Page 6 of Devious Knight

I saw the shooter, the man who was hired to pull the trigger. But there was someone else there with him. Someone who gave the order to kill my mother. Someone who sounded like Parker.

The problem is I never saw him. I only heard his voice speaking in Russian.

My testimony put the shooter behind bars for life but it’s not enough. I want Parker, too.

He’s the whole reason I got this job here. Like Mom was, I want to be an artist, so I was already looking for work experience to add to my resumé. When I found out that Parker would be hosting the Albrecht Dürer exhibition, I had to get this job. I had no plan. Only to get close to him.

This gallery belongs to a senior Knight my father has known for years, so I asked him to put in a good word for me. My father is the principal at Raventhorn Academy, the school I attend, but he also runs all the databases for the Knights, including the gallery’s.

Because of his help it wasn’t hard to get the job but everything else felt like walking around in hell trying not to get burned. Things like not telling my father that Parker was going to be working here. I’ve been on edge the whole time, praying he doesn’t find out. If I had told him, he would never have allowed me to step through the doors.

Seeing Parker and being cordial with him was hard, too. Of course, he recognized me as Tatiana Kolyav’s daughter. Listening to his fake-as-fuck condolences for Mom’s passing grated on my soul. I especially hated how many times he repeated how much I looked like her. Each time those words fell from his lips it felt like acid in my wounds.

I met the mysterious man who wouldn’t give me his name two weeks after I started working here. He’d been observing me and knew I was watching Parker. He hooked me in his plan when he told me that the Albrecht Dürer paintings in the exhibition were his and he believed Parker was going to steal them when the exhibition was over.

The man promised that if I helped him keep an eye on Parker and the paintings he’d help me with whatever I needed from Parker.

I told him about my mother and that’s how we became partners in crime.

Now I’m beginning to think he really did play me.

That Albrecht Dürer collection left the gallery on Friday, so maybe he got it back. What reason would he have to remember his end of our deal once he got what he wanted?

I’m such a fool. He’s not coming back. I feel so stupid for trusting him.

The bell jingles again. I look up at the door with that stupid hope flaring in my chest again. But this time it extinguishes when my gaze lands on my father walking through it. Everything inside me flatlines as I take in the stormy look on his face and the deep furrow between his dark brows.

Dad has never come here to see me before, so that’s the first heads-up that something is wrong.

The moment his bright blue eyes rivet to mine and the fury burning in them intensifies, I know I’m right. Something is wrong. And I have a feeling I know what that something is.

It’s me.

The emotions scattered over his face tell me that he knows what I did.

My father knows everything. God, from the look on his face, I’m also willing to bet my left lung that he might also know that Parker is working here.

Shit.

Because he’s a principal, people often mistake my father for a gentle man. Someone understanding who can deal with high-school kids and their crazy shenanigans. When they hear he’s a computer specialist they expect a geek.

But my father is neither a geek nor a gentle man.

If his broad-shouldered six-foot-four ex-Russian special forces stature doesn’t give him away, you can tell from the commanding manner in which he speaks that he’s something else entirely.

The kind of something else that makes him unique.

Dad might not be a Knight but he was chosen to be principal of Raventhorn Academy by the Knights because of his military training and status in the Bratva—the Russian mafia.

My father was the senior guard to the leader of the Knights for over ten years and head enforcer in the Komarovsky Bratva, a unit owned by the Knights.

So Dad is the principal of the school because the heirs to the Knights, the Bratva, and their allies go there. And Dad takes care of their computer security for the same reason. Protection.

He’s a kill-first-and-ask-questions-later kind of man who could deal with a siege from the most dangerous of opponents.

Yet he’s always treated me like his princess. As I look at him drawing closer, I can’t find that man anywhere. He’s looking at me like I’m one of the threats he’s been sent to eliminate.

“Dad,” I start, my voice shaking.

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