Page 57 of Forced By the Bratva

“Pretty much.” I shrugged my shoulders.

“Ma’am…I—I can’t…”

“Yes, you can,” I said. “All you have to do is hand me that feather duster and just be on your merry way. Easy peasy.”

“A woman of your standard should not be seen doing household chores, ma’am.”

“Okay. But who says anyone has to see me?” I looked right at her, tilting my head sideways.

She paused, confusion flickering in her gaze. “I don’t…I don’t know about this.” She stuttered. “If the boss finds out that I—”

“He won’t find out,” I cut her off. “’Cause I won’t tell him.” A pause. “Will you?”

She thought for a moment, then lifted her eyes toward the camera up in the ceiling.

“We don’t have to tell him. He’ll see it.”

I rolled my eyes at her stubbornness. “Good. Then he’ll see this. Gimme that.” I snatched the feather duster from her hand. “Look, I just wanna keep my hands busy, okay? It’s no big deal.”

She drew a deep, long breath. “I don’t approve of this. But okay.”

“See?” I placed a hand on her shoulder. “It wasn’t that hard, was it?”

A small smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, and she finally agreed to leave the office for me. She gave me a few cleaning tips before walking away and closing the door behind her.

After she was gone, I began cleaning the place. I swept the floor even though it wasn’t dirty, wiped the windows, and cleaned the expensive bottles at the minibar.

I reorganized the shelves, too, and surprisingly, this little task turned out to be therapeutic in its own way.

A stack of printed folders slipped out from behind a row of books and scattered across the floor. I knelt to pick them up, planning to put everything back exactly where it belonged.

But one page stopped me.

Financial ledgers. Corporation names I recognized right away—the same ones from the files I’d found weeks earlier. My eyebrows drew together as suspicion crept into my gaze.

I told myself to leave it alone, that this very curiosity was what had landed me in this situation in the first place.

I looked anyway. Or at least tried to.

The numbers pulled me in the same way they always did. Patterns rose out of the noise before I could stop myself from seeing them.

With a glance at the pages, I could see payment routes looping in cycles that made no sense for legitimate work. Same amounts, same intervals, moving through different shell companies like the money was circling back on itself.

According to public records, several of those companies had been dissolved months ago. The payment trails continued past those dates, flowing through accounts that should have been closed.

I sat on the floor with the folders spread around me and kept reading.

Transportation records came next. Dates that didn’t match anything I’d pieced together about how Tarasov Imports actually operated.

Over the past weeks, I’d overheard enough fragments—hallway conversations, phone calls through walls—to get a rough sense of when certain jobs happened. These transport logs didn’t align with any of it.

Something in my chest went cold and alert at the same time. Same feeling I’d had in my old apartment, hunched over my laptop at midnight, finding a name that shouldn’t still be moving money after it was supposed to be dead.

I started comparing what I remembered from the original breach against what sat in front of me now. The deeper I went, the clearer it got.

Someone inside the Tarasov structure was rerouting money. Falsifying operational reports. Dates that didn’t match. Transactions dressed up to look like something else.

Whoever did it understood the system well enough to hide inside it, using the same shell companies and payment routes the family already relied on.