Page 16 of The Bratva Enforcer and His Virgin Bride

Chapter 2 – Lukyan

Numbers tell the truth more reliably than people ever do.

People panic. People lie. People become emotional, sentimental, greedy.

Systems do not.

Systems either work or fail.

And the Rusnak network has been failing for sixteen years.

I lean back slightly in my chair, eyes fixed on the spread of files glowing across the screens in front of me. Financial records. Transaction ghosts. Shell companies buried beneath older shell companies. Entire accounts that technically still exist but remain inaccessible behind encryption that no one has successfully breached.

Billions frozen in silence.

Not lost.

Worse.

Locked.

The office around me is quiet except for the low hum of electronics and the muted rain striking the windows overlooking Manhattan. I prefer working at night. Fewer interruptions. Fewer people pretending urgency is intelligence.

Across from me, Ben flips through another file before tossing it onto the table.

“Dead end,” he says.

I barely glance at it. “Mm.”

“It’s the fourth one tonight.”

“Then the fourth one tonight is useless. Let’s keep looking.”

Ben exhales through his nose, somewhere between amusement and irritation.

Most people wouldn’t survive working with me this long.

Ben has survived because he understands something important: I don’t care about effort; I care about results.

I shift my attention back to the primary monitor.

The dormant accounts were originally established through a layered financial architecture designed to withstand government seizures, internal wars, sanctions, and disappearances. Whoever built the system understood not only money but human behavior. Anticipation patterns. Psychological blind spots.

It wasn’t created by ordinary accountants.

It was engineered.

Which is why nobody has managed to unlock it since Creed died.

Even after all these years, the final authentication sequence remains incomplete.

A code.

Simple in theory.

Nearly impossible in practice.

We’ve recovered fragments over time. Transaction rhythms. Numeric repetitions. Routing structures hidden inside old offshore movements.