Page 70 of Black Ledger

He dipped his chin and slid his hands into his pockets. “Yeah.”

“And yet you trust me, an Irish mafia princess who likes to hack into systems and tamper with things I shouldn’t?” I scrunched my nose playfully.

He sighed. “Well, I don’t trust you at all, but I figure if you’re going to marry me, you might want to help put your new house in order.”

“That’s risky. What if I’m only here to infiltrate your systems and destroy you?” I raised a manicured red eyebrow.

He stared at me for a long moment, something in his expression giving way as he sank into a chair. “I guess I like playing with fire.”

I let out a laugh and shook my head. “I can’t decide if you want me to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing or not.”

“If you were, at least it would be interesting.”

I grunted and turned back to the monitors. “So where do we start?” I pushed my glasses up my nose and pulled out the chair to the computer.

“Well, I gave you access to company records, personnel records, financial summaries, security logs, and internal communications archives… not everything, of course, but enough to start looking for a mole or thief, or honestly, just start to patch things together.”

I raised both my eyebrows and looked back at him, excited. “So I can start anywhere? Fun.”

I was more than ready to dig into everything. The only problem was that I hadn’t anticipated Severin staying to watch. That made cloning his systems so much harder, but, of course, not impossible.

I immediately logged into the system and started poking around, just examining everything.

I didn’t have a plan yet. I just wanted to get a sense of what I was looking at. I quickly started to see what Severin meant. It was all a mess. Employees had unusual access they shouldn’t have. Their job titles did not match their access like for example, grunt workers had admin access. Weird.

Then there were people attached to multiple companies, records that didn’t line up, and altered records.

A lot of altered records.

Severin spent the first thirty minutes watching me like a hawk, and there was no way I could plug in my external encrypted hard drive and start cloning his systems without him knowing. As soon as I connected the drive, it would run a background script that would start copying everything, allowing me to access it later.

But he was watching me too closely to risk it.

Until, an hour in, he got bored and started poking around through his father’s file cabinets.

I palmed the encrypted drive and slipped it into an open port in the dock behind the monitors. Luckily for me, I knew Severin was utterly useless with computer technology, so he would never notice what I had done. But if any of the Morozovs came in, or anyone else with computer knowledge, they would notice right away.

I sucked in a deep breath and glanced behind me. I closed my eyes at my good luck. Severin was sucked into his task, fiercely examining a file.

I plugged in my drive and then clicked back into my task, hunting down altered records.

My brows knit together because, now that I was looking again, I started to notice it. Modified permissions, altered records, changed ownership structures, created accounts, deleted accounts, and completely reorganized files.

It was a mess, but it wasn’t random. Someone had created it. Someone had hacked into the system and intentionally scrambled things.

Yes, within that scramble were crumbs suggesting people were hiding things, manipulating things, and possibly stealing from the Bratva, but this was organized chaos.

There was definitely a kingpin at the top of this chaos, curating it.

Someone wanted it to be nearly impossible to unravel.

I clicked through more folders, logs, and systems. Then I ran a search. There were seventeen altered files within a single shell company. I clicked into one of them and suddenly got a corruption notice.

It was wiped.

The file was empty.

I refreshed again, and now there were only thirteen files. Four had just been deleted right before my eyes.