Page 28 of Covert Vengeance

“Right.” She itched to get back to England where she could finally hunker down someplace safe and resume her electronic digging in private.Please let me find definitive proof that Hannah was guilty.It was the only way she would be able to move on once and for all.

His intense gaze never left her face. “Trinity mentioned it was your idea to spearhead starting up a WITSEC-type program for the women you bring in.”

Amber concealed her astonishment. Why would Trinity have told him that? He wasn’t one of them. He’d no doubt been brought on board on a contract basis. “Yeah.” But her ultimate goal, after ensuring the safety of the other Valkyries, was to take down the people responsible for the Valkyrie Program. They’d taken everything from her, everything that mattered, and Amber was going to make sure they paid for it.

She reached down to pull out Lady Ada again. “Anything from Trinity or the others on who that guy at the airfield was?”

“Not yet.”

She grunted and booted up the laptop, ready to get answers on her own. She was betting that guy was either linked to a job she’d done, or one of the dead Valkyries from her former team.

Moments later, both their cell phones chimed. Amber looked at hers, frowning at the image on screen and the note from Trinity. “They got a hit from the facial recognition software.”

“Yeah, they sure as hell did.”

At the edge to his voice, Amber glanced up at him.

Cordova’s jaw was taut as his gaze sliced to hers. “And it means we’ve got a serious problem.”

JESSE WASN’T OFTEN surprised by much, but this was a scenario he hadn’t seen coming.

“Do you recognize him?” Amber asked.

He nodded, mind working fast. “It’s an alias.” He typed back a response to Trinity. “His real name’s Yury Stanislav.”

Amber’s gaze shot back to her phone. “Yury?”

“You know him?”

“No. Maybe.” She frowned. “His name is…familiar.”

She was holding something back. Something important. “Familiar how?”

She looked up at him, her green eyes troubled. “One of my previous targets had a boyfriend named Yury. It could be coincidence, but…”

But in their world, there was no such thing as coincidences. “He’s former Bratva.” One of the best hitters in the business. Stanislav had a reputation for being as relentless as Jesse, but with a lot more contacts and money at his disposal. Shit. Had he been hired by the same person as Jesse? Orwashe the person who had hired Jesse?

Amber’s expression closed up. “She used to talk about him. Brag about him. Zoya. About what they would do together, where they would go once we pulled off the last bit of the op and got all the money transferred into our account.”

An account or multiple accounts that Amber had likely set up herself.

A new tension formed in his gut, pulling his insides tight. “Zoya who?”

“Petrov. She was the mastermind behind the Rome op I worked with her and the others.”

He didn’t recognize her name. And Amber didn’t seem to recognize Stanislav’s. “You don’t know about his rep?”

“Not really. I never met him or saw a picture, but he would have known all about me, because of Zoya. You?”

“Never met him in person, but he’s a ruthless bastard with a reputation that’s made him the stuff of legends.” He set his phone down, giving her his full attention. This was bad. The severity of the threat against them all had just doubled, at least. “Do you remember the bombing in St. Petersburg last fall?”

“The government building, the one they decided was terrorism?”

Yeah, that one. “He brought that entire building down in the middle of the work day. Over six-hundred people killed and another thousand or more injured. And he did it to kill a single target for a contract job.”

He watched the gravity of it register in her face. “He’s after me because he wants revenge for Zoya.”

Jesse nodded slowly. “You and anyone connected to you. He’s got contacts everywhere, including the Russian and Syrian military.”

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