Page 36 of His Contract Queen

However, today is unfortunately not one I can afford to slack off.

Malyshko’s covert threats still bother me.

More than I care to admit. More than I should allow in all honesty. And after what shifted between Katerina and me this morning, they matter even more. Because for the first time in a very, very long time, I have something that can be taken from me.

Something I am not at all prepared to lose.

I bend to retrieve my shoes, reaching under the bed to where I must have kicked them off in my hurry to undress myself. My fingers touch the cool leather, my eyes darting up just as something strange catches my attention.

A sliver of black is tucked just beneath the mattress boards, concealed enough that only someone down on the floor would notice it.

Curiosity hones into focus without a second thought. I crouch and reach under the bed and close my hand around it. It resists for a moment from how it’s wedged before slipping free into my grasp. When I turn it over, realization clicks coldly inside my mind.

A burner phone, made obvious by the simplicity of the model and the cash-only bought, nearly untrackable SIM card I find sitting inside the back slot.

For a second, I simply stare at it.

I turn the device slowly in my hand, letting the weight of it settle into my palm. This isn’t a model I give to my men in the field. They use encrypted devices—tested, monitored, rotated every month to keep our secrets from falling into the wrong hands.

This? It’s civilian trash. The kind used by journalists and panicked men trying to hide affairs from their wives. Someone who believes they’re smarter than the network the Pact owns would believe something store-bought with cash could allow them full anonymity. There is no possibility that she acquired this from anyone under my command.

None.

Which means she brought it here herself to use for reasons I was never meant to discover.

A quiet, cold ripple moves through me.

Surprise is a luxury I learned to outgrow years ago. By twenty, I knew better than to let it show. By thirty, I couldn’t afford to let it fester. By the time I took my seat at the head of my Bratva’s table five years later, surprise was nothing more than a liability disguised as emotion I buried along with the rest of my family.

Yet the faint jolt, subtle but undeniable, sets my teeth on edge.

Interesting.

Very, very interesting.

I don’t wake her when I rise to my feet. For a man trained to move without a sound like I am, it isn’t difficult. Her breathing remains slow and steady, each gentle breath tugging at something deep in my sternum that I can’t name.

For a moment, I simply stand there and watch her.

This burner phone tells me one of two truths. Katerina is hiding something from me that she believes is worth the risk of her life if I were to ever find out, or her father’s influence is still reaching her from behind my walls.

Neither possibility sits well with me.

The first speaks to betrayal, the second a threat. Both point to possibilities that present an opportunity to take something from me now that I’ve finally admitted to myself that she is mine in ways I never intended but refuse to double back on.

I breathe in slowly, tucking the phone into my pocket. I take a final moment to look at her, to memorize the quiet curve of her lips and the softness of her expression that she will never show me awake, and leave quietly.

Downstairs, Bashir is the one who finds me first.

He rounds the corner into the foyer with a pace far too quick to suggest he’d happened to walk by at that exact moment. The moment he sees me, his face twists to irritation first, then relief, then back to irritation all over again from being reminded that I’ve been MIA since we arrived back at the estate.

“Where the hell have you been?” he snaps.

On any other day, I would reprimand him for it. Forgetting his place long enough to speak to me like someone who assumes I owe them an explanation is the exact kind of insubordination I do not tolerate from any of my men. A tone like that from anyone else would earn a correction he’d remember for months.

Today, I ignore it completely.

“Do you have a handle on all our accounts today?” I ask, already moving past the irritation vibrating in his posture.