Page 14 of The Pakhan's Secret Baby

For a man like him with so many eyes watching, I bet he hardly slept.

He had to be looking over his shoulder every step of the way.

"And yet my warehouse is empty." I purse my lips and sit back, knowing this is going to get me nowhere. If the truck left clean, it happened out on the road, and without a two-man team, who knows what happened. There are no witnesses.

"How will I make money, Daniil? How will those poor lonely souls wanting their drugs get what they need?" I lean forward, narrowing my eyes. “Three hundred kilos, Daniil. That’s not a couple of bricks that fell off the back of a truck. That’s a hole in my supply chain big enough to drive a fucking tank through. And you’re telling me everything was clean?”

Daniil’s mouth opens, but nothing smart comes out.

His face is pale, sweat rolling down his temples.

I can see the fear in him, and part of me enjoys it. The rest of me just wants blood.

“Get out,” I growl. “Get the fuck out of my sight before I stop being reasonable and let Devid take you downstairs for a real conversation. Move.”

He nearly trips over his own feet scrambling for the door.

Devid steps aside just enough to let him bolt, then shuts the door behind the man so we're plunged into silence again.

Daniil is lucky I didn't carve my seventeen million rubles out of his flesh.

I drag in a breath, trying to shove the worst of the fury down so I can think straight. "Have we heard from Farid?" I flick a glance up to meet Devid's eyes, but he's stoic. He’s probably afraid of what I might say to him about this, or how I might bite his head off. But I'm starting to calm down and think more rationally.

"Farid is dead, boss," he says. "I reached his wife this morning. Three Russians showed up at the house five days ago, took everything out of his office, and then dragged him outside and shot him."

Five days ago?

That's before the shipment even hit the corridor, which means this wasn't some random grab on the road.

Someone mapped out my entire supply chain and started dismantling it from the source.

The thought of it makes my blood boil so fast I can feel my pulse throbbing behind my eyes.

We've never had a hit like this.

Farid was careful—meticulously so. He has a wife and child to think about.

One little slip up and he knows our enemies would come for him.

"There's more," Devid adds, because of course there is. As if my product being stolen and Farid's body turning up isn't bad enough. "The wife saw one of the men when they threatened to come back and kill the whole family."

"Did she get a look at him?" I ask, suddenly curious to know if there is an eyewitness.

"She couldn't describe his face, but she remembered his neck," he tells me. "She says he had a tattoo behind his ear of a black scorpion with its tail curving up."

My mind instantly drifts—I know that tattoo.

I saw it years ago at a card game in Vyborg, on some drunk fool who couldn't stop bragging about the jobs he'd done.

I thought back then what an idiot he was showing off that tattoo, but now I know where to trace the source.

The Gusevs brand every man who works in their ranks with that black scorpion.

Devid was at that game with me, and I can see from his face he's already connected the dots too.

"Tell me you found it," I growl, sitting straighter. If we find the man who put that ink on our killer, maybe we can identify him and trace him back.

I don’t see how the Gusevs would even be strong enough to pull something like this off.