Scamming the Devil

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

IRINA VOLKOV

The enforcer was gone by morning.

I didn't ask what happened to him. I didn't want to know the specifics — whether Nikolai had simply reassigned him or whether the man had been taken to that cold corridor in the basement and introduced to the cheese grater.

Oops!

Either way, the east hallway felt different when I walked through it after breakfast. Cleaner, somehow. Like a window had been opened.

I noticed, and hated that I noticed, that Nikolai had acted on one sentence from me. No questions. No demanding I explain myself or prove what I'd seen. Just — gone.

I filed it under things I am not going to think about and went to work.

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Dmitri was already in the intelligence room when I arrived, two monitors running, a coffee going cold at his elbow in the way of someone who had forgotten it existed. He looked up when I came in, assessed me the way he always did. Quickly, thoroughly, without expression and looked back at his screen.

Hmm.

"The financial leak from last quarter," he said, by way of greeting. "Secondary routing. I can't find where it terminates."

I sat down, pulled the secondary monitor toward me, and looked at what he had.

This was how it worked between us now. No warmth exactly, but a functional respect that had developed in the specific way respect develops between two people who are both very good at the same thing — carefully, without either of them acknowledging it directly. Dmitri had been skeptical of me from the beginning. He was still skeptical. But he handed me problems he couldn't solve, which was its own kind of language.

I found the secondary routing terminus in forty minutes. A shell account nested inside a legitimate import business — patient work, the kind that took months to construct. Whoever built it knew what they were doing.

I flagged it, documented the trail, and slid the notes across to Dmitri without comment.

He read them. Read them again. Set the paper down.

"How long have you been doing this?" he asked, genuinely curious.

"Since I was fourteen."

He nodded slowly, like he was revising something internally. "The shell account has a secondary owner. Ghost identity. Well constructed. Better than standard."

"I know." I pulled the monitor back. "Give me an hour."

He gave me forty-five minutes, then put a fresh coffee at my elbow without saying anything. I drank it without saying anything either.

By the time I'd finished, I had a name. Not the ghost identity. It was the person behind it. A mid-level logistics coordinator who had been inside Nikolai's operation for three years, unremarkable enough to be invisible, patient enough to wait for the right moment.

The same person, I realized as I cross-referenced the access logs, who had been feeding information outward for at least four months.

The mole wasn't new. The mole had been there long before I arrived.

I sat back and looked at what I had.

Then I thought about the timing. Four months of leaks. Viktor finding out I was here within days of my arrival. Alexei's message arriving almost immediately after.

The mole hadn't just been skimming money. They'd been reporting on personnel. On me.

God dammit.

"Dmitri," I said.

He looked up.

I turned the monitor so he could see the access log timeline. Watched his face as he read it. Watched the moment he got to the same conclusion I had.

His jaw tightened. "When did you—"

"Ten minutes ago." I kept my voice even. "Nikolai needs to know today. Not this evening. Today."

Dmitri was already reaching for his phone.

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Nikolai received the information with the stillness of someone who had been expecting bad news and had prepared a specific internal container for it. He read through my documentation without speaking, his face giving nothing away, his eyes moving through the evidence with that focused precision that I had come to recognize as his version of anger — cold and methodical rather than loud.

He set the papers down.

"You're certain," he said.

"The digital trail is clean. I documented every step. Someone with better skills than me could verify it independently and reach the same conclusion." I paused. "Which I'd recommend, actually. You shouldn't take my word alone on something this significant."

He looked at me then — a look I couldn't fully read, something between assessment and something warmer that I deliberately didn't examine.

"I'll have it verified," he said. "But I'm not doubting your work."

Whatever. If you say so. I wanted to say but instead, I nodded and stood to leave.

"Irina." He was still looking at the papers. "The ball is in four days. You'll need a dress."

The subject change was so abrupt I almost smiled. "I assumed you'd have one delivered. Like everything else."

"I thought you might prefer to choose your own." He looked up. "Roman can take you. With appropriate security."

I stared at him. "You're letting me leave the compound."

"With Roman and four men, yes."

Okay, hold on a minute—second.

"That's—" I stopped. Started again. "Why?"

He held my gaze steadily. "Because you identified our internal leak in forty-eight hours and didn't gloat about it. Because you flagged the enforcer with one sentence and didn't ask me what I'd done about it. Because you just told me to verify your own work independently rather than asking me to simply trust you." A pause. "You've been earning things, Irina. I'm not oblivious to that."

The silence that followed was strange. Full of something I didn't have a name for.

"Fine," I said. "Tell Roman I'm not spending more than two hours."

The corner of his mouth moved. "He'll spend three."

He was right. Roman spent three hours and fifteen minutes and bought himself a new jacket while he was at it.

.

.

The dress was deep green. My choice, not Roman's. He'd pushed for something gold and dramatic that would have announced me from across the room, which was the last thing I wanted.

Green was quieter. Elegant without performing elegance. The kind of dress that made people look twice without being able to explain why.

I stood in front of the mirror on Friday evening and looked at the woman looking back at me and tried to remember the last time I'd gotten dressed for something that wasn't a con.

I couldn't.

This is a con, I reminded myself. Different mark. Same performance.

Except I wasn't sure that was true anymore, which was its own problem.

A knock at the door. Roman, presumably, because Nikolai didn't knock the way Roman knocked. Roman knocked like he was genuinely excited about whatever was on the other side of the door.

"Come in."

It was Nikolai.

He stopped when he saw me. Just for a moment — half a second, the length of a breath — and something moved across his face before he reassembled his expression into its usual composed neutrality. But I saw it. I catalogued it the way I catalogued everything about him now, automatically, without deciding to.

He was in a black suit that fit the way his suits always fit. Like it had been made for the specific purpose of making him look like the most dangerous person in any room. The white shirt beneath it was open two buttons at the collar. No tie.

Gosh!

"You look—" he started.

"Don't." I turned back to the mirror and picked up the small clutch from the dresser. "Whatever you were going to say."

"Prepared," he finished. A pause. "I was going to say you look prepared."

I glanced at him in the mirror. The corner of his mouth was doing that thing.

"Sure you were," I said.

Let the party begins.