All Chapters of Scamming the Devil : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

IRINA VOLKOVThe financial trail was not a simple wall. Every account I traced dissolved into another shell. The man was better than good.I pushed back from the desk at two in the morning, rubbed my eyes, and gave up for the night.The study called me the way it always did when I needed to think without thinking — the quiet of it, the books, the lamp that produced exactly the right quality of amber light for reading. I'd been coming here most nights for the past week and a half. My room was closer but the study was where I went anyway.I found the Dostoevsky I'd been working through and curled into the corner of the sofa, feet tucked beneath me.I was three pages from the end when the door opened.Nikolai. Still dressed, which meant he hadn't tried to sleep yet. He stood in the doorway for a moment, scanning the dark room until his eyes found me, and then he crossed to the sofa with the specific purposefulness of a man who had decided where he was going before he entered the room."W

IRINA VOLKOVGalina's words sat in the room like a stone dropped in still water.I watched the ripples reach Nikolai before I understood what I was watching. He was looking at his cards. He hadn't moved in four seconds.I looked at Galina.She was looking back at me with calm, attention — the saying was on purpose."Your mother," I said carefully. "She had green eyes.""She did." Galina set her cards face-down on the table. "Elena. She was from Novgorod originally. Came to Moscow at twenty-two for university and never left." A slight smile. "Vladmir saw her across a lecture hall and that was the end of him. He used to say she ruined him for every sensible decision he ever made afterward." She paused. "He meant it as a compliment."Roman had gone quiet in the way he went quiet when something in a room required it. He was looking at Nikolai.Nikolai set his cards down. "Babushka.""I'm telling the girl about your mother," Galina said pleasantly. "It's not a state secret.""It's not a co

NIKOLAI DRAGUNOVThe Bratva's inner circle met on Thursday mornings.It had always been a men's meeting, not by explicit rule but by the nature of what it was, who sat around the table, what got said. When I walked in with Irina at my side the morning after her return, the silence that followed was the kind that occupies a room before it decides what to do with itself.Irina sat down. She looked at the men around the table the way she looked at everything directly, without performance, filing information at a rate they couldn't see.I sat at the head of the table. "We have a financial discrepancy," I said. "Irina will walk us through it."She did. Clearly, precisely, without preamble. She laid out the routing structure, the Cyprus trust, the thirteen-year trail, and the implications for current operations in the time it took most people to introduce a problem.When she finished, the room was quiet.Then Gregori, my head of territory o

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

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