Scamming the Devil

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

IRINA VOLKOV

Three days after I made the proposal, Nikolai said yes.

Not warmly. Not with any ceremony. He slid a single sheet of paper across his desk — formal, typed, outlining terms — and watched me read it with that particular stillness of his, like he was storing everything he observed for later use.

The terms were reasonable. Surprisingly reasonable. Bratva intelligence work — hacking, social engineering, identity construction. A salary. Freedom of movement within the compound. No uniform, no oath, no pretense that I was anything other than what I was.

Okay, good enough.

I read to the bottom and looked up. "What happens when I want to leave? Permanently."

"That's a conversation for later."

I held his gaze for three seconds. Then I signed.

Ughh! Wicked man.

I told myself it was strategy. A longer leash was still movement. Movement meant opportunity. And working inside the operation meant access — to information, to systems, to the shape of things I hadn't been able to see from a locked bedroom.

I told myself that. Mostly I believed it.

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My first assignment came within twenty-four hours.

A mole inside Nikolai's financial operation — someone had been skimming, carefully and consistently, from the organization's accounts. Dmitri had been working the problem for weeks. He briefed me with the particular wariness of a man who had decided to be professional about something he personally objected to, which I respected more than false warmth would have been.

Yeah.

I found the mole in forty-eight hours.

A low-level accountant. He'd been careful — rotating the amounts, spacing the transactions, using three different routing layers. Good technique. Not good enough. I'd seen the pattern before, in a different context, and I knew what to look for in the architecture of it.

I flagged it, documented the trail, and handed it to Dmitri without commentary.

When Nikolai's men came for the accountant, I was across the room reviewing the next file. I didn't look up. But I felt Nikolai watching me from the doorway — that particular quality of attention he had, the kind that felt like pressure without being threatening.

I filed it away and kept working.

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The living room was empty when I came downstairs that evening, which meant I could exist in it without performing anything. I grabbed coffee and the last of the samosas from the kitchen, found the remote, and settled into the corner of the largest sofa with the comfortable deliberateness of someone who had decided to take up space.

I'd earned it. Forty-eight hours of work. I was allowed a sofa.

Haha, so funny. Or not.

Nikolai appeared from the hallway twenty minutes later. Shirt open to the third button, jacket gone, the ink at his collar just visible. He stopped when he saw me, took in the scene — the television, the samosa, my feet tucked under me — and something in his expression shifted in a way I didn't examine.

"No complaints tonight?" he said.

"I'm choosing my battles. Escaping is impossible. What, are you complaining?" I didn't look away from the screen. "Are you going to stand there, or—"

He sat. Not across from me. On the same sofa, close enough that I was aware of him in the way you're always aware of something large and unpredictable sharing your space.

I took a samosa and didn't comment.

He reached over — not toward me, just leaning forward — and his eyes dropped to my wrist.

I felt it before I understood what he was looking at. The sleeve had ridden up. The scar was visible — old and pale now, a long thin line that Viktor's ring had left when I was seventeen and too slow to move out of the way.

I reached to pull my sleeve down.

His hand closed around my wrist first. Gently. Not restraining — just still. He didn't say anything. Didn't ask. Just held my wrist in his hand and looked at the scar with an expression I couldn't name and didn't want to try.

The memories came without permission. The way they always did when something touched that part of my arm — Viktor's voice, the specific sound of a door slamming, the particular quality of fear that lives in the body long after the mind has tried to reason it away. I had survived it. I had built an entire life on the other side of it. I was not that girl anymore.

I yanked my wrist back. He let go immediately.

I stood, set down the coffee, and walked back to my room without explaining myself, because I didn't owe him an explanation and I wouldn't have been able to keep my voice steady if I'd tried to give one.

He didn't follow.

I was grateful for that.

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I cried in the shower. Properly, fully, the kind of crying I hadn't let myself do in years because it felt like losing ground — like admitting that Viktor still had reach, that the debt wasn't only financial, that some things couldn't be paid off and disappeared.

I stayed under the water until it ran cold. Then I dried my face, sat on the edge of the bed, and breathed until my chest stopped hurting.

You survived him. You're still surviving.

Keep going, Irina Volkov.

.

.

By midmorning I was back in the kitchen, coffee in progress, feeling mostly human again.

I heard heels on the marble before I turned around.

She was beautiful in the precise, deliberate way of someone who understood beauty as a tool — dark hair, immaculate presentation, the kind of poise that came from years of knowing exactly what effect you had when you entered a room. She stopped in the kitchen doorway and looked at me the way people look at something that shouldn't be where it is.

I looked back and waited.

"Who are you?" Her voice was controlled, with an edge underneath it. "What are you doing in Nikolai's house?"

The hell?

"Who are you to ask?"

That landed. Hehe.

She composed herself, smoothed her expression, and lifted her chin. "Mila Sorokina. I'm Nikolai's—" a pause, the pause of someone choosing a word carefully— "his closest companion. For nearly eight months."

Closest companion. Hmm. Indeed.

The carefully chosen phrasing of someone whose actual title was less impressive than she wanted it to be.

"His guest," I said, and turned back to the coffee.

"Nikolai doesn't have guests." She moved closer, and I could feel the territorial energy radiating off her. "He doesn't bring women here. He doesn't keep women here. Whatever you've told him—"

"I haven't told him anything." I kept my voice flat, uninterested. "He made his own decisions. As adults generally do."

"He's mine—"

"You've been sleeping together for eight months and you're describing yourself as his closest companion." I picked up my cup. "That's not mine, Mila. That's convenient." I smiled without warmth. "You should probably know the difference before you come into someone's kitchen and start marking territory."

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Her face went red in a way that was almost satisfying.

I walked past her without another word.

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When Nikolai returned that afternoon I told him, flat and unbothered, that he'd had a visitor and that it had been mildly unpleasant.

He listened. Said nothing.

That evening, from my room, I heard him on the phone in his study. One-sided, quiet, brief. When it was over I heard him tell security something in Russian.

Roman appeared in my doorway twenty minutes later, leaning against the frame with his hands in his pockets. "For what it's worth," he said, "that's never happened before."

"What hasn't?"

"Him making that call." He shrugged, studying me with those bright, too-perceptive eyes. "Eight months, and one conversation with you was enough." He pushed off the frame. "Sleep well, Irina."

He left before I could answer.

I sat with that information for longer than I intended. Turned it over. Looked at it from different angles the way I looked at everything — for the angle, the catch, the thing underneath.

I couldn't find one. Which was its own kind of problem.

I filed it away and went to sleep.