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ROMAN

“ A porn site?”

I glare around the table, trying to ignore the fact that even the word porn conjures up images of Lucia Lopez, wet and aching under my hand. Three days after our encounter in my office, the slightest thought of her still makes me hard as an iron bar.

I push the dangerous images aside and channel my energy into glaring at the faces around the table in front of me.

“It’s not a big deal,” Pavel says, “just something the kid used to run a test. We’ll make sure he hasn’t left any trace.” My head of software development rattles away on his laptop screen with one hand while turning one of those fidget spinner things in the other. Calling someone else kid is ironic, given that Pavel is only a few years out of his teens himself. He has thick glasses, a dark beard decorated with pizza crumbs of several varieties, and an ever-present giant cup of soda on the table next to him. He spends fifteen hours a day wired into the lab, which is what we call the operations room of our server center, surrounded by acres of blinking lights and low-humming machines that have cost the economy of a small country to set up. He heads up a handpicked army of hackers and tech heads drawn from across the globe.

The tech heads are all brilliant. They also piss me right off.

“Pavel.” I spin his chair around and whip the fidget spinner out of his hand. “Amuse me. What, exactly, is Mercura?”

The man looks around nervously at his fellow geeks, all of whom are busy staring at the ceiling, and pushes his glasses up his nose. Pavel has worked on my flagship concept since he was a teenager. If anyone understands Mercura, it’s him. He just doesn’t understand what I’m trying to get him to say right now.

“Mercura is, um, an untraceable cryptocurrency. Faster than the Flash.” He smiles weakly at whatever comic book reference I’ve just missed.

“Funny, Pavel.” I’m not laughing, and his smile fades. “Why don’t you explain what cryptocurrency is?”

Given that the people sitting at this table virtually invented it, Pavel looks around to see who I expect him to explain it to. When I don’t move, he begins to stammer. “It’s a digital form of currency.”

“Glad you’ve read the manual. And why is Mercura untraceable?”

Pavel swallows. Despite the arctic air conditioning down here, he’s starting to sweat. “Because it can only be used on our platform, and only by invitation. Mercura is designed to be so invisible that no government agency in the world can find or monitor it.”

“Amazing.” I fold my arms. “Does it seem smart to you to test the world’s most secret currency by using it to watch Candy does Cunnilingus on the world’s busiest porn site?”

“No, sir.”

“No shit.” I point a remote to a wall-mounted screen, and up comes the offending video, in which one girl is at work tonguing the swollen pussy of another, in eye-watering detail.

Lucia Lopez, open under my mouth. I’ll have to try that next time.

I catch myself.

Not going to be a next time.

My only consolation is watching Pavel, face bright red, glancing sideways at his tech army, who are all shifting uncomfortably in their seats. I doubt most of them have ever actually seen a naked woman in the flesh. I leave the writhing women onscreen just to add to their discomfort.

“Mercura has been exposed.” I don’t hide my fury, and I take a savage satisfaction in watching the table recoil. “Now we’re facing the risk of it being identified, and traced, before we’ve finished building a digital vault around it. It’s not only a big deal , Pavel. It’s a potential fucking disaster. I want to know if we can still avoid that disaster.”

Pavel clears his throat and launches into a convoluted technical explanation that loses me within seconds. I hold up my hand, pinning him with the death stare I perfected as a teenager in the back alleys of Miami, and which has reduced much harder men than this one to piss-soaked wrecks. “I asked if we can avoid the disaster, Pavel, not how. Yes or no.”

He gulps. “Yes, sir.”

“Then get it done, and fast. I want a full risk analysis on my desk by tomorrow morning.” I glare at him. “The CliffsNotes version, Pavel. Not the entire fucking textbook.”

The geeks might be the ones building Mercura, but none of them truly understand its scope. In fact, I’ve made certain they don’t.

Mercura isn’t just another crypto coin. It’s built for a far darker world, the criminal one that always has, and always will, exist. It’s been built in so much secrecy that most of those working on it don’t even understand exactly what the end goal looks like.

From acquiring the land under which the server is built, to the construction companies who dug out the vast bunker it’s housed in, to the state-of-the-art equipment humming all around us, Mercura has taken thousands of man hours, secret meetings, international visas, and government bribes, not to mention billions of dollars, to develop.

Mercura is the safest, most sophisticated money laundering operation in the world.

And the Stevanovsky bratva will harvest a percentage of every single coin washed through it.

Mercura is our future. It takes us off the streets and into the big game.

It means my three godchildren won’t be lost in a car bomb like their father, or jailed for the rest of their lives like their grandfather.

Mercura is what I owe Yuri Stevanovsky for taking me off the streets and adopting me. It’s what I owe Mikhail, his son, who was my closest friend as well as my adopted brother. After he was jailed, Yuri made Mikhail pakhan . When Mikhail was blown to pieces in a car bomb two years ago, Yuri named me pakhan in his place.

