Scamming the Devil

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

IRINA VOLKOV (cont'd)

The elevator opened into the penthouse. He carried me down the hall, pushed open my bedroom door with one hand, and set me down — not roughly, which somehow made it worse — on the edge of the bed.

He straightened. Looked at me.

The blood had tracked a thin line from his temple to his chin. He didn't touch it.

"Stay," he said.

"You're not my owner."

"No." He held my gaze for a long moment. "But I'm the only thing standing between you and a city that will kill you. Remember that."

He left. I heard him stop just outside it. Heard him say something quiet to whoever was stationed down the hall.

I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

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NIKOLAI DRAGUNOV

The first bottle shattered.

Then the second. Third. Fourth. I worked through all six without stopping, the shots clean and precise even through the anger, because anger had never once affected my aim and I wasn't about to let it start now.

I set the gun down. An enforcer stepped forward to reload it without being asked. I touched the bandaged side of my head and said something in Russian that made the man take a careful step back.

Irina Volkov.

The image of her refused to leave. Her back against the wall, wrists pinned above her head, that furious face tilted up at me — not afraid, not performing, just genuinely, incandescently angry. She'd grabbed a vase and hit me with it without hesitating. No warning, no calculation. Pure instinct.

I'd felt it before I'd registered she'd moved.

She will keep hurting you until you let her go, she'd said. And she'd meant every word.

Good.

I didn't examine why I thought that. I picked up the gun again and shot the last bottle off the shelf.

"That woman is dangerous, Kolya Dmitri's voice came from my left, unhurried. He raised his own weapon and put two shots through the throat of the wooden target at the range's far end. Clean. Efficient. "She won't hesitate to kill you if she gets a real opportunity. You know that." He lowered the gun and looked at me directly. "Let her go.”

I know Dmitri. Concern written all over his face but tries to cover it with that cold hard expression.

Dmitri has been by my side since 14. Our fathers were close friends in the bratva and killed same day when were 19. Kozlov—Dmitri’s father, has always been in support of my dad mostly than his own second in command who turned out to betray my father. Just as my father trusted Kozlov completely, he did the same to Mikhail but ended up getting stabbed in the back.

I had vowed to not let what happened go away just like that. Mikhail didn’t work alone, even if he's dead which makes it less difficult, he had some backing and I plan to find out who ordered my father and Kozlov’s death.

"No."

"You've said that twelve times in the last three days."

"And I'll say it twelve more." I moved to the chair beside Roman, who had been watching the entire exchange with that particular expression he wore when he was enjoying himself and trying not to show it. He wasn't succeeding. "Stop smiling."

"I'm not smiling," Roman said, smiling.

Dmitri set his weapon on the table and turned to face us, arms folded. He had that look — the one that meant he'd been thinking for a while and had decided I needed to hear it whether I wanted to or not.

"I did some digging on her."

I looked at him. "I didn't ask you to."

"You didn't need to. She's inside this compound, Nikolai. That's my business." He held my gaze evenly. "You want to hear it or not?"

A pause. "Talk."

"Con artist, yes. Social engineering, identity construction, manipulation — you know all that. What you don't know is that the love scams are a front layer. Underneath it, she has serious hacking capability. She just doesn't use it often."

Roman sat up slightly. "How serious?"

"Serious enough." Dmitri pulled out his phone and read from notes. "Three documented instances. First — she broke into the American banking system. Not a local branch. The central infrastructure. She manipulated account records for her friend Katya, who was in a dispute with the bank, and locked their internal system for three hours while she worked. Their own IT team couldn't regain access until she was finished and let them back in."

The room was quiet for a moment.

"Second — a woman came to her with a blackmail situation. A man had intimate photographs and was using them as leverage. Irina got into his phone remotely, deleted every file, changed every password, and bricked the device permanently. The man woke up to a paperweight." Dmitri looked up. "She did it in under an hour."

"And the third?" I asked.

Dmitri's expression shifted slightly — something between impressed and cautious. "Six months ago, someone was feeding false financial information to Interpol about a mid-level arms dealer. Planted evidence, fabricated transactions, the kind of digital paper trail that takes a team months to construct. Interpol acted on it. The dealer was arrested, his entire network dismantled." He paused. "The dealer had been running trafficking operations through three Eastern European cities. The women he'd been moving — the case that brought him down freed forty-one of them."

Silence.

"She did that alone?" Roman asked quietly. The humor had left his voice entirely.

"Alone. No payment. No one asked her to." Dmitri put his phone away. "She found out about it, built the case, and handed it to Interpol anonymously. Then went back to her apartment and kept running romance scams to pay off a debt that wasn't hers."

I said nothing for a long moment.

The woman who looked like she needed saving. Who used that illusion as a weapon. Who had forty-one women's freedom somewhere in her ledger that she'd never told a single person about.

What are you, Irina Volkov.

"She's more dangerous than you're treating her," Dmitri said. "Not because she'll hurt you. Because she's genuinely capable and genuinely unpredictable and you're keeping her in a cage that someone with her skills will eventually find a way out of." He met my eyes. "I'm not saying let her go for her sake. I'm saying it for ours."

"She stays," I said. Final. Done.

Dmitri exhaled slowly and said something under his breath that I chose not to hear.

My phone rang.

I looked at the screen. One of my outer surveillance team. I picked up. "Yes."

The voice on the other end spoke for approximately twenty seconds.

"Where is he now?" A pause. "Don't let him move. Watch every contact he makes." I ended the call.

Roman was already reading my face. "What happened?"

"Viktor Volkov." I set my phone on the table. "He knows Irina is here. He's been making calls — to Alexei Morozov's people specifically. He's been talking for at least forty-eight hours."

The room went still in a different way than before.

"Nikolai." Dmitri's voice was careful. Measured. "If Viktor has been in contact with Morozov for two days, then Morozov already knows everything Viktor knows. Which means—"

"Which means this stopped being about a con artist and a debt the moment she walked through my door." I stood. "Morozov didn't start paying attention to Irina because of her skills. He started paying attention because of me. Because she's here." I looked at Dmitri. "Viktor sold his daughter to a rival Bratva boss to get himself out of trouble. And he's been doing it for two days while we were watching the wrong direction."

Roman had gone very still. "Does Irina know?"

"No."

"Are you going to tell her?"

I looked at the door. Thought about her on the other side of this building, in that room, staring at a ceiling and planning her next escape attempt.

"Not tonight," I said.

"Nikolai—"

"She just watched me torture a man. She tried to run. She hit me with a vase." I picked up my gun. "Give her one night. Tomorrow she finds out that the man who made her life a nightmare just made it significantly worse." I chambered a round. "Tonight I need to know everything Morozov's people have already been told."

Dmitri watched me for a moment. Then nodded once, reached for his own phone, and started making calls.

Roman sat in his chair and said nothing. For once in his life, he had nothing to add.

That, more than anything, told me how serious this was.