5

RUSLAN

“Nosebleeds?”

“Minor blip. Nothing to worry about. We had a few bleeders in every trial.” My lead chemist drags his feet over to the pristine white lab table where sets of test tubes sit in neat arrays, each brimming with a white liquid. He hems and haws, flipping through his notebooks like the answers to my irritation will be found in there.

Fucking scientists. They’re brilliant.

They’re also a pain in my goddamn ass.

I clear my throat. “Sergey, humor me here. What is Venera?”

His hooded eyes blink in confusion. He knows I know the answer, because Venera is the billiondollar bet that will secure the future of the Oryolov Bratva; what he doesn’t know is why I’m asking.

“It’s, uh…it’s an aphrodisiac with mildly hallucinogenic properties.”

“Good job pretending I’m stupid. Keep it up. An aphrodisiac would be…?”

His blinks get faster and faster until I’m starting to worry he might malfunction. “I-it’s an erotic ststimulant. Designed to induce st-strong s-sexual urges.”

“Excellent. Now, do nosebleeds strike you as particularly erotic, Sergey?”

He glances at his three labcoat-wearing proteges. They’re standing in a neat line, inadvertently mimicking the test tube samples of Venera.

“No, sir.”

“‘No’ is correct,” I snarl. “Nosebleeds are not erotic. Therefore, it’s not a ‘minor blip.’ It’s a fucking problem. What I want to know is, Is it fixable?”

He gulps loud enough for me to hear him over the dull thunder of the lab equipment churning all around us. “I will try, sir.”

I fix him with the infamous Oryolov glare that makes grown men want to piss their pants when they try to meet it. “Don’t try. Do it.”

Sergey has a mind for science, but he doesn’t see the bigger picture. That’s also by design—because if he had any inkling of how much is riding on this drug launch, he’d curl up into the fetal position and never come out.

I’ve spread out billions of dollars in research and development, in bribes to cops and sign-on salaries to new drug dealers, in territory negotiations and raw material suppliers and this, that, and the other, all to pave the way for Venera to hit the streets and take over this city like a fucking storm.

Venera is my future.

Venera is my legacy.

Venera is how we win.

A grunt behind Sergey alerts me to the stick-thin lab tech waiting at attention just behind him. His eyes are watery and timid and his lab coat is stained at the hem.

The moment my gaze lands on him, Sergey waddles aside like a well-trained seal. He’s seen enough of my temper to know it’s best to stay out of reach.

I saunter closer to the man who cleared his throat. “And you are…?”

His eyes twitch. Left and right. Left and right. “Mattias,” he says at last.

“Do you have something you want to say to me, Mattias?”

Now, his jaw twitches, too. “We need to focus on correcting all the side effects, sir. Not just the ones that will affect your bottom line.”

I almost want to laugh. Not very many people have the balls to challenge me to my face.

In my peripheral vision, I catch my second-in-command, Kirill, straightening up. He senses danger. So do the other two lab aides. Like Sergey, they distance themselves from the upstart immediately.

“Seems like you disapprove of my decisions, Mattias.”

He holds his soft chin up high. “Maybe I do.”

My glare doesn’t seem to have much of an effect on him, but the slow smile that curls over my mouth certainly does. Fear flits across his eyes and he takes a half-step back.

“I’m going to offer you one chance to step back in line.”

His jaw clicks in place. “I—”

“Too slow.”

I pull out a gun and shoot the mudak right between his squinty eyes.

Cue screams. Cue chaos. Cue bloodshed. All the usual music.

The other aides go scrambling in every direction, hurling themselves under the lab table and behind flimsy wire shelves. Sergey is the only one who remains standing, but judging from his sheet-white complexion, it’s a shock reaction to the fact that one of his underlings is lying on the floor with a hole where his face once was.

When I turn to Sergey, he springs back, nearly upending the table with all the Venera samples. “SSir…”

“Calm the fuck down, everyone.” Kirill’s tone is equal parts impatience and amusement as he addresses the terrified room. “That smug motherfucker had a target on his forehead the moment he decided to sell sensitive intel to our competitors.”

Sergei’s eyes bug out. “Mattias did what?”

The lab techs have glommed onto the workbenches that hug the walls of the lab, chins wobbling like toddlers who’ve shit their pants.

Good. They’ll work harder after this. Fear is an extremely effective motivator.

“Did any of you know about this?” I ask them.

I know they didn’t. I’ve had full-scale background checks done on each of them. I know where their mothers live, where they hide their money, where their childhood pets are buried. I know things about them they’ve forgotten about themselves. Now that Mattias is dead, the whole crew is squeaky clean, but I need to make sure they stay that way. I can’t afford another breach like this one.