Mercura is our legacy.

At least it will be, if that fucking kid hasn’t already destroyed it.

As if to prove my point, the kid in question walks toward us between the lines of machines, head down. Unlike the rest of the tech kids, who all wear baggy pants and T-shirts, he’s sporting pressed chinos, a button-down shirt, and a neat haircut.

Ambitious, clearly.

He has headphones on, nodding to some beat only he can hear. He’s barely a foot from the op center’s fishbowl window when it penetrates the faulty wiring of his brain that we’re here. It takes another long moment for him to realize that I’m here.

It never ceases to astonish me that people can be so fast on a keyboard and so fucking slow in real life.

“Everyone out onto the floor.”

I don’t want to get blood all over the op center.

The tech kids move out onto the polished concrete floor of the server center with alacrity. I nod at a round table near a vending machine, and they obediently take their seats.

The guilty kid doesn’t bother removing his headphones before he pulls out a chair. I kick it to the wall before his ass even gets close. He stares at it, then up at the porn playing on the op center screen, with a sullen expression.

“Good of you to join us, Leo.”

Pavel glances at me, then scoots his chair out of the line of fire. He knows this isn’t going to go well.

The little prick finally removes his headphones, which are almost bigger than him. “My name is Teo.”

Oh, I’m going to enjoy this.

“Tell me, Leo. What is your job title?”

“System test engineer.” He mutters the title as if it’s beneath him.

“And do you like your job?”

The rat-faced little mudak shrugs. Actually shrugs.

From the corner of my eye I see Dimitry, my second-in-command, move off from where he’s leaning on one of the machines, balancing evenly on his feet.

He knows what’s coming.

The tech heads who have been with me for a while do, too. They go pale and eye the floor nervously.

Headphones doesn’t, though. He slouches against the machine bank, moving from one foot to another as if it’s hard work holding himself upright.

“You look bored, Leo,” I say softly. “Are you bored?”

He tilts his head as if he’s actually considering the question. “I think we should be more aggressive in our testing.” He nods at the screen. “Mercura should be able to slip in and out of sites like this unseen. I thought our job was to test its resilience.”

It takes a certain level of either stupidity or balls to keep bluffing when death is standing in front of you. I almost admire the idiot.

Almost.

I crack my knuckles slowly. “So you decided to get creative with your job, instead of just fucking doing it?”

The kid glances around properly for the first time, taking in the muscle lounging against the walls and the terrified faces of his coworkers, finally beginning to realize that our little gathering doesn’t quite pass the vibe check. He licks his lips nervously.

“Your job is to run the resilience tests we give you.” I get up nice and close, and the kid’s nostrils flare. “Not go ahead and decide what tests need to be run.” He tries to step back, but there are only machines behind him. I get even closer and he steps sideways, standing in the middle of the corridor between machine banks.

That’s better. I’d rather not get blood on the machines.

“You especially don’t get to decide to run a test on a website made by our biggest competitors. One they set up specifically so they could watch every new digital coin that hits the market. But I think you already knew that, Leo, didn’t you?”

There’s an audible gasp from the table behind me, followed by a very tense silence. All of them know, or at least suspect, the price for selling me out.

And the kid definitely isn’t shrugging anymore. His eyes move from side to side as he tries to think up a good story, but it’s way too late for that. It was too late before he ever walked in the room.

“I hope they paid you more than the amount I found in your account.” I pull out my gun slowly and watch his eyes go from defensive to terrified. “Because if not, Leo , your life is worth about as much as those shitty chinos you’re wearing.”

I shoot him straight between the eyes.

He lands just where I planned, away from the machines, although he still manages to spread his brains all over the glass screens covering them. The tech heads hit the floor the moment I fired and are currently cowering under any available surface. Funny how they can all play Call of Duty without batting an eye, but the moment the real thing is in their face, they’re losing their guts all over my lab-clean floors.

“Chill, little dudes.” Dimitry’s calm drawl cuts through the chaos. “None of you have suspicious zeros in your accounts. So long as you keep it that way, you’ll keep your brains, too.” He nudges Leo/Teo’s limp body. “This dickhead lost his long before they wound up on the floor.”

“I-I’m sorry, sir.” Pavel stares at me, stuttering with shock and terror. “I had no idea—”

The others chime in from various positions behind machines and under tables. “I had nothing to do with it—”

“I didn’t know—”

I hold up my hand. “I know you didn’t. Our security team picked it up.”

That gets their collective attention.

I raise my eyebrows. “What?” I say lightly. “Did you lot think you were the only tech heads on my staff? If you think I don’t know every last thing about every one of you, from what you ate for breakfast to the brand of porn you favor, then think again.”

