Chapter 24 – Ilya
Who were these bastards, and why did they want my wife dead so badly? They attacked my estate twice in the space of a few hours.
Why?
Did she know something she shouldn’t? Was she not who I thought she was?
The more I thought about this whole mess, the more Ivan’s warning echoed at the back of my mind. At this point, doubt was starting to creep in, and I had no control over it because nothing made sense to me anymore.
At first, I thought the attack was linked to the missing funds in the Bratva ledger. I thought whoever was behind the rerouting of the organization’s money had sent men to silence my wife and me.
But I was wrong. This wasn’t a Bratva-coordinated attack. These guys were built differently in ways that disturbed me. They’d proven to be a force to be reckoned with—a force that wouldn’t stop until Iris was dead.
Those assholes had messed with the wrong woman. She was mine to protect, and I was going to stop at nothing until I put an end to this nonsense. Once and for all.
I was standing by the window in my office with a glass of vodka in my hand when the full report arrived.
Boris knocked once and walked in, folder under his arm. He dropped it on the desk without waiting.
“Boss, the breach report just came in,” he said.
I drained the remaining vodka down my throat and turned to face him. “Talk to me.”
“Two other places got hit in the last six weeks. Vetrov’s estate outside Moscow, and the warehouse complex in Kyiv.” He watched me flip pages. “Nobody linked them at the time. One got written up as equipment failure, the other as a local break-in.”
“And we’re certain it’s the same men?” I sat in my chair, already going through the files.
“Absolutely. Same M.O.” He tapped the page in front of me. “Same forged credentials. Same rotation of the signal keys. The exact same method each time.”
I checked the timestamps. “These aren’t amateurs.” My voice was barely a whisper.
“No, they’re not. Whoever they are, they sat and watched how our systems checked keys, then built something that slides past the first layers without waking the deeper stuff.”
“It takes a lot of time to do that.”
“Time and access.” Boris’s jaw flexed. “You don’t build that kind of precision from pure outside knowledge. Someone had to see the real process first.”
I kept reading, a myriad of thoughts tugging at my mind.
“They were testing us. Feeling out the defenses before they came here.” He paused. “This wasn’t the first try. It was the third.”
Something wasn’t adding up. Why attack multiple Bratva properties if Iris was the main target all along?
I turned another page and stopped.
The analyst notes sat near the bottom, full of the usual codes. Liabilities. Threats. Assets. One line stood out.
Iris. Reclassified.
I turned the page so he could see it. “Persistent target node. What does that even mean?”
Boris’s face didn’t change much, but something in his eyes did. “It means the system doesn’t list her as a liability anymore.” He met my eyes.
I knew exactly what this meant, and it made my blood boil.
“Mrs. Tarasov is useful to whoever’s running this. Useful enough that grabbing her—or putting her down—is worth throwing real resources at.”
“They already tried twice.” My fingers clenched into fists.
“They’ll come again.” No soft edges on it. “People don’t spend this kind of money and then walk away.”
I closed the folder and left my hand on the cover. Outside the window, the estate looked quiet under the morning light. Guards still walked the perimeter from last night.
“Get me everything on Vetrov’s breach,” I said. “And the Kyiv warehouse. Full files, not the summary.”
“Already on it.”
“And Boris.”
He stopped at the door.
“Triple the security. Make sure every man is fully armed and on high alert.”
He nodded once and left.
I sat with that for a long time before calling her into the office.
The weight of it settled differently than the usual threats. Men came after me because of what I was. They came after her because of what she knew and what she could still find.
I’d built my career on solving problems alone. Violence when it was needed. Discipline when patience worked better. I never needed anyone else’s mind in the room with mine. Not for anything that mattered.
But this time, it was different.
Iris understood the financial architecture better than anyone on my payroll. Better than the analysts Ivan trusted. Better than men who’d spent years inside this world and still missed the patterns she’d caught in a single afternoon.
If this external group was moving through the same shell structure she’d already traced, she was the only one who could follow that thread properly.
I needed her. Not just to keep safe. But also to help me solve this.
“Hey,” she said softly, closing the door behind her.
“Hey,” I replied with the same tone, a small grin slowly creeping across my face.
“You wanted to see me?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Please, take a seat.”
In the midst of all this madness, she still managed to look so beautiful even when she wasn’t trying. And the sight of her alone made my dark day seem bright.
She sat in the visitor’s chair, tucking her hair behind her ear.
“How’re you feeling?” we chorused, our voices blending as one.
I watched her smile broaden in a way I hadn’t seen before.
“You first.” It happened again.
I cocked my head to the side, my expression soft and welcoming.
“Okay, this is weird.” She chuckled.
“I believe it’s called dual telepathy,” I teased, making an attempt at a silly joke.
“Really?” She raised her brows in disbelief.
“Yeah. It’s when a couple gets to a point in their relationship that they start reading each other’s minds.”
