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Ghost: Gimme twenty. I’ll seed some fake forum posts. Maybe a blurry photo outside the gym.

Me: You’re the best criminal I know.

Ghost: You need better friends.

I smirked and tossed the phone onto the bed.

This was the kind of thing I was good at. Not punching, not running rackets or shaking people down for money, but bending perception, flipping narratives. I’d spent my entire life manipulating reality with a smile and a camera flash. This was the same thing, just with a darker lens.

And if it made me a few thousand dollars by betting against the house, well…

That was just smart investing.

I sank deeper into my pillows, pulling my knees up, fingers hovering over my keyboard as I flipped back to the page with Nikolai’s name on it. There was no photo, no bio, just a codename:The Hammer.

Figures.

Even his alias sounded like a threat.

My chest tightened for a second, but I ignored it. I didn’t have time for crushes on bloodstained mob gods. I had a scam to run. A bankroll to build. And maybe—maybe—a Russian to ruin.

Or maybe I just wanted to watch him fight again and try not to imagine how it would feel to taste him.

Either way, tomorrow was going to be fun.

CHAPTER 7

Nikolai

Something was off.

I didn’t know what, but it was there, slinking through the undercurrent like rot beneath polished wood.

I was in the office above the gym, leaning back in my chair, feet up on the desk, scrolling through the latest fight card odds on the private books we monitored. We had eyes on four different betting channels—three legit, and one buried behind layers of encryption that screamed backdoor Bratva.

Moretti’s odds were dropping.

Too fast. Too quietly. Too fucking off.

He was still the favorite, but the confidence was slipping.

At first, I thought it was just nerves. Pre-fight chatter. A few big bets shifting things. But this? This wasdirected. Someone was fucking with the narrative. Someone with just enough reach to make it look organic.

That wasn’t random.

It was calculated.

I sat forward, elbows on my knees, eyes locked on the screen.

There was a forum link embedded in one of the lines of code—Ghost code. Posts seeded into conversation threads that hadn’t existed yesterday. Fake injuries. Photos from angles that suggested weakness. I called bullshit.

“Sergei,” I called, already knowing he was standing just outside the office door.

He stepped in, expression unreadable. “What?”

I jerked my chin toward the monitor. “You been watching Moretti’s numbers?”

He nodded. “Thought they were weird. Didn’t say anything yet.”