Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty-Two
Severin Volkov
Dark secrets don’t stay hidden for long. I am coming for you, Severin. I am coming for all of you.
I stared at the message. Screams echoed throughout the room, but fury crawled over my skin like a thousand fire ants. The ghost had the audacity to strike so publicly, making me look weak just as I inherited this empire.
If I weren’t already determined to hunt down the ghost and kill her violently, now there would be no mercy.
“Well, what skeletons do you have in your closet, Mr. Volkov?” Keira asked, slipping beside me with an amused twinkle in her eye. Far too flirtatious for what the moment called for. She also completely ignored the fear emanating from all the Bratva members around her.
“Sorry, don’t mind her.” Neeve shook her head. “She is far too fascinated by drama and dangerous things.” She murmured the second half under her breath, but I was close enough to hear every single word.
“Not drama. Mystery.” She smiled, stepping up to the message. She smelled it before reaching out to touch—
“No, don’t. That’s evidence.” Ilya cut her off, and her hand paused inches from the substance.
“And will you be calling the police?” she asked, raising a well-manicured red eyebrow in my direction. I didn’t have to answer. She simply laughed and turned back to the words. “Thought so.”
Keira dipped her finger in the paint. She examined it and smelled it again before she turned back to us with her lips quirked up in a smirk. “Just as I thought. Have you pissed off any women recently? Besides me…” The last part came so low I almost missed it.
“What?” My brow creased.
“It’s lipstick.” Keira leaned closer to the writing, inspecting it.
“I’d feel lucky, though, if I were you. I was stuck in traffic the other day, and I saw a vandalized car.
Apparently the owner’s ex-girlfriend had written all over it with Sharpie.
” Keira stepped back, her red locks bouncing with her movement.
“She wrote that he had cheated on her with her sister… Have you done that? She wrote it on the car in huge letters. God, I wish I’d gotten a picture of it. ”
I let out a low chuckle. Keira was amusing.
Brightness wrapped with a hint of darkness.
I found it fascinating. Well, I found everything about the woman fascinating, and so did my dick, which really needed to settle because I could not be getting hard moments after being threatened. Especially not tonight.
I’d promised myself I wouldn’t care about my engagement party or the woman I was supposed to marry. I might want to fuck her, but she would never be the woman I wanted to marry.
“Perhaps we should check the cameras,” she said, facing me.
And so that’s what we did. Keira, the Morozovs, and I went to watch the footage.
We crowded into the tiny security room. It was so cramped, someone’s elbow dug into my side.
The monitors hung on the wall. Nika cycled through the feeds and checked the metadata and code. Keira leaned over her shoulder, muttering advice under her breath, which only fueled the tension between the two.
“Nothing is altered,” Nika said, pulling up another screen before returning to the footage.
Dimitri rubbed his face. “It cannot be an actual ghost.” His Russian accent thickened. It was usually so light you couldn’t even tell he had an accent. But right now, it was thick.
The footage came back up. Letter by letter, the message appeared on the wall, but no one was there writing it: no hands, no body, no lipstick tube. Not even a shadow.
“Is it possible that it’s time-activated paint?” Nika asked. “I read a book once where that happened. Someone paints it, and it appears hours later.”
I cocked my head. The footage played on the screen again and again. “Anything is possible.”
“But it’s lipstick, not paint.” Keira straightened, no longer hovering over Nika’s shoulder. “I touched it, I smelled it. It wasn’t paint.”
“Could the footage have been edited?” Ilya asked.
“No,” Keira and Nika said at the same time.
“The metadata is intact,” Nika stated right as Keira said, “The timestamps all match and haven’t been altered.”
“Then how the fuck is this possible?” Ilya asked, scratching his five-o’clock shadow.
“I think the better question is, why is someone targeting you?” Keira faced me, and confusion had burrowed into her expression, along with a little accusation.
Fuck. I hadn’t told her any of this, and now she was thrown into the center of it and possibly also a target.
“We don’t know,” Nika said, pushing her chair back and standing, nearly in Keira’s face.