I lean forward on the table, eyeing each of them in turn.

“I pay you fucking well. And you all own a piece of Mercura, so you’ll be paid even more when we launch. I like ideas, and I love ambition. I encourage both, and I reward them. I also don’t mind if you want to leave because it isn’t for you. Sign your NDA and go, and good luck to you.

“But take a good long look at your buddy there on the floor, and hardwire it into your brain. Because that’s what happens if you ever betray me.”

I let them all take a long look, and I let the silence draw out for a while. Sometimes, demonstrations are necessary.

None of them will be selling information anytime soon.

I nod at two of my men by the machines. “Get this cleaned up. Pavel, your team can get back to work, but I need a word with you.”

Pavel goes from pale to green. I know he thinks he’s next. I let him sweat a little before I take him into his own office. “We’re only months away from launch, Pavel. You’ve been on this from the start, so you know what it’s taken to get to where we are.”

He nods vigorously.

“Hale Property was purposely built to mask Mercura. It’s taken close on six years to convince the authorities the Stevanovsky bratva are now a legitimate realty corporation, especially after its former CEO went up in a car bomb two years ago.”

Pavel winces. He liked Mikhail. Everyone did. Mikhail was the front man, the smiling CEO who made the front page of GQ when Hale made its first billion. I was the dark muscle behind that billion, and happy to stay in the background. Mikhail and I were a team, closer than any brothers could be. He killed at press conferences; I killed anyone who got in our way. I tried to argue with Yuri when he made me pakhan in his son’s place. I never asked for the spotlight, and I still hate the bullshit that goes with it. But the truth is that Mercura was always mine, just as Hale was, even if it was Mikhail who pressed the flesh.

After the initial grief of losing my adopted brother, followed by the ruthless bloodletting when I murdered every single one of the bastards responsible for leaving three children without their father, I’ve found that I don’t mind leading.

But in moments like this , I think grimly, looking at Pavel’s terrified face, I could do with Mikhail’s charm.

“If the authorities discover we’re developing an invisible currency, it’s not just me who’s fucked. It’s also fifteen-year-old Ofelia, fourteen-year-old Mickey, and five-year-old Masha. You’ve met Mikhail’s children, Pavel. Mercura is Mikhail’s legacy, and his children’s future. I need to know you’re going to help me keep it safe.”

“Yes, boss.” The color is back in Pavel’s face, along with the determination that made me hire him in the first place. “I dropped the ball.” He sounds almost as pissed off as I was when I discovered Teo’s betrayal. “It won’t happen again.”

I grip his shoulder firmly. “I know it won’t.”

It better not.

“Are we putting bullets in the people who paid that kid?” Dimitry glances sideways at me as we walk away from the gleaming software development facility we built to conceal what we’re actually doing in the server room lab below it. There are real software experts in the facility, doing real work—including the security team who discovered Teo’s little side hustle of selling information.

“No.” I shake my head. “Despite what I said back there, the breach is already plugged, hopefully with no harm done. A body trail will only make them think there’s something to hide.”

“Damn.” Dimitry grins. “We’re so woke these days, brother.”

I roll my eyes. “Tell me about it.”

“Not to mention getting a bit of a hipster vibe happening.”

“What are you talking about?” We get in the back seat, and the driver points the car down the winding road toward Malaga.

“Apparently a brand-new coffee machine just arrived at your office.” He shoots me a sly smile. “Something wrong with what the lovely Miss Lopez has been serving up?”

I give him the same glare I treated Pavel to earlier. Unfortunately, Dimitry has been watching me pin men with that stare since we were prepubescent kids, so it has rather less impact.

“Dimitry?”

“Yes, boss?”

“Fuck off.”

He shuts it, but he remains grinning the entire way back to Malaga. I toy with the idea of taking him to the boxing ring and reminding him of exactly how woke I am not, but I don’t have time. I don’t have time for anything—and particularly not for the unholy distraction that is Miss Lucia Lopez.

I rub a hand over my face and stare out the window. Hearing Dimitry mention her by name annoys me. The fact that he’s noticed her at all annoys me, particularly long enough to call her lovely. It’s the wrong word for her, anyway.

Snarky? Yes.

Feisty? Definitely.

Tempting, intriguing, and insanely sexy? Tick.

Fucking dangerous?

Absolutely.

Watching her delicious curves in that ridiculous uniform sashay up to serve my coffee, not to mention the daily battle to make her blush, has become the hottest ten minutes of my day. The smoky sideways glance of topaz eyes as she decides what insult to hit me with. Scraping her teeth over that absurdly full lower lip as she thinks of a comeback, a habit I’m almost certain she’s unaware of. Watching her shorts ride up that delectable ass when she bends down to the fridge. She might have ordered in Russian water just to score a point in our game, but I hit the jackpot every day when she has to bend over and get a bottle of it out of the fridge. I’ve been fighting the urge to bend her lush, tantalizing curves over any available surface for months. And now that I’ve had my hands all over her, my dick is obsessed with finishing the job.

