“You scared?” I asked, watching her reaction.
Illyana’s eyes went cold. She reached behind her back and pulled out a butterfly knife, flipping it open with casual grace. Then another from her boot. A third from somewhere I couldn’t see. Each one appeared like magic, spinning in her hands before she laid them on the console between us.
“I’ve got a list of bodies with my name on them,” she said quietly. “Los Zetas should be scared of me, not the other way around.”
I believed her. Everything about Illyana Kamarov screamed danger wrapped in expensive clothes and pretty features. The kind of woman who’d smile while she slit your throat.
“Fair enough,” I said.
The door opened, and Timur filled the frame. “Can you sweep the neighboring mansion’s surveillance grid?” He wasn’t asking. “See if you can figure out how someone bypassed their system?”
The neighboring mansion. Where Barbara said there’d been a break-in. Where she’d lied about needing to rush home to.
Coincidence? In my world, coincidences didn’t exist.
I stood, already reaching for my laptop bag. “I’ll check.”
“Good man.” Timur clapped me on the shoulder hard enough to bruise. “Whatever you find, I want to know.”
As I followed him toward the door, my mind was already racing. Barbara’s panicked call. Her stammered excuse about a break-in. The way she’d fled my penthouse like demons were chasing her.
And now this, an actual break-in at a mansion next door to Bratva property. A break-in where nothing was caught on camera. Where someone with serious skills had bypassed multiple security layers without leaving a trace.
My fingers itched to get into that system, to pull apart the code and see what secrets it was hiding. Because I had a feeling, the kind of feeling that came from years of hunting shadows, that this break-in had something to do with the woman who’d spent the night in my bed.
The woman with honey-brown eyes and a boyfriend whose name made her shake with fear.
The woman I was quickly realizing might be in more danger than just a bad relationship.
And despite every instinct screaming at me to stay focused on Douglas, on the vengeance I’d promised myself, on the deal I’d made with Vladimir, I knew I wasn’t going to walk away from this.
I wasn’t going to walk away from her.
Chapter 5 – Barbara
I spent the entire day trying to convince myself that last night had been a mistake.
It didn’t work.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him tensing under my hands, the way he’d looked at me like I was something precious instead of broken. Kirill. His name had become a prayer I couldn’t stop repeating, even as guilt churned in my stomach like acid.
Sebastian had called me a whore that morning. Said it coldly through the phone while I stood in Kirill’s penthouse, still wearing the evidence of what we’d done on my skin. And maybe he was right. Maybe that’s exactly what I was, someone so desperate to feel something other than fear that I’d thrown myself at a stranger and pretended, just for a few hours, that I could be someone else.
Someone free.
I was pacing my bedroom in bare feet and a silk robe when my heart suddenly stuttered in my chest. Some primal instinct made me move to the window, pulling back the curtain just enough to see the front gate.
A black SUV rolled up the drive, sleek and dangerous and moving with purpose.
The driver’s door opened, and Kirill stepped out.
He looked furious. Deliberate. Every line of his body screamed determination and barely controlled rage. He was wearing dark jeans and a fitted jacket, and even from this distance, I could see the tension in his jaw, the way his hands clenched and unclenched at his sides.
He was coming for answers.
And I had nothing but lies to give him.
“Shit.” I was moving before I could think, feet hitting the marble floor of the hallway as I ran toward the stairs. “Shit, shit, shit.”
