Page 111 of Kept in the Dark

She pales.

“You said you got a job at St. Luke’s, right?” James continues. “That’sBratvaterritory. On any night, you were probably treating overdoses, gunshot victims, trafficked women… all part of Volkevich’s legacy. That money is how they stay in business. Right now, they’re cut off, and they can’t make payments to their suppliers. It’ll run them into the ground and get ‘em all killed, eventually. But if you give them that USB back, they’ll pick right back up where they left off.”

She winces and her shoulders round under the weight of the knowledge. “Okay, so we’re definitely not giving it back. But it’s evidence… not to be the one that suggests involving the authorities again, but they’re already up my ass anyway, right? Can we just turn it in?”

I stroke my thumb down her arm. “The gears of the machine of bureaucracy move slowly, and there are no guarantees the evidence would be admissible, or that it could be linked back to Volkevich.”

“Building a case against organized crime is no simple task, and bitcoin is secure against identification—it’s why they use it,” Wesley adds.

“But their leader is dead. He was the one with the passwords and everything, right?”

“Da, Viktor is dead, but there are many more beneath him, and they will spend the rest of their lives looking for this money. Remember how I said Volkevich has men in the police department? They would use those men and whatever resources they had left to track us down and kill us in retribution for stealing everything from them.”

I can see the vein in her neck thrumming as her heart jumps, picking up in rhythm. “So, we can’t give it back. We can’t turn it in. We’re not going to use it ourselves for the same reason—they’d know a transaction had occurred, and the money was gone, right? We’re not going to give it away because we’d make a target out of anyone who received it.”

She looks to me for confirmation, and I nod.

“So… what do we do?”

I cannot take that look in her eyes, so I pull her in. She is rigid against me, but melts a little at the reassuring kiss on her temple. “James and Wesley and I still need to discuss. We will figure it out, trust me.”

She blows out a breath, shaking both of us with the motion. After a second in my embrace, tight and meant to calm, she nods. “Okay. I… um… I’ll leave you to it, then.”

Instead of letting her turn away, I place my palm on the side of her neck and tilt her head up towards me. “I will always keep you safe,” I remind her, leaning forward to brush my lips against hers.

“I know,” she whispers back, offering a weak smile before stepping away and disappearing out of the study.

“She’s freaking out, D,” James observes, staring at the closed door.

“Da. I will need to calm her, I think. I would prefer to do this with a valid plan. We need to eliminate the rest of the Volkevich clan and draw Kyle out of hiding.”

Wesley chuckles, lacing his fingers across his abdomen and sitting back in his office chair. “Well… we’ve got the entire Volkevich fortune at our fingertips, so I’m thinking the plan kind of writes itself on this one.”

35

Nicole

Too rigid to bend, he’d break instead

I move to the pool house like I’m in a trance, going through the motions of putting on workout clothes for lack of anything better to do. I guess a workout would help ground me, and I desperately need that right now because I feel like a light breeze would knock me over.

Hundreds of millions of dollars.

That’s so much money. It’s too much money. It’s frankly a stupid amount of money.

It doesn’t feel real. And maybe it’s not, in the tangible sense of the word, but neither is money in a bank by that reasoning. It terrifies me. The guys were pretty blasé about it, so I’m guessing it’s not as big a sum of money to someone in their world as it is to me, but that’s… hitting the lottery. It’s being set up for the rest of the lives of everyone in your family. It’s never worrying about anything again.

It’s money to kill for—tobekilled for.

I had a dozen guesses about what was on that flash drive, and money was one of them. But I’m not really sure where this leaves us. As long as we have it, or someone thinks I do, I’ll always be a target.

I will always keep you safe.

He’s said it before, and he said it again last night. At the time, it left me breathless with a delirious kind of happiness because the sincerity in that promise is so deep, I can’t touch the bottom. But in the light of day, it just feels daunting.

In his world, safety often comes at the cost of another life. In this case… every Volkevich out there? Viktor is one thing, and I’m sure he’s got guys in his inner circle who are just as bad, but where does it end? What about their families? What if innocents die, caught in the crossfire? What if Dimitri can’t get to everyone?

He’ll take care of me; I know that much. He’s told me over and over that he will.