Multiple times. On every available surface.

I need to get under some model ASAP.

I don’t do relationships. I do mutually beneficial situations that satisfy my cock and leave my head alone. I don’t date, and I certainly don’t take advantage of those less fortunate than myself. I know how it feels to be the person washing dishes out back or serving coffee to rich pricks who don’t remember your name. It’s the reason I tip properly, and the reason I felt like a class A bastard after I handed Miss Lopez her ass for a mistake that wasn’t hers.

Then she’d run from my office without a word—and without taking the tip.

If she’d just taken the goddamn envelope, I could have walked away with a clear conscience , I tell myself, even though the way my cock throbs at the mere memory of her bending over my desk makes a total liar out of me. And after implying that she’d spent the night rolling around in some man’s bed , as she put it, sending an envelope full of money over to the café with my assistant would definitely send the wrong message.

Not that it matters, if I’m never seeing her again. And it’s none of my business if, or indeed who, Lucia Lopez is, now or at any point in the future, rolling around in a bed with.

I grind my teeth.

Keep telling yourself that.

I’m a possessive prick, always have been. I keep what belongs to me close. Safe. I don’t allow anyone to take what is mine.

The thought of some other man putting his hands anywhere near the sweet curve of Lucia’s ass, or the bee-stung lips my dick has some seriously filthy ideas about, kicks something primal inside me into gear. Which is the only excuse I have, poor as it is, for almost losing myself entirely with her the other day in my office. It took every ounce of self-control I possess not to tear her shorts off and get balls deep inside her hot, wet, and insanely tight pussy.

Pizdozh.

Not a chance my hard-on is going down after that thought.

But Lucia Lopez isn’t mine. Even if I wanted to change that, there’s no room for her in the clusterfuck that is my personal life.

As if in confirmation, my phone lights up with a call from nanny agency be nice . I grind my teeth even harder.

“Mrs. Laidlaw,” I say as politely as I can manage, glaring at Dimitry, who is smirking in the passenger seat. “What an unexpected pleasure.” I put the call on speakerphone. If I have to listen to this bullshit, Dimitry can fucking well suffer with me.

“I’m not calling with good news, I’m afraid.”

When do you ever?

I stifle the retort with an effort. “What seems to be the problem?”

“I’m sorry to inform you,” Mrs. Laidlaw begins, in a tone that suggests she isn’t sorry at all, “that Stefania has terminated her employment as your children’s nanny.”

“What?” Aghast, I grip the phone hard enough that I’m going to need a new one. “The Holy Week school holidays are coming up. The children will be off school for at least a week—”

“And perhaps you should have considered that.”

Mrs. Laidlaw launches into a tirade of complaints, the broad thrust of which are that my godchildren are the spawn of the devil, and that I am Satan himself.

I tune her out and stare through the windshield at the city lights, trying to work out what the fuck to do about this particular disaster.

We’re almost at the Hale offices, and Lucia’s café is coming up on my left. She wasn’t lying about her hours. Since our encounter I’ve been discreetly watching Lucia Lopez. She works more hours than even I do.

What I don’t understand is why.

What drives a beautiful young woman to work every available hour in a job she’s clearly far too intelligent for?

It’s just one of the mysteries about Lucia Lopez I’d very much like to solve.

Preferably while she’s naked and impaled on my cock.

Christ.

I drag my thoughts back to the problem at hand with no small effort.

“Mrs. Laidlaw.” I start again, this time in the icy tone that has reduced countless criminals to shaking wrecks. “Stefania was contracted to stay for the next school term and the entire summer holidays. Your agency has been paid a three-month advance. All the security checks have been completed. And now you tell me that after less than a week, she’s quit? What, exactly, do you expect me to do on such short notice?”

“Cope, Mr. Stevanovsky,” she says, in a tone even more arctic than my own. “People do, you know. You could try spending more time at home, perhaps.”

I stare at the phone in astonishment. Across the car, Dimitry is shaking with silent laughter. I send him a death stare, which only makes him laugh harder.

“If you are unable to fulfill my requirements,” I say coldly in an attempt to regain ascendancy, “then perhaps your agency doesn’t deserve its reputation.”

“And if you insist on completely ignoring your three children, not to mention setting impossible standards for their nanny,” snaps back the haughty English voice through my car speakers, “then I suggest you find yourself a new agency. Although given that you’ve gone through five in as many months, Mr. Stevanovsky, I don’t like your chances. Good day—and good luck.”

The line turns into a series of long beeps.

“I think,” Dimitry says, barely containing his laughter, “that the good Mrs. Laidlaw hung up on you.”