Page 67 of Forced By the Bratva

“Thirteen.”

“Any deaths?”

“Fortunately, no.”

“Good.” I nodded. “Keep the perimeter locked until Ivan gets here. No one in or out.”

He nodded and moved off.

I walked the ground floor again, slower this time. Checking the points of entry. The gate systems had accepted the forged handshake without flagging it until it was already too late.

That meant someone had either bought the codes or reverse-engineered them from previous traffic. Either way, it pointed to resources and patience. Not a rushed job. Not a message meant to scare us. A real attempt.

Ivan arrived twenty minutes later with reinforcements. He moved through the wreckage of the lower floor with his usual cold precision. No wasted motion. No unnecessary questions until he had seen the evidence himself.

He crouched beside the body in the hallway outside the bedroom. Turned the man’s collar over. Examined the equipment strapped to his vest.

“This isn’t ours,” Ivan said, working through the gear methodically. “The encryption residue on this comm unit doesn’t match anything we use. Neither does the signal hardware at the gate.”

“Foreign. Yeah, I figured,” I said, arms across my chest.

“This was contract work.” He looked at me directly. “Someone paid serious money for a job like this.”

My thoughts exactly.

His eyes moved briefly toward the bedroom door, toward where Iris had almost been killed. “This attack wasn’t internal correction, Ilya. Whoever’s behind those ledgers has resources outside our organization entirely.”

“Someone powerful enough to hire people who don’t officially exist anywhere,” I said.

“Exactly.” He rose to his feet. “If you ask me, this is way above Yevgeni’s and Markov’s pay grade.”

“Maybe,” I answered. “But that doesn’t change the fact that they might know something we don’t.”

“Your men interrogated Yevgeni. Did he say anything useful?”

“No,” I replied. “He claims he doesn’t know anything about the missing funds. But my gut tells me he’s lying.”

“We need to tread carefully, brother,” he said. “There seem to be more players in this game than we know. Strong forces to be reckoned with.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Ivan wiped his hands on a cloth one of the guards handed him, his expression hardening.

“Ilya, someone outside the Bratva is hunting your wife,” he said. “And now they know exactly where to find her.”

Chapter 23 – Iris

If he had even been a minute late, I would’ve been dead by now.

The attack happened hours ago, and the entire mansion was being cleaned up, but I was still shaking with fear. I’d never experienced such violence before in my whole life, and I never wanted to experience it ever again.

Luckily, the attack hadn’t claimed the lives of anyone at the mansion. However, it left thirteen people injured—including Natasha—and in need of medical attention.

I was so traumatized by the attack that I hadn’t been able to close my eyes without seeing the gun pointed at my face. That man had his finger on the trigger and would’ve shot me dead at such close range if Ilya hadn’t shown up in the nick of time.

He was the reason I was still breathing. God, speed and agility were rather remarkable. I’d always known that he was ruthless as they came, but watching him in action changed everything I thought I knew about him.

Ilya would do anything to protect me. He proved it when he beat that man to death with his bare hands. His bare hands. How was that even possible?