Page 30 of Kings of Violence

Sierra

I wasn’t kiddingwhen I said the laptop they gave me was crap. It’s got to be at least six years old, it runs on the previous iteration of Windows, and I think opening two tabs at once uses up all of its RAM.

There’s nothing I can do about it now, though. I need to give them something if I want them to trust me more.

This laptop isn’t even hooked up to the main network. Maybe it had been wishful thinking that they’d let me access the same network everything else in this mansion is using. I know my brothers hadn’t understood any of this stuff. I’d even noticed Kyran had spyware on his phone once, probably from downloading porn from shady sites. I’d given him a whole lecture about cybersecurity, all while Kyran denied ever visiting those kinds of sites.

Yeah, right.

My hands still on the keyboard.

I hope Kyran doesn’t do anything stupid trying to rescue me.

Except part of me does hope he shows up, despite what I told him. He could come in guns blazing, riddle Nikolai and Konstantin’s bodies with bullets, and…

Probably get himself killed in the process.

I rub my brow and shake the thoughts away. Thoughts of revenge aren’t going to help me here, even if I prefer thinking about them than the way my body aches.

It isn’t all from pain, either.

I shudder when I think of the way Nikolai’s fingers had felt, the way he’d urged me toward climax and shoved me over the edge not once, buttwicein rapid succession. It’s not fucking fair. None of this is.

I squeeze my eyes closed, take a deep breath, then go back to typing.

It’s slow going, and the only reason I’ve made any progress at all was the fact that I’d managed to crack my father’s secret phone. For being so important, he had been careless with it, assuming that its location in the safe room would keep it from falling into the wrong hands.

Maybe Konstantin and Nikolai wouldn’t have found it if it hadn’t been for me. The feds hadn’t found it, after all. But I’d known what I would need, and this is part of it.

I wish they’d let me have proper clothes. I’m still wearing just one of Konstantin’s oversized t-shirts. I’d found a bathrobe and used its tie to make a makeshift belt, but I’m beyond self-conscious of the fact that I’m sitting on this chair without any underwear.

At least none of the staff bother me in this room. Cell. Whatever they want to call it. Yay, I get a bed and an attached en-suite. It’s still essentially a prison. The only times they let me out is when they want to parade me around and fuck me and?—

Right, I’m not thinking about that.

I’m trying everything I can think of to access my father’s passwords. He has a password manager that I’d set up for him, but the password isn’t the one I’d originally set for him, and of course it’s all encrypted and backed up on one of his private servers that he never saw fit to give me access to.

I did try the stupid easy passwords, like my niece and nephew’s names and birthdates. I tried less obvious ones, like the day my brother Neil died.

But in the end, he had taken all of my advice about randomized passwords to heart.

“I know why you were such a paranoid fucker, but did you have to be such a paranoid fucker?” I complain to my dad’s computer. If I had a laptop with more processing power, I could attempt to brute force at least one password, but they won’t give me that unless I find something and I can’t find something without more processing power and…

Of course, I don’t need my father’s passwords to start looking intootherthings. Like the news articles about Sean’s arrest. That was the same event that got Konstanin and Nikolai’s boss, Matvey Petrov, arrested.

What’s funny is that I’m sure Konstantin’s surname is Voronkov, and this was always the Voronkov Bratva, so why was some dude named Petrov in charge?

There’s something I can use there, if I can figure out what was going on.

The public articles tell me that Petrov is technically still awaiting trial, but he’s being held without bail due to the flight risk.

I’m tabbing through all the articles I can find, trying to dig up more about the guy. Late fifties, an established mobster for years, ties to Russia, etc etc. Nothing particularly new. I try looking up thisYurithat Konstantin and Nikolai keep mentioning.

He has to be the same Yuri I’d met two years ago. The young man who’d flirted with me… and disappeared just as quickly. I thought my father must have put the fear of god in him like he’d done to me—that like Kyran now, Yuri hadn’t been willing to fight for me.

I guess I know the real reason he disappeared, but there aren’t any articles about him. He isn’t a big enough deal for anybody to write about him.

Out of idle curiosity, I search my father’s name.

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