with him because there had been no more leverage worth exploiting.
The only thing of value Ramil Borchin has left to offer currently would be his own life—something I’m not at all remotely interested in.
A life like his is worthless to me, an emptied vessel gutted of usefulness the moment he traded his daughter for his own selfish gains.
What remains of him after such a transaction is just a hollow husk.
A man who betrays his own blood will betray anyone. I have no patience for men who hold no loyalty to anything, not even their own child.
My jaw tightens, a slow grind of teeth behind unwavering composure.
So, then, what had been the point? Why give her a mission to spy on me? Why send her into the lion’s den with detailed instructions that required the risk of her life and then ignore her completely after she delivers incredibly valuable information?
It makes no sense.
If he’d intended to use the intel against me, I would have noticed movement in the channels my people monitor around the clock by now.
But there has been nothing.
In the almost two months of her reporting to him, nothing has changed. Nothing has disrupted my operations or suggested her notes are being collected, analyzed, and weaponized to use to dismantle my Bratva when I least expect it.
Suddenly, this looks less like an intelligence operation and far more like a man throwing his daughter into the deep end without bothering to check whether she could swim or not. Spy or not, she walked into this entire operation blindly.
I exhale slowly and push my chair back from the desk as the decision crystallizes.
How concerning…
Not because he tried to spy on me. That’s almost boring in retrospect. Everyone tries to eventually.
What sets me on edge is the sheer audacity to sell me his daughter under the guise of saving himself and then having the gall to turn around and violate the terms of our agreement by sending her to me with explicit instructions to spy on me with little regard for how it would play out if she were to get caught.
Placing her in danger like that is something I can’t forgive, even if the information is going nowhere. A man like that doesn’t deserve to play clever games. He deserves consequences.
I stand, the decision made with the same certainty that governs everything else I do.
Time to pay Ramil Borchin a visit.