Page 107 of Blood Mosaic

“Too much celebrating over the weekend?” Elene was looking at Tatyana with an amused expression. “I gave you time off so you could rest, not so you could party.”

They were sitting in Elene’s office, Tatyana on her laptop and Elene at her desk. There were spreadsheets, files, and printouts scattered over the coffee table, and the remnants of dinner waited on a tray near the door.

Tatyana laughed weakly. “Well, when someone buys you an entire bottle of champagne and you have no one to drink it with, it’s a crime to let it go to waste.”

It had been three days since Oleg had left her slightly drunk and very sexually frustrated at her hotel door, and Tatyana was still confused by what had happened.

He had been soft and sweet and gentle with her. Yes, he’d been domineering and high-handed too, but she wasn’t going to pretend that his sweeping her off her feet, ordering champagne and caviar, and kissing her senseless didn’t work.

It worked. It had very definitely worked.

And then in a blink he was angry and she was alone.

Again.

She was starting to think their night in the back of his car had been a fever dream.

“Men,” Tatyana muttered.

Elene’s eyebrows went up.

“Sorry,” Tatyana said. “My mind wandered, but I’ll have those files for you shortly.”

They’d been working all day, but they were waiting on an email from Grimace, who thought he could crack the last of Zara’s accounts that night, leaving only the paperwork of foreign attorneys to deal with, which would be Elene’s forte.

Once Tatyana found the signing documents from Zara’s email server, Elene would start on the process of claiming ownership of ZOL’s foreign properties under the SMO umbrella.

“Ah, men.” Elene smiled a little bit. “Good men are priceless. And there is nothing worse than a bad one.”

Tatyana peered through her reading glasses at the older woman she was starting to idolize. Elene Beridze was the CFO of a vampire-owned multinational corporation, trusted adviser to a thousand-year-old immortal, and commanded a staff of humans and vampires who hung on every command.

In short, she was a complete badass.

Tatyana had also seen the pictures of Elene’s adorable professor husband on her desk along with pictures of their two gorgeous children.

Tatyana wanted to be Elene when she grew up, and she was starting to feel like if there was anything positive to come out of this insane situation—other than gobs of money, obviously—it was meeting Elene.

“What would you classify Oleg as?” Tatyana asked her. “A good man or a bad man?”

“Neither,” Elene said. “He’s a vampire.” Her head popped up when she saw something on her screen. “An email from Grimace.” Elene waved at her. “Translate.”

Tatyana opened the messaging app that she and Grimace used to communicate and clicked on the message her old friend had sent.

—pidge, your wish is my command. You owe me a date when you’re back in Kyiv and the world is a happier place.

She quickly typed back.—you get a date when you’re old enough to buy me a beer.

—low. I turned eighteen last summer.

That was news to Tatyana. She’d been teasing—she thought he was in his early twenties—but that confirmed that the best hacker she knew had started breaking into military servers when he was fourteen.

In his own way, Grimace was as terrifying as Oleg.

—you’re a wunderkind, Grimace.

As she typed, a stream of user names, passwords, and authorization keys streamed across a window that popped up in the corner of her laptop. Grimace had not only found the last of Zara’s accounts, he’d grabbed the passwords and set up two-step verification on all of them so that she wouldn’t be able to access them anymore.

“Get ready.” Tatyana opened a secure window and started typing. “Account one is in the Maldives.” She let out a sharp breath. “Five hundred thousand.” That was less than she expected. She typed in the next. “The next one is Swiss.”

---