Chapter 10 OKSANA #3
The way he says my name is almost worse than the wound.
I smirk. "What? Too honest?"
He tapes fresh gauze over the reopened stitch, jaw tight enough to crack a tooth. When he finishes, he sits back on his heels, eyes dragging over me like he’s trying to memorize every place he touched. "We shouldn’t have—"
"Stephano," I cut in, catching his chin and forcing him to look at me. "I would do it again. Right now. Wound and all. So stop acting like you fucked a porcelain doll."
Something dark and hungry flashes in his eyes. Then, softer, almost grudgingly, "I’ll be more careful."
"You won’t," I say, brushing a thumb across his lower lip, "and that’s half the fun."
He huffs a laugh—low, wrecked—and I stand, letting him watch because I want him to. Which brings us perfectly to—
"Computer," I say, still slightly breathless, "Shower. Maybe coffee."
"Bed?" he asks, hopeful and evil.
I stare at him, incredulity rising in me, "We just finished."
"Ah, Zhena, that's where you're wrong." He steps closer to me, and his fingers brush against my lips, "I don't think I'll ever be finished with you."
I tap my bandage with two fingers. "Tomorrow, Marito. Today, I only break people with a keyboard."
"Deal," he says in a voice too rough. "Try not to break me first."
"No promises," I say, and drop into the chair opposite his as if I’ve always sat here, waking the nearest monitor. "Ground rules. I’ll use your box, but you don’t touch my keys."
He leans against the doorframe, amused. "I don’t need your keys."
"Mm." I unzip my bag and set a matte-black USB on the desk, no brand, just a tiny silver raven etched on the side. Then, a small, nondescript travel router the size of a deck of cards. "You’re getting the guest treatment."
His brow kicks up. "You’re about to boot my workstation off a mystery stick in my own house?"
"Relax, Marito." I thumb the power, tap the boot menu, and choose USB. "It’s a disposable OS—RAM-only. When I shut down, it evaporates. No writes to your drive. No crumbs for your gremlins."
"That assumes I’m not watching network traffic."
I hold up a slim hardware token between two fingers. "My accounts are hardware-locked. Without this and my face, you get gibberish. And I’m not touching your network."
An amused eyebrow moves up; he's sexy. My mind is still spinning from the incredible sex. If that is a promise of what's to come… hell, I might be in more trouble than I care to admit. "And I'm to take your word for it?"
"Hey," I wave my hands up, "I'm just an odd job girl."
His grin deepens, and he shakes his head. "There is no just about you, piccola tempesta."
His nickname makes me laugh. "Trust me, there is nothing little about me either."
"I'm afraid you're right." His eyes are heated as he watches me plug my travel router into a power outlet, let it wake up, then tether my phone to it.
"Separate pipe," I explain. "Double-hop. You’ll see a little noise in the air, but nothing on your cables."
"Paranoid."
"Professional." I slot the token, look into the tiny sensor on it, and feel the familiar confirmation buzz against my thumb. The live OS drops me into a clean browser I trust. "Even if you packet-mirror, all you catch is encrypted rain."
He smiles like he’s both irritated and turned on. "Proceed, Mrs. Conti."
I proceed.
Two steps and I’m in the hardened mailbox I use for old ghosts. One new message sits at the top; it's from Vasili, timestamped with some ungodly Moscow hour. When that man is onto something, he doesn't sleep.
Subject: ZIMNYAYA SHKOLA / VORONIN FILES – NEW HITS
I open it. My pulse picks up.
We’re still swimming in Voronin’s trash ocean, but I found a thread of the facility where Margarita V.V.
and Igor V.V. were raised/trained. Cover name: Internat No.
7 (Voronino District), real codename: Zimnyaya Shkola—Winter School.
Officially, it was declared an orphanage, only the children housed inside were all Viktor's bastards.
It was a feeder program. Curriculum: languages, marksmanship, forgery, seduction, cryptography, fieldcraft.
Instructors rotated out of GRU and Spetsnaz.
Funding: siphoned from three shell charities tied to the Church of St. Vladimir and Cappella del Corvo.
My blood goes cold. It's the same churches the Cells are using. I look up at Stephano, "Does the name Cappella del Corvo mean anything to you?"
His eyes narrow, and he steps closer. I make no move to stop him from reading over my shoulder. "What is this?"
"The church." I prompt, sure he can figure out the rest himself. He's a big boy.
"Yeah." He rubs his neck in confusion and looks utterly adorable, liquifying my ovaries, who are now fully in cahoots with my vagina in wanting to meet that certain part of him again.
His voice distracts me from my lower body.
