Page 50 of The Bratva’s Monster

I roll my eyes. “Come on, Alex.”

“Okay, fine. It didn’t come from you. It came from her husband. He told her or had something written down that she’s read, whatever. But she’s been feeding that information the Irkutsks and I’m not about to let her destroy in a few weeks what it took our family years to build up.” He gets in my face, daring me to strike out against him.

“Orders have changed,” he says. “Take her out, Rikki. I want her gone.”

“Alex, we don’t know⁠—”

“I don’t care,” he says. “You do understand what I’m saying to you, right? I want her dead, Rikki. And I want it done yesterday. No more games.”

He steps away from me, slowly, his face still twisted into a scowl. “We already lost our closest brother. Gedeon was like blood to us. Our father cared for him just like he was one of his own sons. And the Irkutsks took that away from us. And they are still taking. It has to stop. You will make it stop.”

I have to clench my jaw to keep from challenging him, but all I can think to say is Or what? Will I be next? Who do you think will be able to take me, Alex?

I’m not going there with him, however. It’s not my place to question an order and it’s certainly not a question that I want to know the answer to.

“Do you hear me now, Rikki?” he asks me.

“Loud and clear,” I say.

“Good. Call me once it’s done.”

He pushes past me and walks out without another word. I listen for his footsteps as they recede, then the door closing on his way out.

The kill order has been made and my brother expects me to follow through with it as any Pakhan ordering his enforcer would. Disobeying him means my head’s on the chopping block.

I walk into my bedroom and grab my phone from the nightstand, turn it back on. It lights up almost immediately with several missed calls from Alex…

And a text from Liz. It says simply, Come over. I think I found something.

I hope you have, Liz. I genuinely hope you have.

20

LIZ

The one place I haven’t had the chance to look was his computer. I guess because Gedeon barely used it. He used to complain that it was just an expensive paperweight for all intents and purposes. I guess that’s why he wrote everything down on paper, storing it all away in these filing cabinets.

I spent a good chunk of time cleaning up the mess that those bastards left for me. They took papers out of the filing cabinets and tossed them out onto the floor and in the wastebasket. Some of them have been left torn, crumpled, or stepped on. And while, all things considered, I’m glad that Marius and his people didn’t touch this room in their grand clean up, it was still hours before I saw the floor.

But everything’s been picked up and instead of putting it all back in the filing cabinets, I decided to arrange everything back in their neat little piles, separating the items by whatever dates were on them. From there I got the wild idea to try putting them all in an excel document so that I could at least build a chart showing how much money he won and lost over the years.

I don’t know what any of that will prove until I can track where the money he received came from. After seeing that video and seeing Stefan’s name on at least a few of the more recent notes he left, I thought that I might not have to wonder for too long.

But then I got on Gedeon’s computer and… and now I think that I might have found what I’ve been looking for all along.

I texted Rikki a while ago and I wish I had a printer or something to make a hard copy of what I’m seeing.

Curiously, Gedeon didn’t have anything password protected. Getting onto his computer was easy enough. I looked around at a few incomplete Excel files before deciding to have a look in his email. I scrolled through pages of junk mail, notifications from different services he’d subscribed to, on and on…

His inbox was full, so I went looking through other folders until I reached one marked Volki, or Wolves in English, and I opened it. Now I’m reading through emails that I don’t think anyone was ever supposed to see.

Letters between Gedeon and Stefan, dated years before he and I met. And every single one is written in Russian print. The first one I opened was the most recent one and all it said was, “We need to talk. Call me after midnight.”

That one had been sent roughly a few weeks before his death. And probably a couple of weeks before he actually met up with him. I wish I knew what they talked about…

My stomach lurches suddenly. I cover my mouth as the bile starts to come up. Another heave threatens to take me over, and I know I’m not going to be able to make it to the bathroom. I get up from the desk and stumble over to the wastebasket in the corner of the room, vomiting up my breakfast.

Dammit. This pregnancy has been taking out its pound of flesh on me. After that encounter with Stefan earlier, I’ve been in and out of the bathroom throwing up whatever I manage to keep down.