Chapter 19 – Iris
It had been a few days since the gala and the heated argument on our way back. Ilya had been so swamped with work that he was hardly at home.
As usual, that part of me that was drawn to him now missed his presence at the house. He left early in the morning, before I woke up, and returned late at night, when I’d fallen asleep after waiting to hear the sound of his car pulling up downstairs.
I told myself that an overly jealous husband was dangerous and that I shouldn’t let myself become emotionally attached to him. But it was already too late. I’d crossed the line, and there was no coming back.
The more I tried to hate him, the more something kept pulling me to him like steel to a magnet. It was obvious that when it came to matters that concerned him, I wasn’t in charge of my own emotions.
Maybe that’s why I’d barked at that young man who tried to disrespect him at the gala. I deluded myself into believing I didn’t know why I stood up for him the way I did.
The answer was simple. But I refused to accept it. I couldn’t. Because the second I did, I’d be naming this feeling that was growing within me without my permission. And I wasn’t ready for that.
One cool afternoon, while he was away, I was wandering the halls, bored out of my mind, when I saw Natasha cleaning his study. I wanted to just carry on and let her do her job, but for some reason, I felt the urge to make my hands useful at least.
I changed course and walked inside his office for the first time since I’d been here. The air smelled faintly of his cologne, cedar, and aged paper.
Dark wood shelves lined the walls, floor to ceiling, packed with books and folders. An expensive golden chandelier hung from the ceiling, its warm glow illuminating the space.
A heavy desk sat near the window, papers stacked in careful piles across its surface.
Natasha was busy dusting a shelf with her back to me, unaware of my presence. Her hands moved with practiced ease as she hummed something under her breath.
“Natasha.”
She yelped, her hand flying to her chest as if to prevent her heart from jumping out. “Mrs. Tarasov.” She bowed her head. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
Mrs. Tarasov. I still wasn’t used to being called that.
“It’s all right,” I said, scanning the office.
“Did you need anything, ma’am?”
I hesitated. “Actually, yes.”
Her silence was my cue.
I picked up my pace and headed over to her in slow steps. “So, I was hoping you’d be able to help me out with something.”
“Anything. Just name it.”
“Could you, like…let me clean his office today?”
Her eyes widened in shock. “You want to clean his office?”
“Yes.”
“Um…” She scratched the back of her head. “You’re basically asking me to let you do my job.”
“Pretty much.” I shrugged my shoulders.
“Ma’am…I—I can’t…”
“Yes, you can,” I said. “All you have to do is hand me that feather duster and just be on your merry way. Easy peasy.”
“A woman of your standard should not be seen doing household chores, ma’am.”
“Okay. But who says anyone has to see me?” I looked right at her, tilting my head sideways.
She paused, confusion flickering in her gaze. “I don’t…I don’t know about this.” She stuttered. “If the boss finds out that I—”
“He won’t find out,” I cut her off. “’Cause I won’t tell him.” A pause. “Will you?”
She thought for a moment, then lifted her eyes toward the camera up in the ceiling.
“We don’t have to tell him. He’ll see it.”
I rolled my eyes at her stubbornness. “Good. Then he’ll see this. Gimme that.” I snatched the feather duster from her hand. “Look, I just wanna keep my hands busy, okay? It’s no big deal.”
She drew a deep, long breath. “I don’t approve of this. But okay.”
“See?” I placed a hand on her shoulder. “It wasn’t that hard, was it?”
A small smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, and she finally agreed to leave the office for me. She gave me a few cleaning tips before walking away and closing the door behind her.
After she was gone, I began cleaning the place. I swept the floor even though it wasn’t dirty, wiped the windows, and cleaned the expensive bottles at the minibar.
I reorganized the shelves, too, and surprisingly, this little task turned out to be therapeutic in its own way.
A stack of printed folders slipped out from behind a row of books and scattered across the floor. I knelt to pick them up, planning to put everything back exactly where it belonged.
But one page stopped me.
Financial ledgers. Corporation names I recognized right away—the same ones from the files I’d found weeks earlier. My eyebrows drew together as suspicion crept into my gaze.
I told myself to leave it alone, that this very curiosity was what had landed me in this situation in the first place.
I looked anyway. Or at least tried to.
The numbers pulled me in the same way they always did. Patterns rose out of the noise before I could stop myself from seeing them.
With a glance at the pages, I could see payment routes looping in cycles that made no sense for legitimate work. Same amounts, same intervals, moving through different shell companies like the money was circling back on itself.
According to public records, several of those companies had been dissolved months ago. The payment trails continued past those dates, flowing through accounts that should have been closed.
I sat on the floor with the folders spread around me and kept reading.
Transportation records came next. Dates that didn’t match anything I’d pieced together about how Tarasov Imports actually operated.
Over the past weeks, I’d overheard enough fragments—hallway conversations, phone calls through walls—to get a rough sense of when certain jobs happened. These transport logs didn’t align with any of it.
