Page 92 of Bought By Sin

Mila.

Where?

Where are you? Where do I go? What⁠—

The shuffle of feet behind me was the only alert that I had before ducking and spinning into a kick to take the newcomer down. It wasn’t Mila. The footsteps were from someone heavier. A guard rushed up behind me, gun out. Apparently, an alarm had been triggered to alert the patrolling man to come this way. Or maybe it was his unlucky night to happen to go on this circuit through the house.

Too deft and too strong for him to resist me or throw me off, I curled around after kicking at his knee. He fell, his mouth opened to cry out or yell, but again, I was faster. I broke his fall so his body wouldn’t make a sound. Before I released him, I set my hands on his neck and snapped it.

One push in of my hands and he was dead.

A silent kill.

The Bratva soldier ran up the steps quietly, gun up, and made eye contact with me as I lowered the body to the floor.

“Four,” Mila reported, referencing the room behind us now.

Her voice was still hushed, but I didn’t miss the urgency in it to go now. I stepped over the dead body and rushed as silently as I could into the room she said to go into.

It was an anteroom to an office. And unlike the rest of this floor, it was occupied.

Yusef spun, raising a gun at my head, but I was faster. Three pops of my gun made a bloody massacre of his face. Just in case, I dropped my aim and fired twice at his chest too.

This wasn’t about making a specific statement. I only needed the glory of a Volkov Bratva member killing Gregori’s highly-ranked official. It would send a message, and that was all we needed to happen as far as this corpse went.

He dropped to the floor, thudding down. I didn’t advance to break his fall. He crashed down, and I stared at his back as he rolled to a final stillness.

A soldier ran in behind me, his gun still up.

Then Mila ran in.

“You got him.”

I nodded, facing her. “What happened?”

“I went into that meeting room and realized that he’d been on the computer there recently. Or that someone had been.” She scanned the room, not minding the dead body as she trespassed. “And that meant someone was on the move up here.”

“What about upstairs?” I asked.

She shook her head, but it ended with a shrug. “I don’t know.”

I tipped my head at the guard with the silent expectation that he’d clear that floor too. If Yusef Antonov hadn’t been where we thought he’d be, it was only safe and smart to assume that others might be changing up their routines too.

He ran out to secure the building. But Mila didn’t look to be in any rush to leave.

“Did it feel good?” she asked, walking into the bigger office space that this smaller connecting room was.

“Did what feel good?”

“Killing him,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at me.

I huffed out a wry laugh. “It’s not a matter of whether it feels good or bad. It was a hit. A job. And now it’s done.”

She frowned as she entered the bigger office and scoped it out. “I thought it would feel… good. That it would appease you to strike back and kill someone he relies on.”

“It will feel better to kill him,” I replied, meaning every syllable. I would never miss Gregori and I would never want him to live. He deserved only pain and misery. “What are you doing?” I asked, listening in for any sign of others coming. The other Bratva men we’d come with sounded like they had everything under control from their ends.

“Looking for these documents…” She furrowed her brow. “There was a list of them lying out in that meeting room downstairs, and they sound important.”