Page 114 of Devious Corruption

“You don’t.” I square off with him. “Other than my word.”

Levon looks down at his father, and then at their soldier still bleeding on the floor. “We need assurances. When we pull out of our deal with Tony, there may be blowback.”

I nod. “Especially if he’s using you to overthrow his brother. What do you need from us?”

“If there is retaliation, you and the Volkovs will stand with us.”

“Of course. If we are to be in business together, it doesn’t do me any good to have you all dead.” It won’t take more than a phone call to get Alexander to agree.With this deal, we’ll be hurting the DeAngelos, and at the moment, that’s his favorite thing.

“All right.” Levon nudges his father, who also gets to his feet.

“Then we have a deal. We can discuss the numbers later.” Vartan puts out his hand, and I take it.

“Good. And you agree, the twins are not to be touched.”

“Those boys betrayed us. I can’t allow that to go unchecked.” Levon’s jaw tightens.

“It won’t. We can discuss their future when we go over the numbers. Until then, they stay alive and unharmed.”

Vartan exchanges a look with his son. “Agreed.”

It’s going to cost me in this deal. But if I have to give up a few more percentage points in profit to keep Maxine from having to mourn her dead brothers, then it will be a loss worth taking.

“Now.” Vartan claps his hands together. “I have information for you about Tony and the Volkov girl.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Sit. I’ll explain.”

I’m sitting on the floor of the stock room with the six new boxes of books that arrived this morning. I’m ignoring them for the moment, focusing instead on the credit report I’ve pulled up for myself on my phone.

Lev was right. There’s a credit card and personal loan on this report that I didn’t open. The balance is over fifteen thousand.

I’m trying to digest this information when Serafina pops her head in.

“Whoa, all that has to go out on the floor?” Her eyes go wide.

“Yes.” I sigh, looking around at the stock. “Your uncle ordered more inventory for thereligion section.”

“Religion? But we barely sell anything from that section.” She frowns. “That man has no idea what he’s doing around here. He’s lucky you’re saving his ass.”

I smile, taking a little joy in her compliment.

“We can make it work. We’ll have to go through what’s there already and thin out what’s not selling. We can probably get most of the money back with the return to the publishers, but a lot of that stock your uncle bought through distributors and not the publishing houses. Which means we’ll take a small hit. But I guess we could look into selling them to a discount store, or one of those used bookstores. Compare the money we could get, then decide.”

Serafina’s grinning by the time I’m finished thinking out loud.

“What?” I run my hand over my cheek. “Do I have chocolate on my face?”

I’ve been indulging in the homemade fudge she’d brought in this morning.

She laughs. “No. I was thinking, you know a hell of a lot more about all this than my uncle does. It’s good to see someone actually care about this place making money.”

“Well, if it makes money, maybe he’ll pay us more.”

“Yeah, I doubt that.” Her smile falls. “But anyway, I came back here because there’s two guys up front asking about you.”

“Two guys?” I place the inventory list on top of a box and push up to my feet. “Is Dmitri up there?”