Something in my chest went cold and alert at the same time. Same feeling I’d had in my old apartment, hunched over my laptop at midnight, finding a name that shouldn’t still be moving money after it was supposed to be dead.
I started comparing what I remembered from the original breach against what sat in front of me now. The deeper I went, the clearer it got.
Someone inside the Tarasov structure was rerouting money. Falsifying operational reports. Dates that didn’t match. Transactions dressed up to look like something else.
Whoever did it understood the system well enough to hide inside it, using the same shell companies and payment routes the family already relied on.
Worse, some of the disappearances I’d heard blamed on rival groups didn’t show any outside fingerprints at all. No rival organization appeared in these records.
Whoever was responsible was already inside. This was an inside job, and the organization wasn’t even aware of what was going on underground.
I sat there a long time after that thought settled, folders across my lap, my pulse steady as my mind raced through everything I’d just put together.
This went deeper than the breach that had me taken in the first place. Deeper than anything I’d imagined sitting in my apartment weeks earlier, thinking I’d only stumbled onto simple corporate fraud.
I didn’t have names yet. Just patterns. Just numbers that refused to make sense any other way.
I was still on the floor, papers in careful stacks around me, when I heard him clear his throat conspicuously.
A few weeks ago, I would’ve been scared, but today, I wasn’t. I raised my head, and there he was, towering over me with both hands in his pockets. I must have been so carried away with my investigation that I didn’t hear him come in.
“How long have you been standing there?” I asked him.
“Long enough.”
I braced for questions about why I was going through his private documents. Instead, he looked at the folders, then at me, his expression soft.
“What are you doing?” It wasn’t an accusation. Just a question.
“I was reorganizing the shelf when I found these by accident,” I said.
He lifted his eyebrows. “By accident?”
“Look, I know it sounds bad, but believe me, I wasn’t snooping. I promise.”
“What do you mean you were reorganizing the shelf?” He looked at me, as though he were already piecing the puzzle together in his head. “Were you cleaning my office?”
I hesitated. “Yes.”
“Iris, that’s what the maids are for.”
“Yeah, I know.” I rolled my neck in a massaging motion. “But I was bored, and I needed to get my mind off…”
A pause.
“Off what?”
“Never mind.”
Yeah, I wasn’t about to tell him that I was doing this just to avoid thinking about him all day.
He crouched across from me, close enough to see what I’d been working through.
I expected him to gather everything up, tell me it wasn’t my concern, maybe even lock the whole cabinet somewhere I couldn’t reach again.
But he didn’t. Instead, he stared at me suspiciously. “What did you find?”
“Huh?” I feigned ignorance.
“You have that look on your face that says you found something important.”
I didn’t deny it. Didn’t accept it either.
“Show me,” he said, his gaze unwavering.
“It might be nothing serious…”
“Show me.”
I hesitated half a second, then decided there wasn’t much point holding back now.
I walked him through it page by page—the payment cycles, the dissolved companies still moving money, the transport dates that didn’t match anything I understood about the family’s actual operations, et cetera.
At first he looked skeptical, jaw tight, like he assumed I’d misread something or misunderstood how the business worked underneath.
But I didn’t stop there. I kept going, laying out each inconsistency in order so he’d clearly see for himself that I knew exactly what I was talking about.
Somewhere around the fourth or fifth example, his expression started to shift.
“This route,” he said, tapping one line. “This shouldn’t be active. This account closed two years ago.”
“According to the paperwork, yes. According to the ledger, it processed three payments last month.”
He went quiet, reading it again himself. I watched something change behind his eyes. Not disbelief anymore. Recognition.
We ended up at the desk together, papers spread across the surface, both of us working through the details for hours.
He pulled additional files from a locked drawer, cross-referencing dates against operations he remembered personally, comparing what I’d found against internal records I didn’t have access to.
For the first time since he’d taken me from my apartment, he wasn’t treating me like something fragile to manage or contain. He was listening. Actually listening. Weighing what I said instead of deciding in advance how much of it mattered.
At one point, he leaned over my shoulder to look at a ledger entry more closely. In such proximity, his hand settled on the table beside mine, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him along my side.
Neither of us mentioned it. The air had shifted anyway—quiet and heavy, as if the numbers in front of us had nothing to do with it.
“You see it too,” he said, low, close to my ear. “The pattern.”
“I’ve been seeing patterns like this for years. It’s what I do.”
He didn’t answer right away. When I glanced up, he was looking at me instead of the page. Something unfamiliar settled in his expression. Something that looked almost like respect.
That alone melted my heart and almost made my cheeks flush.
I’d felt his possessiveness plenty of times by now.
This was different.
This was him trusting my mind instead of just wanting my body.
And somehow, that hit me harder than anything else he’d done since the night he first knocked on my door.