Page 3 of Forced By the Bratva

I worked remotely for a London-based corporate consulting firm that outsourced digital reputation management and data recovery.

I was on a deadline. Although the job was simple, something felt off, something I’d yet to wrap my head around.

My supervisor had asked me to perform a thorough cleanup for Tarasov Imports, a luxury shipping and logistics company with ties to Russian ownership.

The company recently suffered a cyberattack that led to the leak of internal emails and the corruption of financial records.

My job wasn’t to catch whoever did it. My job was to go in after, trace inconsistencies, clean up the mess, and put the pieces back together without making more noise than necessary.

However, the inconsistencies I spotted three days ago, when the file first arrived, were why I believed something was off about this case.

I’d been on the server for three nights running, sorting fragmented folders, matching timestamps, and rebuilding what the breach had scrambled.

Normal cleanup work involved restoring what was damaged. But someone inside Tarasov Imports wasn’t restoring anything. They were manually deleting records.

Files that had survived the breach intact were vanishing on a schedule unrelated to the attack.

And I’d done this long enough to know that meant one thing. Someone was covering something up.

I knew I should let this go and just do what I was paid to do. Backend cleanup. But unfortunately, I’ve never been good at looking away from suspicious activity like this.

If I were being honest, this was the reason I hadn’t finished the work yet. I had to set it aside for days, hoping that delaying the job until the deadline would somehow shift my focus from the inconsistencies to the fact that I had limited time to deliver.

I was wrong. Looking at the file now, there was no way I wasn’t going down that rabbit hole, even with the short amount of time I had on my hands.

I drew a deep breath, finally deciding to satisfy my curiosity. “Here goes nothing.” My voice was a low whisper.

Within the next hour, I was already deep into my investigation.

I found hidden ledgers buried three folders down, beneath a pile of shipping manifests that didn’t match anything in the inventory system.

The files were encrypted, but not well. Whoever set this up didn’t think anyone would dig this deep.

I did. It took me forty minutes to crack the first layer.

Inside were payments. Big ones. All of them routed through shell companies that popped up, moved money, and then closed down a few weeks later.

My brows drew together as I studied the numbers. At first, I thought it was tax fraud—I mean, companies hide money in uglier ways than that all the time. So it wasn’t far-fetched.

The next second, my eyes caught a name I recognized.

Dimitri Udinov.

I would’ve brushed it off as nothing, but then again, I noticed the same name kept appearing multiple times. On different pages.

Hmm.

Wait. Why does that name sound familiar? Why do I recognize it? Where have I heard that name before? I thought for a moment, allowing my brain to do its magic.

Then it hit me.

I’d read about him months ago in an article about a businessman who died in a boating accident off the coast of Italy.

I remembered the name more than the story. And the man’s image was still a bit blurry in my head. But what has the deceased got to do with Tarasov Imports?

My curiosity was piqued, so I dug even deeper.

According to the ledger, payments tied to his accounts continued for eleven days after he was supposed to be dead.