Page 53 of Marked By the Devil

“Well, this job has become personal, if you don’t mind my saying that.” I crossed my arms and tried not to let the confusion, bitterness, and bewilderment get to me all over again.

“Having a hit placed on me isn’t fun.”

He scoffed. “You’re telling me,” he deadpanned.

“And having a second attempt on my life isn’t great, either,” I said. If he wanted my commiseration about someone trying to kill him, I wouldn’t know what to say. He was a Mafia boss with many enemies. It came with the territory of his title. But, while I sat here with him… I couldn’t see him as only the interim Pakhan of a powerful crime family. I knew him as the father of Luka. The husband of Elena. The brother of Viktor.

I sighed.

“We’ll be looking into Smithson’s activity,” he said.

I scoffed again. “Me too.”

That was what I went back to doing, searching and picking through all that I could from the Volkovs’ resources, and that was a lot.

I wrestled with guilt that I was looking into my former colleagues, but when I remembered that they were doing the wrong thing by accepting money from this mysterious network, it wasn’t hard to stick with the plan of snooping. Whenever I wanted to question whether I was compromising my principles, I reminded myself that I was only doing the rest of the government a favor by rooting out this corruption.

All the while, as I came in to work with Elena at the computers, I discovered more and more uncomfortable truths. In this day and age, it was far too easy to hide online activity and what went where and who said what. But with Trojan’s skills as a hacker, I was getting deeper into trespassing in the communication that could matter to both the Volkovs and me.

They wanted to know who this Gregori was using to pay off the agents and cops around here.

And I wanted to know why Smithson would’ve set me up to be killed off.

“Jeez…”

Elena swiveled her chair, glancing at Luka in his portable crib in the corner before raising her brows at me. “Now what?”

“It’s just… so much.” I gestured at the computer and slumped in my chair. “Smithson has taken in the bribe money most frequently, but the names of who has gotten bigger payouts from those flagged accounts are his superiors.” I rubbed my face as Lev and Mila entered the room. “It makes me wonder how far up it goes.”

Lev sat in the chair that Igor usually used when he worked in here with us versus at his own office. “So.”

Mila stood next to him, arms crossed as she smiled at Luka sleeping in the crib. I had yet to spend much time meeting Carina—and that wasn’t a goal that I wanted to consider when I knew in the back of my mind that I wasn’t here as some extended “stay” as a guest—but the few times I’d spotted Mila, she was quiet and deferred to Lev. She seemed to trail him everywhere, and I was curious what their story was. Not as curious as I was about what they’d found in checking out my apartment. Adrik and Maksim had suggested they go see if there was any activity there. Viktor wanted them to plant bugs, too, in case Smithson or someone else wanted to wait for me to show up there.

“So?” I raised my brows at him.

“Trashed,” he replied. “We lifted some prints and will check them, but the whole place was trashed.”

I sighed heavily. “How? I hadn’t even unpacked yet.”

“They handled that for you. Boxes opened, stuff everywhere, shit broken.”

I groaned.

It reiterated the fact that I’d become an involuntary person of interest, caught too close to whatever Smithson was ultimately up to. But it also emphasized how much safer I was with the Volkovs. With Viktor, who strode into the office now.

Lev summed up to his cousin what he and Mila found, and Viktor only shook his head. “Did you have anything valuable there?”

I groaned again. “I’m not a spy!” I was, actually, for them, looking into agents who had been bribed. But not the other way around.

“I didn’t mean it like that, Red. I meant anything valuable that you would need to replace. From your mom?”

I ignored the butterflies in my stomach that he cared about my not losing something from my mom. Like he could be compassionate enough that I not lose who I was and where I came from. I shook my head. “No. That stuff is in storage.”

The cousins shared a glance and I winced.

“We’ll go see about having that checked out,” Lev said, getting up and leaving with Mila.

“Alexei and I only stopped by to check in with Adrik. I need to go, but I’ll see you later.”