Page 55 of Sexting my Bratva Daddies

I stopped outside the bathroom door. There was really no need to go inside. I just hoped to get her away from Leo’s office before her rising voice brought him out. “It’s not–”

“Don’t.” She shook her head once, hard. “Do not tell me what it looks like. I read fast and I saw enough.”

I pressed both hands over my face, then dropped them. “You can’t tell anyone. Elena, I’m serious. No one.”

“Peyton.” She said my name with the weight of the world in those two syllables. “Is it him? Is he one of them?”

I was in over my head, but I could not lie to her now. “Yes.”

She made a small, rasping laugh. “Wait. Do not tell me that Viktor and Mikhail are the other two.”

It wasn’t even a question. The heat in my face answered for me, the flush crawling up and over my cheeks.

Elena stared at me. “I’ve heard things.” She took her time speaking, her hands falling to her hips and settling there. “Rumors. About all three of them. I have heard that they share women, which you have confirmed. It’s some kind of arrangement they have had for years. I never put much weight behind it because it seemed unbelievable. Men sharing women?”

“It’s true.” I didn’t have to say that. “All of it. And before you say anything, I know how it sounds. I know how it looks. But you need to understand that it has been unbelievable. Everything that I told you is true.”

Elena looked me up and down, reading and assessing me in that way of hers.

There was a reason she worked in finance.

Honestly, she reminded me of Misha and the way he went utterly still sometimes, his eyes and brain so busy, the rest of him had to stop.

There was no recrimination in her gaze, nothing that made me uncomfortable, but instead of acceptance or excitement, she looked slightly terrified.

“What?” I pushed off the wall. “What’s wrong?”

“There are more rumors.” Elena gripped my arms, bringing our faces so close our noses almost touched. “Rumors about who they are. What they’re involved in.”

Her grip tightened, her fingers digging in. “People have gone missing. Not just recently, and I do not mean the people they have fired, though some of them are concerningly silent. Colleagues, business associates, people who were connected with this company in one way or another.”

She shook me. “I did not want to believe it was connected because believing it meant working here was a risk. But the frequency has gone up the last few months. I have been trying very hard not to think about why.”

Footsteps creaked from a distance, and Elena released me.

“They would never hurt me.” I meant every word.

“You do not know that.”

“I do.” Nodding made me feel like a bobblehead doll, but I did it anyway.

A disgruntled grunt parted her lips. “You are not objective about this.”

“No. I’m not.” And I never would be, but that did not change the facts. They would not hurt me.

Elena took a step backward, toward the stairs. “Be careful. That is all I’m asking. Just… be careful.”

We parted ways, Elena using the keycard to open the door to the stairwell and me to my desk. I sat and wiggled my mouse, only to stare at the screen again.

Elena’s concerns rang in my ears. People have been known to disappear.

Getting close to them is dangerous.

I knew that. On some level, somewhere deep below the part of me that replayed Misha’s voice in the dark and laughed too hard at Viktor’s dry delivery, I’d known.

My conversation with Leo rang in next.

You’ve become one of those people. Whether you asked for that or not.