Page 39 of Blood Mosaic

—not if I help the billionaire.

—FUCK.

—I know.

—what are you going to do?

The man was probably already in Sevastopol, lurking and waiting to find her. She’d been sitting in her house all day, stressing out and trying to figure out who had broken in. She’d touched base with everyone who had backups like Grimace and another online friend in the UK. She’d gone out and immediately bought another laptop and cloned her working computer to that, hiding it in a brand-new location.

And all day she’d felt like someone was watching her.

Maybe it was Oleg’s people, maybe it was Zara’s, but Tatyana felt like she had a target on her back, and she was more and more certain that tracking down Zara’s father had been a stupid idea.

You could run.

One hundred thousand dollars might not be millions, but it would be enough to get her and her mother away from Sevastopol. The question was, where would they go?

No, the real question was: How would she ever convince her mother tokeeprunning? Anna might run for a short time, but eventually she would start whining to go back to her house and her birds.

Tatyana felt as trapped as poor Rex Harrison with his broken wing.

—what are you going to do?

Grimace’s question lingered on the screen.

—I’m going to help the billionaire find the money. Then I’m going to try to forget all this ever happened and hope he and Z both forget I exist.

—don’t be too good at your job.

—I learned your lesson.

According to Grimace, he’d hacked into a military database only to be recruited to some shadowy arm of the government when they caught him. They didn’t want to put him in jail. They just made him work for them.

—did Z have lawyers?

—she paid enough money to offices with three last names, so I think yes.

—any of them international?

Tatyana frowned and flipped open her laptop, scanning the expenses for the first year she’d been doing Zara’s books.

—three different firms,she typed to Grimace.—one in Russia, one in the UK, and one in the US.

—real estate. Easiest way to hide money overseas. She could have claimed them as offices or put them into an entirely different name. Invest in the right real estate and your dirty money starts getting cleaner.

Tatyana double-checked the ledgers that Elene had given her, the ones Zara had submitted to SMO, and noticed that only two firms had been paid in that ledger, the one in New York and the other in Saint Petersburg.

—the UK firm isn’t on both sets of books.

—Londongrad, babee.

—you might be right.

—you know I’m right. I’m always right.

Tatyana rolled her eyes. She had a sneaking suspicion that Grimace was barely in his twenties. When she’d first met him online, he struck her as a teenage boy and kept wanting pictures of her even though he offered nothing of himself.

Tatyana refused. Obviously.

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