Page 36 of Beyond the Temptation: Vol 2

This one brought me back to America after a sixteen-year absence.

I dislodge my knife from the desk, and Perry’s thirty-second bravado crumbles.

“She was a nobody. I’m important, damn it!” His hand disappears under the desk in a desperate last-ditch effort for survival.

Dropping my knife, I reach inside my jacket and pull my gun. “Wrong again.” With one bullet, the back of Senator Norton Perry’s head splatters across the white walls of his office. “You were important. Now, you are just a headline.”

An hour later, I’m sitting in a rental car in an abandoned parking lot in Arlington, Virginia, focusing on the bright glow of my laptop screen. I should return to London, but Perry’s blood didn’t satisfy my hunger.

And America is a buffet of sin.

My fingers fly across the keyboard, and within seconds, I’m inside a corrupt vortex society pretends doesn’t exist. The dark web.

After accessing our usual, encrypted chat, I stare at the cursor deciding what details to report to my handler, Minx. After fifteen years, I still only know her by her code name. We’ve never met in person. Anonymity is safer for both of us.

I’m a man of few words, so I get straight to the point.

Job is done.

The response comes immediately.

I still expect compensation.

Minx is efficient, even if she is pissed at me for taking the D.C. case pro bono. To compensate, I offered to pay her usual ten percent finder’s fee out of my pocket.

You will get it. I want a new job while I am here.

Seconds tick away as I stare at the blank screen. Minx’s silence is outlasting my patience. If she doesn’t come up with something soon, I’ll find it on my own. Just as I go to close the laptop, her response flashes across the screen.

Head to Miami. Fifty million.

Fifty million means someone of importance. Royalty. A syndicate head.

Bratva.

Name?

I wait for her answer, my chest constricted by the two names I dread seeing flash on the screen. Instead, the one I see nearly stops my heart.

Zasha Gaheris.

I expected to see Niko Gaheris or Ava Chernova’s name, not their daughter. Not the little girl with dark pigtails who skipped around a strip club completely unaware that she was a genetic time bomb.

The product of one of the FBI’s most wanted assassins and the bratva queen of Miami.

How did a pakhan’s daughter get on the list? Who contracted the job?

The cursor blinks only seconds before Minx answers with all the compassion of a corpse.

Don’t know. It was all set up by a third-party shell account. My guess is her mother rained on someone’s pussy parade, and this is their payback.

Fuck.

Sex trafficking.

I wish I could say I’m surprised.

Ava Chernova has made it her mission to dismantle all domestic and international flesh trade. Not an easy task, considering her father commandeered the largest human trafficking ring in the world.

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