Page 68 of Forced By the Bratva

Seeing him as a monster was as disturbing as it was intriguing.

While I replayed the scene of my near-death experience over and over in my head, a few questions lingered. Did the assassin barge into my room to kill me specifically? Or did he just walk into a random room, looking to kill whatever was in there?

The answers to these questions mattered because they could shed more light on the dark corners of this whole situation.

I was helping Natasha bandage her wounded arm when Ilya showed up and said he had something important to show me. I hesitated for a moment but eventually went with him.

The room Ilya took me to was small and windowless, with monitors lining one wall, showing feeds from the estate outside.

Cleanup crews moved across the screens in silent black and white, sweeping the grounds, clearing bodies, and checking the perimeter for anything left behind.

He shut the door and sat me down across from him at a metal table, a folder already waiting there.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I’m not going to soften this,” he said. “You need to see it clearly.”

He opened the folder.

The first page was a weapon inventory, photographs of rifles and gear pulled off the men who’d attacked the estate.

None of it matched anything Bratva-issued, he explained. Manufacturing origins traced back to a supplier that didn’t sell to organizations like his. Foreign. Untraceable through any channel his people normally used.

The second page held printouts from a recovered comm device. Fragments of intercepted messages, encrypted, in a language none of his men could immediately place. Not Russian. Not anything close to it.

“We’re working on translation,” he said. “It’ll take time.”

The third page was the one that made my stomach drop.

A payment trail. Offshore accounts routed through jurisdictions that had nothing to do with Bratva systems. Money moved through numbered shell entities that dissolved the second each transaction cleared, with no name attached to any of it.

I stared at it, my mind already running the comparison before I fully decided to make it.

“Wait. This is the same structure,” I said slowly. “The same pattern I found in the ledgers. Shell companies opening and closing around specific transactions.”

He nodded.

“So whoever’s funding this attack—”

“Might be connected to whoever’s been rerouting money inside my own organization.” He finished the thought before I could, his voice flat. “I don’t know that for certain yet. But the structure is close enough that I can’t rule it out.”

I sat back, trying to process what that actually meant.

For weeks, I’d told myself the danger in this house came from the Bratva itself. From Ilya. From the men who wanted me eliminated because I knew too much about their internal operations.

That fear had shaped everything, every decision, every moment of distrust I’d carried since the night he first knocked on my apartment door.

This was different.

I looked into his eyes, my eyebrows knitting together. “Ilya, is there something you’re not telling me?”

He hesitated. “Based on everything we’ve gathered, I have reasons to believe that you might’ve been the main target.”

“Me?” My eyes widened.

That’s when it hit me—he’d just answered the question lingering on my mind all day.

“I think you’re right,” I said. “They knew where I was. Not just the estate. They knew which room, which floor. The man who held me at gunpoint wasn’t searching randomly. He knew exactly where to look.”