Alexei was off the phone now, joining in the conversation as we went to my office.Wait. My father’s office. It still didn’t feel like mine.
Fuck. I didn’t need this to trip me up now. Itwasmy place and Iwasin charge. I had to accept it.
“And I still think that was the smart move,” Alexei said.
“You had every reason to kill that motherfucker for that shipment not sending as expected due to supposed insufficient funds, which weren’t insufficient,” Maksim said. “That was the least he could’ve deserved for such a fuckup.”
“But by letting him think that you only wanted to punish him somehow, and stay a client of his firm, it gave us the time to see what he was trying to do,” Alexei said.
It was all a trap. “Yes, but we have only been able to play this game of spying on them and what they do with our accounts because Elena has been here.”
I sat in the huge chair and sighed. I’d barely gotten any sleep. After I walked back, leaving Elena asleep on the floor tucked in with the blankets, it wasn’t but a couple of hours later when I got the news that John Morovov was wiping smaller accounts clean and trying to make a run for it. None of the main Volkov accounts were touched. He’d emptied a smaller fund, but it was still fucking theft. Sacha and Igor confirmed that without Elena’s help. But her father had taken other money from clients—clearly spooked by something—and wanted to leave the country.
“I just want to know what the fuck he’s been up to,” I growled.
“He’s got to be included or at the very least aware of what this shadow network is doing,” Alexei said.
“Fuck.” Maksim ran his hand down his face. “If Gregori is alive, and he’s forming an alliance that could go against us?—”
I held up my hand. “Stop. We’re not going to assume he is alive. We will continue to investigate that, but right now, we need to handle John Morovov fucking us over. Again.”
Nikolai and Viktor were with Elena. Not to babysit her or cuff her to stay here, but because they were less likely to lash out in anger than I was.
As if she was summoned merely from us talking about her and her father, she was escorted into the room.
All of us, except Lev, were in here now. He was handling the supervision of a crew driving out to stop Morovov from fleeing.
Elena walked into the office with a somber, worried expression. I could tell that she sensed something was very wrong and that it meant something would have to happen in retaliation, but first, I needed more answers.
Despite how badly I wished we could just beus, drawn to each other and fitting so perfectly together, I couldn’t go soft on her. This was too serious, too important.
If John Morovov got away with stealing even a single penny of Volkov money, it would be a sign of weakness. It would be a signal that I wasn’t handling everything like I should as the interim Pakhan.
And if that fucker ran with our money and we didn’t rush after him to make him pay for that transgression, we’d never be seen as a top power in the city or anywhere else. Our empire, our reputation, was at stake.
“I only just started to track what he’s doing,” she said quietly, almost meekly as she approached the desk.
Alexei moved aside while Maksim brought a chair over for her to sit. She lowered to the seat and opened the laptop. “He’s drained accounts just hours ago.” She glanced at me, almost nervously, as if she was going to add that it had to have happened in the middle of the night when I had been with her.
I heaved out a steady breath, focusing.
“The only account of yours is a smaller one, just a surplus, like a change account to be able to move funds around smoothly. But while I was in the program, I saw that he’s cleared out multiple accounts for other clients.”
“Whose?” Viktor asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. The identification that I have access to is coded. It’s just like how I never knew who you were, or whose the Volkov accounts were until I came here and learned what was what. Numbers and serial IDs were always used for that ambiguity. I don’t know who he’s taken money from. But…” She licked her lips and cringed. “I can speculate—I can’t tell for sure yet without cross-referencing my notes—but I can speculate that he hasnottaken any money out of those unclaimed shell company accounts.”
Fuck.
I felt my heart speed up as dread kicked in.
“You mean any of the shell companies that are connected to the network that Gregori could be behind?” I asked, my voice lethally low.
She nodded, still cringing. “Yes. I believe so. Again, I can’t tell without checking my notes, but… it looks like that.”
All while she sat here with us, upfront and professional, she showed no sign of affection toward her father. For the man who was supposed to call himself her father. Not once since she’d come to be with me, under my charge, had she expressed any emotion of missing him. Or of wondering about how he was doing.
Suspicion, yes. She suspected her father of terrible things. And she wasn’t a fan of him after he’d given her to me. I understood that. What also got my attention was that she didn’t have any personal stories about him. We hadn’t had much time to talk, and I had been careful not to give her the idea we could be friends, but the one time she’d opened up to me with something personal about her life or past, she’d shared about her mother who’d passed away.
