Her brows rose, a small grin tugging at the corners of her lips. “Are you saying I’m usually loud?”
“No,” I replied, struggling not to be affected by her smile. “I’m just saying that you speak a lot less these days.”
“I thought men liked that,” she said, holding my gaze. “I thought you guys hated it when we talked too much.”
I paused, taking a moment to savor that grin I hadn’t seen in a while. “I see what you’re doing.”
She shrugged her shoulders and reached for her cup of freshly brewed coffee. “I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re deflecting.”
“Unless you can substantiate that claim—with some real evidence—I’m afraid it’s just a baseless assumption.” She sipped her coffee.
I hesitated, my lips curling into a mischievous smirk. “Does your sudden detachment from me and the rest of the world count as real evidence?”
“Not at all.” She retained that smile that had already brightened my day. “At best, it sounds…circumstantial.”
I watched her in silence, enjoying her enthusiasm for her legal profession.
She paused, her smile slowly vanishing. “People are allowed to be quiet sometimes, Adrik.”
Silence.
“It doesn’t always mean that they’re detached. It just means that…they might be dealing with a lot.”
Again, silence.
I couldn’t find the right words to say at the moment.
She flashed me a forced smile. “It’s a phase. It’ll pass.”
Whatever she was dealing with began the day she went to visit Richard Beaumont. That man wasn’t to be trusted. He’d sold out his only grandchild to secure an alliance with my family.
I’d always known that he was a snake—just like every other person in this criminal underworld. I needed to tread carefully, especially with Emika. She might look innocent and harmless. But before everything else, she was first a Beaumont, even though she went by Morgan.
She was Richard’s granddaughter, and his blood ran through her veins. Inmyworld, trust was a luxury that ruined empires and got people killed.
Maybe Emika was innocent. Maybe she wasn’t.
But one thing was certain: I wasn’t going to let my guard down.
***
Later that night, Sergei and I followed one of my men to an abandoned warehouse at the docks. According to Sergei, he’d noticed that this man had been acting strangely lately. He said he had a gut feeling that the man was up to something.
When we arrived at the location, he parked the car at a reasonable distance. From here, we could clearly see the man speaking with two other unfamiliar faces.
“Should we get him?” Sergei asked, glancing at me in the rearview mirror.
“Not yet,” I said, my eyes pinned on the three men in the distance. “They’re waiting for someone. I wanna know who.”
Less than a minute later, a vintage vehicle pulled up in front of them. A tall man in a black suit stepped out of the car with a briefcase in his hand. The man we’d trailed walked over to the newcomer and shook his hand.
With my binoculars, I watched the man hand out a file bearing the Tarasov logo in exchange for the briefcase.
My jaw tightened. This bastard was the mole. He’d been selling information to the enemy. Was whatever in that briefcase worth his life? What an idiot!
I shifted my lenses to the newcomer, the man in a suit. “Do you recognize him?” I asked Sergei. “The buyer.”