"It's the church most of us attend…" he pauses just long enough for me to realize he's about to drop another bombshell.
"Donna Margarita was a staunch supporter.
I have to ask one of the older matrons, but I'm sure I heard somewhere that this church became La Famiglia's favorite after a heavy Donna Margarita endorsement. "
I whistle low, "Why the hell would Donna Margarita escape Russia, only to go right back to the same church that was used to cover her upbringing?"
Stephano shakes his head, and I follow his eyes as he reads on.
Project VORONA—raven—housed Voronin’s illegitimate offspring. Spare heirs or hidden assets. His goal was to build a private stable of deniable tools he could deploy inside and outside Bratva lines.
I'll attach a map of known locations.
"Voronino," I say out loud. "Zimnyaya Shkola. Winter School."
Stephano bends low, so low I can feel his warm breath dancing across the shorter hairs by my ears. "Meaning?"
"Meaning your sainted Italian matriarch wasn’t just tough. She was engineered." I scroll, skim, and let names and dates line up in my head. "Voronin built a private army from his bastards. A stable. Margarita and Igor grew up inside it."
His jaw moves, thinking. "That’s good context," he says finally. "But it doesn’t put Nico on a map."
"No." I lean back, feel the chair catch the sore place in my side, and ride it out. "It doesn’t help with the Venezuelan Cell structure either. Still… it tells me why she played the long game like a religion."
"Revenge." He concludes it like a diagnosis.
"Revenge and design," I correct softly. "Women like her don’t forgive the men who turn them into knives.
They learn to cut better." Or shoot. As Sergei Baranov found out in that church after he bragged that I would never get his spot as my father's enforcer.
Unfortunately, he never had a chance to put that lesson to use.
He drags a hand through his hair, the kind of move that makes me want to seize his wrist and bite his palm. "But Igor is dead and Donna Margarita will soon be history too. If a bullet doesn't catch her, age will."
I tilt my head. "Motives replicate. Projects replicate. Winter School didn’t end because one raven fell." I tap the screen. "If Voronin scattered feathers and some of them survived, we could be tripping over legacies without knowing it. Including inside churches."
His eyes meet mine, quick and sharp. We’re thinking the same thing: hymns and numbers; oraciones; old systems wearing Sunday clothes.
If some of those kids survived and had kids of their own who are loyal to a dead Bratva leader, it could spell trouble for Grigori.
Something I'm sure Stephano won't care about.
But I can't shake the suspicion that, together, Margarita and Igor had an agenda to bring down the Mafia and the Bratva. And that their legacy is ongoing.
My inbox pings again—same thread. Vasili works fast.
Addendum: One page mentions a secondary site near Tver—Okhotnichya Dacha—the Hunting Dacha.
It's off-grid and still holds trainings on weekends. I'll notify your brother. I found a note in one of the old manifests: Igor V and Margarita V moved to Italy, 1969. If this is Margarita’s window, she and Igor left winter ’69.
From the looks of it, whoever ran the house never admitted to the two of them running away.
They claimed they were transported. I'll work on finding out what's true.
"Christ," I murmur, then angle the monitor so Stephano can read.
He exhales again, and my skin prickles underneath the slight brush. "All interesting, but none of it is a pin in Creel."
I smile without warmth. "You asked for intel. You got intel. Now it’s your turn to feed me."
Before he can answer, the desk phone on his side of the console buzzes. He glances at the display, goes a shade grimmer, and hits the speaker. "Yeah."
An unknown voice announces, "Boss, got a hymnbook and a headache. Cappella del Corvo bulletin ran a hymn sequence that encodes to a Batopilas airstrip coordinate plus a time. It matches the tail number ping Ana’s guy sent yesterday.
There’s also a second drop hidden in Wednesday vespers, looks like a convoy plate switch near Guachochi. "
My mouth curves. "Told you prayers move money."
Stephano’s already standing straighter. "Anything on-site?"
"Working it. Also—" A pause that makes the room lean. "We rattled a kiosk near Cappella del Corvo. Our watcher got hit, and someone just scrubbed the bulletin archive and toggled off cameras in a three-block radius. That’s not parish staff. That’s pro."
My blood sparks. "So we spooked a Cell."
"Yup," the man on the other end says. "And one more thing: The El Paso team can be in the air in two. Your call."
Stephano looks at me across the desk, the kind of look that asks for a decision and offers one at the same time. I close the window, hit power on the live OS, and watch the screen go midnight. No logs. No prints. No ghosts for his ghosts.
"Then let’s stop reading about ravens," I say, standing. "And start hunting lions."