“W.R. Holdings,” I whisper, my voice barely audible over the buzzing lights. “Viktor Rezhnov. Some other Russian names I couldn’t pronounce.”
Dave goes white. Literally white, like someone just drained his blood. “Oh God. Oh no, no, no.” He starts pacing again, three steps to the broken soda machine, three steps back. “This is so much worse than I thought.”
“Worse how?” My voice cracks. “Dave, what the hell is going on?”
He stops pacing, looks at me with eyes that are pure terror. “Mary, listen to me very carefully. You stumbled into something you don’t understand. Something that could get us both killed.”
The word “killed” hangs in the stale air like a physical thing.
“What are you talking about?”
“Viktor Kozlov. The accounts you saw. The money—” He runs both hands through his greasy hair. “It’s not just fraud, Mary. It’s laundering. For the Bratva.”
I blink. “The what now?”
He opens his mouth like he might explain slowly, like I’m a child or a hostage or both.
And something in me—something small and survival-shaped—says,“Don’t let him.”
I don’t want to know this. I don’t want Russian anything in my vocabulary before 8 AM. I don’t want to be in a murder laundromat learning about mob money like I’m in a bad Netflix doc.
But Dave keeps going.
“Russian mafia.” His voice cracks. “Viktor was skimming from casino operations, using our bank to clean the money. I got pulled in because—” He stops, swallows hard. “Because I owe people. Bad people. Gambling debts that spiraled, and they offered me a way out.”
“Mafia…?” My throat dries. The stack of flagged deposits in my bag suddenly feels radioactive.
The fluorescent light above us flickers, casting weird shadows that make Dave look like a skeleton.
I stare at him. “So you helped them launder money.”
Dave’s laugh is bitter, broken. “Helped? Mary, I wasn’t the only one.” He looks around the laundromat like the walls have ears. “You think they’d trust something this big to just one regional manager at a second-tier bank?”
My stomach clenches. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying this goes deeper than you think. Way deeper.” His hands shake as he takes another hit from his vape. “There are others at Brightside. Others at different banks. This isn’t some small-time operation; it’s a network.”
“Stop.” The word is sharp. “Just stop. I don’t want to know.”
Dave stares at me like I just slapped him. “Mary—”
“No, Dave. Whatever this is, whoever else is involved—I don’t want to know.” My voice is shaking now. “I just want to go home and pretend I never saw that email.”
“You can’t just pretend—”
“Watch me.” But even as I say it, I know it’s not true. Dave wipes sweat from his forehead, his eyes darting to the boarded windows.
“When Viktor started skimming, when money started going missing, they didn’t just blame him. They started looking for leaks. And Mary—” He grabs my arm. “They think the leak came from someone who had access to those account details.”
“I processed deposits. Moved funds. Created fake accounts.” He’s talking faster now, words tumbling over each other, like confession is bleeding out of him. “But it wasn’t just me, Mary. There’s a whole system in place. People at corporate, maybe even federal contacts… I don’t know how high it goes.” His voice cracks. “But Viktor got greedy. Started taking more than his cut. And now they think someone at the bank leaked information about the operation to him.”
“Someone likeyou.”
“Someone likeus.” He points at me, his finger shaking. “You saw those accounts, Mary. You know the names. They’ll think I told you, or worse—that you’re working with Viktor.”
My stomach drops. “But I didn’t do anything.”
“You’ve seen the records. You could identify the accounts.” Dave’s eyes are wild now. “I tried to delete that email before you could see it, but it was too late. And now—”
