All Chapters of Scamming the Devil : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

IRINA VOLKOVEscape. Escape. Escape. Was all I could think of even when Nikolai’s steps became dangerously nearby. The hallway was empty. No guards in sight — the rotation gap I'd clocked on the tour, exactly where I'd calculated it would be. I moved fast, eyes forward, heart hammering against my ribs.A door at the end of the corridor. I had desperately hoped it would lead me outside the house. I reached for the handle—A hand closed around my arm and pulled me back in one smooth motion.I didn't need to turn around."Where are you going, malyshka?"Don't fucking Malyshka me!I turned anyway, because I wanted him to see my face when I answered."Away from you."Nikolai looked down at me with those ice-blue eyes, one brow slightly raised, utterly unbothered. Like I was a minor inconvenience. Like I hadn't just mapped his entire compound and timed his enforcers' rotations and made it further than anyone apparently expected."That would be a mistake," he said.His lips curled into a sm

NIKOLAI DRAGUNOVI should have told her about Viktor tonight.I'd decided against it by the time I reached my study, poured two fingers of whiskey, and sat down with Roman's weekly territory reports spread across the desk. The decision had nothing to do with softness. It had to do with timing. She'd watched a man bleed in my dungeon, tried to run, hit me with a vase, and been carried back to her room in the span of a single afternoon. One more piece of devastating information tonight and she'd either shut down completely or do something reckless.Neither outcome served me.I pulled up the security feed on my secondary monitor — something I hadn't done before, which I noted without examining — and found her in her room. She was curled in the armchair by the window, a philosophy book open in her lap. Not performing calm. Actually calm, or close enough that the difference didn't matter. She turned a page and the corner of her mouth moved — not quite a smile, but adjacent to one.My baby

IRINA VOLKOVSomething had changed in the compound while I was in my room being bored.I noticed it the moment I stepped into the hallway — the density of it, the way the enforcers were positioned differently, more of them, closer together, the particular alertness of men who'd been given new instructions. Two of them flanked my door specifically. One tried not to look at me and failed.I looked at his gun. Then at him. Then kept walking.Viktor had made his move and Nikolai had responded by wrapping the building in an extra layer of controlled violence. Which meant the threat was real enough to take seriously, which meant my stepfather had found something useful to offer Alexei Morozov, which meant I was now a variable in a war between two Bratva organizations and my own survival instincts were telling me things my brain hadn't fully processed yet.Think. Don't panic. Think.I moved through the compound looking for Nikolai, which I noted without examining — that he had become the per

IRINA VOLKOVThe car was black, long, and moved through Moscow's Friday evening traffic with the particular ease of vehicles that don't have to worry about anyone getting in their way. I sat beside Nikolai in the back, a careful distance between us, watching the city slide past the tinted windows.Moscow at night was different from Moscow in daylight. Softer. The lights turning everything amber and gold, the Moskva River catching the reflection of the bridges, the spires of the old buildings cutting dark shapes against a sky that never went fully black in the city.I'd loved this city once, before I'd had to become invisible in it."What do I actually need to do tonight?" I asked, without turning from the window."Stay close. Observe. If Alexei approaches you directly, you don't engage alone." He said it simply, like instructions rather than restriction. "Other than that, it's a party, Irina. You're allowed to exist in it.""And what do I have to do in the ball? I'm not sure I'm going

NIKOLAI DRAGUNOVI didn't sleep.This wasn't unusual. Sleep had been a negotiation since I was nineteen years old, since the night I'd stood in a hospital corridor and been told my father was dead and felt the floor of everything I'd understood about the world shift permanently beneath me. In the years since, I'd learned to use the hours between two and five AM productively — reading, working, playing through chess problems that required enough concentration to crowd out everything else.Tonight the chess wasn't working at all.I sat at the board in my study, a glass of whiskey untouched at my elbow, and looked at the position I'd set up forty minutes ago without having made a single move. The pieces stood in their formation like they were waiting for me to remember what I was doing.The name on the program was sitting in my chest like a stone.I'd been looking for that name for thirteen years. Not actively though. Not with resources deployed and men in the field because I hadn't know