Keira eased back and studied us one by one. Suspicion sharpened her expression. “What’s going on?”
My shoulders stiffened. It was probably not the best idea to tell a woman I had just met about the ghost. But then again, I had asked that same woman to hack into my systems and find my rat… what more danger could there be in letting her know about a vigilante hunting me and all of my men?
She might become a target, too.
So I started to explain it all, but Dimitri warned, “Are you sure you want to read her in?”
No. A chill chased down my spine, but I tilted my head and continued to tell her everything, from the gifted penis—at that, she snorted—to all of the notes and photos I had found the other day. Throughout my explanation, she remained still.
I didn’t go into any of the whys or hows. Mostly because I didn’t know them. I just gave her the facts from the last couple of months.
“So, in summary, a vigilante, who might be an actual ghost, sent you your father’s penis and is hunting you and all of your men down?” she asked in a tone that was both amused and colored with concern.
“Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.”
“Lovely.” Her attention drew back to the cameras. “And what do you intend to do about it?”
“I’m going to find her and kill her,” I said coldly.
“Great. How can I be of help?”
“You can’t,” Nika said sharply, and every eye in the room landed on her. “He shouldn’t have told you any of that.”
“But now he has.” Keira’s tone was calm and almost unconcerned. “So I can just go on pretending as if I know nothing, or I could help.”
“Then pretend like you know nothing.” Nika crossed her arms.
This was going to be a problem. Nika wasn’t usually this protective or this harsh with people. She wasn’t the type of girl who marked her territory like this. “Clear the room,” I said. “All but Keira.”
Nika’s entire demeanor hardened, and she squeezed her knuckles so tight they turned white. But she refused to argue with her Pakhan in front of an outsider. Dimitri and Ilya gave me concerned looks, but they, too, left the room, the door clicking shut behind them.
I faced Keira, expecting her to yell at me for hiding the vigilante and putting her in danger. I expected her to talk to me about the possible rat in my kingdom. I didn’t expect what came out of her mouth.
“Why have you been ignoring me all night?” she asked.
I stepped back, and my brow furrowed. I didn’t know how to answer that question.
The truth was not advisable. I had avoided her because I didn’t want to be engaged to her.
Because I had imagined this moment with another person.
And that was not an appropriate thing to say—especially not to the woman I was supposed to marry.
I went with the most dismissive option, which was utterly unkind. “Did I?”
Her brown eyes scanned my face for a long moment, as if waiting for me to say something else, but I didn’t.
“Right.” She sighed. “Anyway, I have a list of people you might be interested in checking more deeply. Especially now with your… situation.” Her voice was flat and drained of all emotion, like a soldier briefing a superior.
“I included Grigori Larin and Mikhail on the list because they were very clean… possibly too clean, and that makes me suspicious.”
I nodded. Her coldness caught me off guard. Clearly, she was mad, and she probably had every right to be. No woman liked to be ignored. But it still unsettled me. I hadn’t expected her warmth to evaporate.
Keira slid her fingertips under her dress and into her bra. My heart jumped into my throat. My attention betrayed me because instead of keeping my focus on her face, it dropped to the neckline of her dress for a beat too long.
She wasn’t the woman I wanted her to be, but she was still a magnificent creature.
She pulled out a folded piece of paper and handed it to me. It was warm to the touch. I unfolded it and read a list of twenty-nine names.
“Why not keep it in your purse?” I asked, motioning to her clutch bag.
The corner of her mouth drew up. “Because someone could steal my purse. It’s much harder for them to steal my bra.”
My throat worked. I looked again at her breasts. Apparently, my self-control was on hiatus tonight. “Smart.”
It wasn’t the most sophisticated of answers, but I needed to say something.
She bit her lip and tilted her chin in acknowledgment. We were now stuck in an awkward dance I had created by refusing to acknowledge her existence tonight.
“Well, then, it would seem the party is over,” she said.
She didn’t let me get another word in. She yanked open the door and left.
Well, I had summarily fucked that up.