What was he doing here? How did he know where I lived? Had Sebastian…?
No. Sebastian wouldn’t have told him. Sebastian didn’t even know Kirill existed. Which meant Kirill had figured it out on his own. Had connected the dots between my panicked lie about a break-in and whatever he’d found at the Kamarov mansion next door.
Because, of course, the Bratva mansion was next door. Of course, my life couldn’t be complicated enough without adding Russian organized crime into the mix. I should’ve known when Kirill was hanging out with Drew at a Bratva-owned club.
I hit the bottom of the staircase just as voices echoed from deeper in the house. Male voices….
The security command room.
My bare feet made no sound on the cold marble as I hurried down the hallway, my robe flowing behind me like a ghost. I should’ve stopped. Should’ve gone back upstairs, changed into something that didn’t screamI just rolled out of bed thinking about you. But I couldn’t help myself.
I needed to see him. Needed to know what he knew.
Needed to see if he was looking at me differently now. Like I was the whore he likely thought I was. Like I was something dirty and used and not worth his time.
The command room door was open, spilling harsh fluorescent light into the hallway. I stopped just outside, pressing my back against the wall, trying to calm my racing heart.
“…consistent pattern,” Kirill was saying, his voice cold and clinical. Professional. Nothing like the rough whisper he’dused in my ear last night when he’d told me I was beautiful. “Every two weeks. About twenty seconds on repeat.”
“That’s impossible,” Marcus, our head of security, argued. “The system’s top of the line. It would’ve flagged any tampering.”
“Your system’s five years old and running on outdated firmware.” Kirill’s tone made it clear what he thought of that. “A decent hacker could loop your footage in their sleep. This one’s just been smart about it. Small windows. Consistent timing. Made it look like natural surveillance footage.”
My blood ran cold. He knew. He fucking knew about the loops Sebastian had forced me to create, the twenty-second windows that let him slip in and out of the mansion without anyone noticing. The windows that had taken me months to learn how to program, hours of watching YouTube tutorials in the middle of the night, terrified my father would catch me.
“Someone’s forging your recordings,” Kirill continued. “Has been for a while, based on the pattern degradation. You’ve got a ghost in your system.”
A gasp escaped my lips before I could stop it.
The room went silent.
Then Kirill’s head turned, those sharp blue eyes finding me in the doorway with the precision of a sniper locking on a target. For one suspended moment, we just stared at each other. His expression shifted from professional detachment to something I couldn’t read, surprise, maybe. Recognition.
Just like last night, my skin prickled with awareness. My heartbeat stuttered and raced, pulse pounding in my throat. Even across the room, even with Marcus and two other security guards between us, I felt the pull. That invisible thread that had dragged me onto the dance floor, into his penthouse, into his bed.
But this time, he looked away.
The dismissal hit me like a physical blow. He turned back to the monitors, jaw tight, fingers flying across the keyboard like I didn’t exist. Like I was just another piece of furniture in a house he was being paid to secure.
“You need a complete overhaul,” he said, still not looking at me. “New system, new protocols, new everything. This setup’s compromised beyond repair.”
“We can handle that,” Marcus said, shooting me a confused glance. He probably wondered why the boss’s daughter was standing in the doorway in a robe, looking like she’d seen a ghost.
“Contact Kamarov if you want it done right.” Kirill stood abruptly, shoving his laptop into his bag with controlled violence. “I work for them. They’ll arrange everything.”
He was leaving. Just like that. Going to walk out without acknowledging me, without asking the questions I could see burning in his eyes, without….
He moved past me like I was invisible, his shoulder nearly brushing mine. The scent of him made my head spin. Made me want to reach out, grab his arm, demand he look at me.
But I didn’t.
I just watched him storm down the hallway toward the front door, his footsteps echoing on the marble like gunshots.
The door slammed. The SUV’s engine roared to life. And then he was gone.
I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding, my legs suddenly shaky. Relief washed through me, followed immediately by something that felt suspiciously like disappointment.
He knew about the loops. Knew someone had tampered with our security. And he’d looked at me like he knew I was somehow involved.
