Page 44 of Prey of the Bratva

“Are you alright now?” Diane asked.

“Much better,” I nodded. “But we don’t have time for any of this right now. We have wasted enough time because of my absence and injury, and we have already missed out on key information we could have gotten from Elias Vance. We need to get back in the game and gather intel to strike further.”

That was enough. All of them nodded, and the shift was immediate. Laptops came out, and files spread across the table. The air changed from tension to focus so quickly that it was almost physical. This was where we worked best. Not in conversation but in execution. Within an hour, the room transformed completely. Maps covered the main table with shipping routes marked in overlapping lines. Codes were written, crossed out, and rewritten. Diane sat across from me, fingers moving quickly over her laptop.

“I pulled everything from the last three weeks,” she said. “Patterns are tighter than we thought.”

“Show me.”

She turned the screen towards me, and I could see rows of shipment details being sent over as medical exports and relief cargo. They were all clean on the surface, but we all knew exactly what was underneath.

“Look at the timing,” she added. “They’re aligning arrivals with low inspection windows.”

“Smart,” I murmured.

“Calculated,” Sera corrected from the other side of the table. “They’re not just avoiding detection. They’re anticipating it.”

“Which means someone inside is feeding them clearance patterns,” I said.

“Or multiple someones,” Alina added quietly. “If the system were as big as we expect it to be, they would have bought more than enough people.”

I nodded. “Cross-reference the ports.”

Marina leaned over, pulling up another set of data. “Already did. The same three docks keep coming up.”

“The one from the warehouse,” I said.

“Yes.”

Katya spoke then, her voice softer but steady. “There’s more.”

We all looked at her, and she slid a printed sheet across the table. It highlighted financial routing and shell accounts, talking about layered transactions under fake accounts. I felt something shift the second I saw it.

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

“From a contact in the survivor network,” she replied. “Someone who used to move money for them.”

My jaw tightened. “Walk me through it.”

“They’re funneling payments through multiple intermediaries,” she said, pointing to the chart. “But the origin point stays consistent.”

“Where?”

She hesitated for a fraction of a second, and then she said it. “None of it is here. It’s in Russia.”

The room went quiet. Shit. Slowly, Diane zoomed in on the chain, and a name appeared at the center of it. It was clear and unmistakable.

Sergei Volkov.

Everything stopped, and no one spoke for several seconds. No one moved. Despite not being based in Russia and having no power there, we all knew what that name meant. It represented old power and untouchable reach. I should have known that a network such as this could not be run by some small fish in the sea. It had to be someone as big as Sergei Volkov.

A man who did not operate unless he controlled everything beneath him.

“This isn’t local,” Sera said finally, her voice lower now.

“No,” I replied quietly.

“It never was.”