Page 122 of The Bratva Enforcer and His Virgin Bride

But not today.

Today, I’m incredibly eager to get back home to my wife. Karl doesn’t deserve the theatre of my patience. He’s nothing but a speck of dust beneath my shoes, an annoying obstacle that’s finally been cleared.

Before he can even form the first word, I pull the trigger.

The deafening crack of the gunshot echoes off the shipping containers, and his body slumps instantly against the cold steel, lifeless eyes staring at nothing as his blood spills everywhere.

I lower my weapon, not feeling a single shred of emotion as I look down at his corpse. I turn around and address Ben, my voice entirely flat. “Clean this place up. Burn it to the ground if you have to. It’s over.”

Without waiting for a response, I march out of the isolated terminal, leaving my men behind to handle theaftermath. The heavy rain begins to wash the soot from my jacket as I stride toward the convoy. I climb straight into the driver’s seat of one of the heavy armored trucks and slam my foot onto the gas, driving off into the dark streets.

Sofia is waiting for me. And I’m driving toward a home that finally feels whole.

Chapter 29 – Sofia

The sprawling mahogany desk in Lukyan’s private study is usually covered in tactical maps and intelligence briefings, but today it holds only a single, heavily encrypted laptop and the legal pad containing my father’s decoded legacy. The heavy velvet curtains are drawn against the afternoon sun, casting the room in a quiet, amber glow.

The atmosphere in the room is markedly different from any other moment since this madness began. What was once a desperate race fueled by absolute urgency, terror, and bloodshed is now approached with a profound sense of clarity and mutual understanding. There are no shadows looming over us anymore. Karl is gone. The past is finally laid to rest.

“All right,” I say, taking a deep breath as I pull the laptop closer to me. “The encryption algorithm has a triple-helix architecture. If we input the master key without dismantling the secondary firewalls first, the entire network will permanently delete itself. It’s a dead man’s switch.”

Lukyan stands directly behind my chair, his large hands resting flat on the back of my seat, his massive chest brushing against my shoulder. Instead of taking the keyboard away from me, instead of letting his usual aggressive need for control dictate the room, he simply watches me. He is trusting me completely, yielding the digital battlefield to my hands.

“Tell me what to do,zaychik,” he murmurs, his voice low and steady.

“I need you to bypass the proxy servers on your end while I execute the alphanumeric sequence,” I direct, pointing to the secondary screen running a secure network connection. “It has to happen simultaneously. On my count.”

I lead the process, calmly guiding Lukyan through the intricate, labyrinthine structure of the code I spent the previousnight organizing. My father was a genius; the system he created requires absolute, flawless precision. A single typo, a millisecond of delay, and the safeguards will lock us out entirely, scattering the pieces into the void of the dark web forever.

“Ready?” I ask, my fingers hovering over the keys.

“Ready,” Lukyan replies.

As we begin working through the sequence, a heavy, palpable tension builds within the room. It isn’t the chaotic, frantic panic of an external threat or the sound of approaching gunfire. It is the crushing, awe-inspiring weight of what we are about to unlock. These dormant accounts aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet; they represent an immense, terrifying power. These are resources that could easily reshape the entire global balance within our world, capable of building or toppling empires with the stroke of a key.

My heart hammers against my ribs as I type in the final string of numbers—the sequence corresponding to the song my father used to play.

“Executing now,” I whisper, hitting the enter key.

When access is finally achieved, the shift across the screens is immediate and blinding. The frozen, black command prompts suddenly burst into a flurry of vibrant green data streams. Cascades of firewalls dismantle themselves, green checkmarks lighting up the interface one by one as the dormant network roars back to life.

The verification is absolute. The decoding is perfectly correct.

As the primary database initializes, the true, unfathomable scale of what has been recovered finally populates on the screen. Account ledger after account ledger decrypts, revealing offshore holdings, sovereign bonds, and hidden liquid assets spread across hundreds of secure institutions. The sheer significance of my father’s life’s work—and my own role incompleting it—settles deep into my bones. We aren’t just looking at wealth. We have just gained access to billions of dollars.

My jaw drops, my breath completely trapped in my throat as the final, staggering net worth calculation finishes loading in a string of endless zeroes.

“Oh my god,” I gape, my eyes darting frantically across the screen, trying to comprehend the sheer magnitude of the digits. “Lukyan… look at this. This is so much money. This is billions.”

But when I look up, expecting to see the calculating, triumphant gleam of a syndicate boss staring at the screen, my breath catches for an entirely different reason.

Lukyan isn’t looking at the screen at all. He’s looking entirely at me, his gray eyes dark, burning with a fierce, unwavering devotion that makes the billions of dollars melt away into absolute insignificance.

I stare at him for a beat, completely thrown off by the sudden intensity in his gaze. “What?” I breathe, my voice barely a whisper against the hum of the laptop.

“Sofia, let’s get married again,” he says.

A startled giggle escapes my lips, and I shake my head slightly, wondering if I’ve misheard him over the adrenaline still rushing through my veins. “What?”