It was the way Ivan Zotov made me feel. The way he’d gotten under my skin. The way I wanted him, even when I knew next to nothing about him or who he was working for.
The only thing I knew for sure was that he was the enemy, and I should hate him.
Which I didn’t.
That was the real threat here. This man and my crumbled defenses.
Not that I would ever let him or anyone know. “Bring it on, Zotov.”
15
IVAN
Isat in the darkness of my quarters, the glow from the indirect light casting shadows across the room. Shorty was Isabella Salvini. Not Mirabella. And not only that, she was the hacker known as Iset.
And I kissed her.
My lips still burned from that kiss. I ran my thumb across my bottom lip, remembering the taste of her, the way she’d responded with equal ferocity. It had been anger and frustration that drove me to grab her, to silence her defiance with my mouth. But something else had taken over—something I couldn’t afford to feel. Something I shouldn’t let myself feel.
“Focus,” I muttered to myself, taking a swig of coffee that had gone cold a while ago. I grimaced and set it aside.
I pulled up the folder Nina’d copied earlier onto my laptop—Grey’s documentation, not the official file on the Paraskia’s server. As if the fact that there were two versions of her file wasn’t suspicious enough, Grey’sfolder contained a slew of references, photos, documents, even voice memos. I opened her file and scanned through the first page—all information I’d already memorized.
Isabella Maria Salvini. Twenty-three years old. Twin sister to Mirabella. Daughter of Alfredo Salvini, now deceased, and Mariella Salvini, also deceased. A footnote stated her IQ of 169, but nothing more.
One-sixty-nine. The girl was a fucking genius.
Not that it would explain Grey’s obsession.
I scrolled to the next page which was already different from the official version.
My phone beeped—a message from Anton.
Still no movement.
Grey was still in Verona, to where we tracked the jet, which was good.
I focused back on the file. Why was Grey so fixated on Iset? What had she discovered or done that made her such a priority target for Grey because I even checked with some of my contacts in the organization, and the Paraskia’s interest in her was still only to use her as leverage to get Vince—and the Salvini family back into the organization.
Nothing more.
Somewhere in the distance was the faint sound of a door closing. My brothers and sisters were somewhere around, or sleeping. I still didn’t know why they were here on the island—still didn’t know what Grey had planned with them here.
I scrolled deeper into her file, searching for anything connecting Grey to Isabella or her activities as Iset. I broke another toothpick and threw it at the growing stack of broken toothpicks in front of me—evidence I was far from calm and collected. There were so many pieces of the puzzle, and instead of solving at least some, the pieces multiplied right before my eyes.
My fingers paused over the keyboard. There had to be something I was missing. Grey never acted without purpose, and his interest in Isabella went beyond professional. It was personal, almost obsessive.
I grabbed my phone.
It didn’t even take a single ring before Nina picked up the call. “Can you send me everything the Paraskia has on Iset?”
“Sure,” she said, ended the call, and a second later, the official file arrived with a ding.
I opened the file, clicked through to a section labeled “Subject History,” and froze. The earliest date stamp was 2008. Isabella would have been only eight years old.
“Why 2008?” I muttered, leaning closer to the screen.
Something about the timeline nagged at me—Isabella’s surveillance began in 2008, the same year as…