She laughed. Harder than I expected, and it warmed my heart, broadening my smile. She knew I just made that up. Dual telepathy was obviously not a thing, but she got the joke.
Why would anyone want to harm such a beautiful, harmless human being like Iris? Whoever these people were, as long as I was alive, I wouldn’t watch them take her. Never.
After holding each other’s gaze for a moment, she broke eye contact and asked why I had called for her.
Over the next few minutes, I began feeding her carefully controlled pieces of information, testing how she handled them and watching whether pressure made her sharper or more scattered.
It made her sharper.
As we buried ourselves in the files, she caught a discrepancy in the payment intervals that the analysts had dismissed as a rounding error.
She laid the pages side by side and showed me how the same amount reappeared three times under different company names, each time just after a dissolved account should have gone dark.
I checked the original ledgers myself. She was right.
“This surveillance gap,” she said, pointing to a section of the report. “Nobody flagged this. The cameras at the east gate went dark for four minutes during the breach. That’s not equipment failure. That’s a deliberate window.”
I checked it against Ivan’s notes. No one had caught it.
“You’re right.”
“It means whoever did this had someone controlling the camera feed in real time, not just forged credentials at the gate. Active manipulation during the attack.”
“That requires access to our surveillance network.”
“Exactly.” She looked up at me, sharp and certain. “Which means this isn’t just an external team hitting you blind. Someone inside is still feeding them real-time information.”
I sat back and let that settle. The shape of the problem shifted under her observation again. Internal and external working together. That changed the list of people I could trust and the list of people I needed to watch.
She was right more often than she was wrong. That unsettled me more than I wanted to admit. The ease with which she found what my own people missed. The speed at which her mind moved through data that took my analysts hours to process.
Over the following days, I started deferring to her conclusions before locking in operational decisions.
Small things at first. Which guard rotations to adjust. Which accounts to freeze quietly instead of alerting the wider organization.
Then came larger things. Decisions that mattered. Decisions I would have made on instinct alone before, now running past her first.
I caught myself waiting for her reaction before I signed off on a change to the night watch.
I caught myself explaining a financial freeze in more detail than I needed to, just to hear whether she saw a gap I had missed. The habit formed without me deciding to form it.
I realized too late how far the balance had shifted.
This wasn’t the woman I’d dragged out of her apartment weeks ago. Restrained. Terrified. A problem to contain until the danger passed.
This was someone I relied on. Someone whose judgment I trusted enough to weigh against my own before acting.
That should have scared me more than it did.
We worked late most nights, long after the rest of the estate had gone quiet around us.
Some nights, the only sounds were the turning of a page or the scratch of her pen. She would lean over a ledger, hair falling forward, and stay that way until something clicked.
Then she would sit up and start talking, laying out the next piece of the pattern without looking at me for approval.
I listened. I asked the questions that needed asking. I stopped pretending I already had every answer.
The silence between us during those hours had changed. Not hostile anymore. Not even tense the way it used to be. Just quiet. Comfortable in a way I hadn’t expected from anything in my life.
I watched her work sometimes instead of the documents in front of me. The way she chewed the end of her pen when something didn’t add up. The way she’d go still for a few seconds, processing, before the pieces clicked and she started talking again—faster, more certain.
Once, she caught me at it and raised an eyebrow. I looked back at the page in front of me and said nothing. She didn’t push. She just returned to the numbers.
I understood, watching her like that one night near midnight, that there was no version of this that let either of us walk away untouched.
If we solved it together—traced the external network back to whoever was funding it, exposed the internal source feeding them information—we might survive it. Both of us. Together.
If we didn’t, we’d both be eliminated.
There was no clean exit left. No version where I pulled myself out of this, sent her somewhere safe, and went back to handling Bratva business the way I always had. Alone. Unattached. Uncomplicated.
The ring on her finger had been a solution at the time. Protection. A claim that kept other men from treating her as fair game.
Somewhere along the way, it had become something else. I could feel the difference when she sat across from me at the table, when she argued a point without fear of my reaction. When she stayed in the room after the work was done instead of finding a reason to leave.
She looked up from the papers and caught me watching her.
“You know it’s rude to stare, right?”
“It’s not if you’re staring at your wife, who just happens to be the most beautiful woman in the world.”
Her cheeks flushed, and she lowered her head slightly, as if to hide her blush. “Flattery will get you nowhere, Mr. Tarasov,” she teased.
“Are you sure about that?” I leaned back in my chair. “Because I can think of a few places it can get me.”
She held my gaze a second longer than necessary, her hazel eyes shining with something I didn’t have a name for yet.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice sweet like honey.
“For what?”
A pause.
“Everything,” she answered. “You’ve saved my life twice now. And for that, I’m grateful.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” I said. “We still have a secret organization to find.”
“And we will.” She reached out across the table and held my hand. “We’ll find them…together. Whoever they are.”
The conviction in her tone was the inspiration I needed.