“N-no…!”

“I swear, sir. I had no idea.”

“We would never.”

“Please…”

“Enough!” I barely raise my voice, but both of the stuttering scientists clamp their mouths shut. “Let this be a warning. Traitors will be shown no mercy. I will be judge, jury, and executioner and I’m not exactly impartial. Is that understood?”

I’m met with a desperate silence. Heads bob frantically. Satisfied, I snap my fingers and signal over two of my men. “Take out the trash. I’m sure Sergey doesn’t appreciate us contaminating his floors with that traitor’s blood.”

Sergey looks as though the cleanliness of his floors is the very last thing on his mind. The color still hasn’t returned to his face.

“The launch will take place soon. I need everything to go smoothly.”

“Of c-course, sir.”

“Bane Corp. exists to protect the movements of this Bratva. Without my façade as a respectable CEO, I can’t run my empire or protect the people under its wings. You understand that, don’t you, Sergey?”

He dips his chin so low that he’s in danger of snapping his neck. “Yes, sir.”

“One mole is forgivable, but a second would raise questions about your competency to pick your own personnel.”

“Pakhan, I swear—”

I hold up my hand to shut him down. “I’m not interested in excuses. I want fucking results. Now, get back to work and get this drug back on track. We’re running up against the clock here.”

Sergey nods once more, then disappears into the chemical storage room on the right. I chuckle—he’d rather be cooped up with cyanide than with me.

Good choice.

Kirill watches Sergey’s clumsy lope until the poor bastard is gone. “Do you think he’s up to the challenge?”

“He better be. I don’t have the patience for any more delays.”

“Patience has never been high on your list of virtues, brother.”

Smirking, Kirill and I head out of the lab, shedding our protective lab coats along the way. More lab rats part like the Red Sea as we step aboveground, into the belly of the sprawling facility I purchased to birth this drug into the world. It cost me a pretty penny, but this investment is about to earn us a colossal return—if we can perfect Venera before its launch date a few weeks from now.

“I want eyes in that lab twenty-four-seven,” I instruct Kirill. “I want every single chemist on this project to be monitored around the clock. Disloyalty won’t be tolerated.”

Kirill starts tapping at the screen on his phone. “Got it, boss. I’ll get a team on them ASAP.”

I frown when I notice the voicemail alert on my screen. It’s a name that really pisses me off. What the fuck does she want at this hour?

“Seven minutes and thirty-two seconds,” I mutter. “Fuck me.”

“Something wrong?”

“I may need to get myself a new assistant.”

“What for? You have a great one. And, added bonus, she’s easy on the eyes.”

Kirill may have a point—I just don’t like the fact that he’s made it.

Correction: I don’t like the fact that he’s noticed her in order to make it.

In my mind’s eye, I see a flash of her as she was this morning. Not her usual put-together self, but another version entirely. Nervous, flustered, unkempt. I keep seeing the shoulder of her bra strap, the way her breast peeked out of the cup just enough to give me an eyeful of cleavage.

It was unprofessional. Lazy. Annoying. Distracting.

And tempting.

Way too fucking tempting.

“She’s been dropping the ball recently.”

“Enough said. Just give her a good tongue lashing and she’ll pick that ball right back up.”

I wince. The mention of tongues has me wondering just how much damage I could do to her with mine.

I imagine myself throwing her onto my desk just so that I can push her skirt up and see what those pencil skirts are hiding. It’d be so easy. She’d gasp and moan so fucking deliciously, I can already tell. I’m hard at the mere thought. Although some of that is just pent-up tension. I’ve piled a hell of a workload on myself, so it’s been a long time since I’ve been with a woman.

“If she’s called to give me some bullshit excuse about why she can’t come in tomorrow, I’m kicking her to the curb.”

“Your choice,” says Kirill with a shrugged shoulder.

I walk over to my SUV while Kirill texts some last-minute instructions to my vors carrying out Bratva business across the five boroughs. The chauffeur opens the door and I climb into the backseat. Reluctantly, I start listening to Emma’s voicemail, which I’m sure is going to be an unnecessary harangue of half-baked excuses and furtive apologies.

I stop short when a series of muffled sounds hits my ear. No coherent words seem to be forthcoming. Is this some sort of prank? A joke? No—what it is is a waste of my time. I’m just about to cut off the message and text my HR manager to open up a new job posting…

When I hear a single breathy moan.

Is this what I think it is?

Her voice comes through a second later. Heated, aroused, filled with a desperate urgency. It takes me a moment to realize what she’s saying.

She moans a name—my name. And just like that, I’m hooked. 5