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Chapter Ten

Author: Uche Lawrence
last update Petsa ng paglalathala: 2026-03-09 17:01:21

IRINA VOLKOV

I waked up properly for the first time — actual sleep, deep and unwanted — and lay still for a moment resenting my own body for it.

Two days in this penthouse and I was already adapting. Already finding the bed comfortable, the sheets soft, the silence manageable. That was dangerous. Comfort was how cages became homes.

Get up. Think. Plan.

How about I find a gun and kill that monster?

I went to the kitchen. Coffee was already made — hot, which meant he'd been up before me and thoug
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  • Scamming the Devil    Chapter Three Four

    CHAPTER THIRTY FOURIRINA VOLKOVI sat with the photograph for exactly four minutes before I got up and walked down the hall and knocked on Nikolai's door.He opened it immediately. Still dressed, which meant he hadn't slept either.I held up the phone.He looked at the photograph. Then at Viktor's message. His expression didn't change but his jaw set in a controlled fury.He took the phone from my hand without asking, forwarded the image and number to Dmitri, and handed it back."Go to sleep," he said."He's outside this building—I mean, I checked, he's not there. But he might still be....""He was outside this building. Present tense, he's in a car two blocks away with four of my men watching him." He held my gaze. "He cannot get in. He cannot get to you. He's been standing in the street sending photographs because standing in the street sending photographs is the only thing left he can do." A pause. "He's frightened, Irina. Frightened men make noise. It doesn't mean they have power

  • Scamming the Devil    Chapter Thirty Three

    CHAPTER THIRTY THREEIRINA VOLKOVI found them on the stairs by accident. I'd been looking for Katya and heard voices and stopped before the landing.I didn't hear what they said. I only saw from the angle of the corridor below, Katya three steps above Dmitri, looking down at him, and Dmitri looking up at her with an expression I had never once seen on his face in two months of working alongside him.it wasn't warmth or softness.The expression of a man who has just encountered something he didn't plan for and hasn't yet decided what to do about it.I backed away before either of them saw me.Found Roman in the corridor."So, Dmitri and Katya," I said quietly.Roman's face did something extraordinary. "Oh! You saw.""Yeah, I did."He pressed his lips together with suppressed energy, containing excitement. "I give it six months before he admits it and two years before he does anything about it.""That long?""Have you met Dmitri?"I thought about the man who had been professionally sk

  • Scamming the Devil    Chapter Thirty Two

    KATYAI'd told the large terrifying man I had questions and he'd said they could wait until morning and I'd agreed because it was midnight and there'd been some kind of security incident involving men at the perimeter and I was choosing my battles.Morning came. I had all the same questions plus several new ones that had developed overnight.The first person I encountered in the kitchen was not Irina.It was a man. Tall, dark-haired, green-eyed, with a scar that ran from his left ear to his jaw and that stillness of someone who had trained the instinct to react out of himself through sheer discipline. He was standing at the coffee machine reading something on his phone with the focused attention, someone who did not expect to be interrupted.He looked up. I looked at him. Damn, he's such a sugar daddy. Fine as hell. A whole meal. Ten over ten and....dangerous. "You must be Katya," he said. His voice was low and unhurried."You must be one of the large men from last night.""Dmitri

  • Scamming the Devil    Chapter Thirty one

    IRINA VOLKOVThe backup generators turned the penthouse red. Katya's hand was on my arm. Galina had moved away from the windows without being asked twice, which told me she'd lived through enough of these moments to know what they meant.From below us, footsteps. Voices in Russian, clipped and directional. Nikolai's men moving with efficiency just like they've been trained."Irina." Katya's voice was very controlled. She was frightened and managing it, which was one of the things I'd always loved about her. "What's happening.""Security response. Someone breached the perimeter.""Someone breached—" She stopped. Started again. "Okay. Is this normal?""No.""Is your guy handling it?"I paused and finally said, "Yes.""Are we safe here?"Oh God, Katya!I looked at Galina, who had positioned herself near the interior wall away from the windows with calmess. Like she had been through this before and survived it. "Yes," I said. "We're safe here."Katya nodded. Took a breath. Took another o

  • Scamming the Devil    Chapter Thirty

    IRINA VOLKOVI showed Nikolai the phone without speaking.He looked at the screen. His expression didn't change. But the quality of the air in the room did — something dropping several degrees in the space of a breath.He took the phone from my hand, stood, and called Dmitri."Katya," he said when the call connected. "Where are our people."A pause. Nikolai's jaw set."Get there now," he said. "Don't call ahead. Move."He ended the call and looked at me. I was standing very still because standing very still was what I did when I was frightened and didn't want to be."She's fine," he said. "Our people are two minutes away.""How did he get my number.""The second leak. We haven't found it yet." He crossed the room to me. "Irina. She's fine.""He's using her because of me." My voice was level. "This is what I said would happen. Staying here means the people I—" I stopped. "Katya has nothing to do with any of this. She makes coffee and reads too many romance novels and she has nothing to

  • Scamming the Devil    Chapter Twenty Nine

    IRINA VOLKOVI didn't sleep.This was different. This was lying in the dark in a room that had stopped feeling like a prison a long time ago, staring at a ceiling, turning something over in my hands that I wasn't sure I knew how to hold yet.He'd kissed me back.I'd kissed him first, which meant the decision was mine, which meant I owned it, which meant I couldn't explain it away as something that happened to me. I had moved the inch. I had made the choice. And his hands on my face and the way he'd said *I'm finished being interrupted* and the quality of the silence after it — all of that was going to require a new category in the filing system I used to manage my interior life.Gosh.I didn't have a new category ready.I got up at six and went to the kitchen.He was already there.We looked at each other across the counter in the early morning light with the awareness of two people who have crossed a line and are now determining what country they're standing in.Galina knows too much

  • Scamming the Devil    Chapter Three

    IRINA VOLKOVThe next morning, I took the metro to Tverskaya and found a secondhand boutique that catered to women who needed to look expensive without actually being expensive. The owner, a rail thin woman with black hair and calculating eyes, sized me up immediately.“Special occasion?” she asked

  • Scamming the Devil    Chapter Two

    IRINA VOLKOVThe apartment building in Tekstilshchiki looked worse in daylight than it did at night. Yeah.Crumbling concrete, rust stained walls, windows that was covered with mismatched curtains or cardboard. I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, the elevator had been broken for six fucking m

  • Scamming the Devil    Chapter One

    IRINA VOLKOVThe wire transfer notification chimed on my phone at exactly 3:09PM.Fifty thousand dollars. Clean. Untraceable. So beautiful.My gaze was fixed on the screen in the dimly lit corner of the cafe, my fingers wrapped around my coffee that had lost its warmth an hour prior. The scene was

  • Scamming the Devil    Chapter Seven

    NIKOLAI DRAGUNOV I gestured to a hallway leading off the main living area. "There are three bedrooms. The one on the left is yours. You'll find everything you need. Clothes, toiletries, whatever. I had them brought in this afternoon." "This afternoon?" She laughed, a sharp, broken sound. "You were

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