I’m looking at the staff roster for a firm I’m planning a hostile takeover of. My right-hand woman in this venture, and many others, Margaret, is by my side as we go through the staff profiles, including their photographs, education, roles in the company, and salary. It’s a firm that started as a company making computer games, then they ventured into IT and set up a consultancy. They’ve diversified too far in recent months and lost money, but their talent pool is phenomenal. This will be a keeper, not a break it up and sell it loser.
Some of the staff will go, but many will stay.
My mind is only half on work, which isn’t like me. I’m worrying about my son, about Michael. The boy is about to get married into the damn Italian mob, and I’m still not sure if it’s the right thing for him to do.
Plus, things in Moscow have been hot lately. I’ve been over there quite a few times recently, and I really feel like the soldier I used to be, only this time, I’m fighting two wars—a corporate one in London, and a murky, underworld one in Moscow.
“Cassie Evans,” Margaret says and pushes the papers with the photo clipped to the front my way.
For a moment I stare, not hearing anything else Margaret says.
That name. Cassie. I’ve not heard it in so long, and slowly the picture percolates into my confused brain. This is the Cassie, my Cassie, little Miss Sunshine from the coffee shop, but she’s working in IT now, and … different.
The light in her eyes has darkened, her hair too, and her skin is sallow, not golden. Shit, she almost looks sick.
“…so, I think we can safely let her go,” Margaret finishes.
“Sorry?” I shake myself out of my stupor and give Margaret my attention.
She frowns briefly, but then taps one perfectly manicured nail on the photograph. “This one, Cassie Evans, we can let her go. She’s not been there all that long; therefore, it won’t cost anything redundancy wise, and”—she leans in—“you know I always do a little digging over and above getting the staff files.”
She does; it’s why I use her.
“Yes,” I say with a smile.
“Well, Cassie Evans was engaged to one of the senior programmers; in fact, the rumor is he helped get her the job. The firm doesn’t have any rules against dating a colleague, but they ought to. Place is a hotbed of nerdy love.” She gives a disgusted shudder. “Anyway, Cassie was engaged to Timothy Spoor.”
“Was?” I say.
“Yes, was… He allegedly had an affair with a member of the sales team, and now he and Cassie are broken up and at loggerheads. It’s causing an awful atmosphere. Trouble is, he’ll cost a fortune to get rid of as he’s been there a lot longer and is a manager. She’s a lowly IT consultant, so easy enough to cut. I know that for once, you want to turn this place around and keep it on our books, so my advice is, cut her for sure. We need to implement a no fraternization rule too. Bloody Brits, lackadaisical to a fault. You don’t get this shit so much in America. It’s a shame in one sense because the girl has skills. Came top of her class, and they had to shut down a project she was working on with two other people because they managed to hack into top level government security.” She laughs.
Cassie … my Cassie is a hacker? Or, at least, she was. Well, this is interesting. The girl gets more intriguing every time I find out something new.
“No,” I say without thinking.
“Sorry, no what?” Margaret wrinkles her nose, the way she always does when she’s confused.
“No, we’re not getting rid of Cassie. Sack him instead.”
“What? I mean… Sorry, boss, but that makes no sense.”
“You just said she has skills; maybe we can use them?”
“With all due respect, Konstantin,” Margaret uses my first name, a sure sign she’s bringing her most serious game to this discussion. “This is a girl who used her then fiancé to get a job in the firm, and then, by all accounts, couldn’t deal with his affair in a grown-up manner.”
“Would you deal with Dave in a grown-up manner, if he had an affair?”
“Yes, actually,” she says with a shark smile. “I’d take him for everything he’s got, via my lawyer.”
“Touché. But, trust me on this one. Keep the girl, sack the guy.”
“Okay. Whatever you say.” She sighs but doesn’t argue further.
We conclude our meeting an hour later, and Margaret leaves my office. She’s taken the staff sheets with her. I can hardly ask her to leave Cassie’s behind without it looking strange, but I’ll go grab it from her office when she leaves for the day.
My little ray of sunshine has come back into my life, and suddenly, I’m determined to get a whole lot deeper into hers. I tried to walk away; hell, I did walk away. I never went back to the coffee shop, or tried to find out where Cassie was, even though I thought of her often.
That girl, with her dimpled smile, and her love of literature, is someone I’ve had more real conversations with during the short time I knew her than almost anyone else.
Seeing her picture made my heart beat faster.
Seeing her picture made my cock hard.
As of next week, I’ll be her new boss. I’ll own her ass, and she’ll be mine. I’m determined to make that true in more ways than one. I let her get away once. Not again. Poor little Cassie, she’d almost escaped and got the boring life she so clearly craves. Never mind, I’ll show her a walk on the wild side she’ll never forget.
The burner phone in my desk goes, and I pick it up. “Yes?”
“It’s me, boss,” Vasily speaks in our native Russian.
“Da.”
“I’ve found something out about what happened to Yulia.”
My heart stutters, and I grip the receiver so tight I think I might break it. I’d buried this. My father was killed for what he did, horribly and violently by my men, and despite Vasily and others looking into it at the time, we found nothing linking the crime to anyone else.
“Really? So long after?”
“Yeah, and this comes from a cast iron source. It seems Kyrylo Voloshin helped your father do what he did.”
I sit back in my desk and take a deep breath. The name is such a blast from the past it takes me a moment to process what Vasily has said. Kyrylo is dead now, but he wasn’t then.
Holy fuck, I need a drink. Whenever I think about Yulia’s death it slays me all over again, so most days, I don’t think about it. At all. We never found anyone inside our organization who had helped, and my father didn’t name anyone even under extreme duress, or what some might call torture. Vasily worked him over good and proper, and the only names he got from him were lowlife street thugs. We’d pretty much concluded my father had worked with some level shit to put his plan together.
“I don’t understand,” I speak my thoughts out loud.
Kyrylo was a Pakhan, a Bratva boss. In fact, he was the man who ran most of London and the southeast of the UK with an iron fist. He was also on Andrius’ shit list, although Andrius has always sworn he didn’t take the fucker out. I can’t fathom why the bastard would be involved in what happened to Yulia.
“It makes no fucking sense,” I tell Vasily. “Are you sure this intel is accurate?”