Page 14 of Lethal Legacy

Pavel swallows. Despite the arctic air conditioning down here, he’s starting to sweat. “Because it can only be used on our platform, and only by invitation. Mercura is designed to be so invisible that no government agency in the world can find or monitor it.”

“Amazing.” I fold my arms. “Does it seem smart to you to test the world’s most secret currency by using it to watchCandy does Cunnilinguson the world’s busiest porn site?”

“No, sir.”

“No shit.” I point a remote to a wall-mounted screen, and up comes the offending video, in which one girl is at work tonguing the swollen pussy of another, in eye-watering detail.

Lucia Lopez, open under my mouth.I’ll have to try that next time.

I catch myself.

Not going to be a next time.

My only consolation is watching Pavel, face bright red, glancing sideways at his tech army, who are all shifting uncomfortably in their seats. I doubt most of them have ever actually seen a naked woman in the flesh. I leave the writhing women onscreen just to add to their discomfort.

“Mercura has been exposed.” I don’t hide my fury, and I take a savage satisfaction in watching the table recoil. “Now we’re facing the risk of it being identified, and traced, before we’ve finished building a digital vault around it. It’s not only abig deal, Pavel. It’s a potential fucking disaster. I want to know if we can still avoid that disaster.”

Pavel clears his throat and launches into a convoluted technical explanation that loses me within seconds. I hold up my hand, pinning him with the death stare I perfected as a teenager in the back alleys of Miami, and which has reduced much harder men than this one to piss-soaked wrecks. “I askedifwe can avoid the disaster, Pavel, not how. Yes or no.”

He gulps. “Yes, sir.”

“Then get it done, and fast. I want a full risk analysis on my desk by tomorrow morning.” I glare at him. “The CliffsNotes version, Pavel. Not the entire fucking textbook.”

The geeks might be the ones building Mercura, but none of them truly understand its scope. In fact, I’ve made certain they don’t.

Mercura isn’t just another crypto coin. It’s built for a far darker world, the criminal one that always has, and always will, exist. It’s been built in so much secrecy that most of those working on it don’t even understand exactly what the end goal looks like.

From acquiring the land under which the server is built, to the construction companies who dug out the vast bunker it’s housed in, to the state-of-the-art equipment humming all around us, Mercura has taken thousands of man hours, secret meetings, international visas, and government bribes, not to mention billions of dollars, to develop.

Mercura is the safest, most sophisticated money laundering operation in the world.

And the Stevanovsky bratva will harvest a percentage of every single coin washed through it.

Mercura is our future. It takes us off the streets and into the big game.

It means my three godchildren won’t be lost in a car bomb like their father, or jailed for the rest of their lives like their grandfather.

Mercura is what I owe Yuri Stevanovsky for taking me off the streets and adopting me. It’s what I owe Mikhail, his son, who was my closest friend as well as my adopted brother. After he was jailed, Yuri made Mikhailpakhan. When Mikhail was blown to pieces in a car bomb two years ago, Yuri named mepakhanin his place.

Mercura is our legacy.

At least it will be, if that fucking kid hasn’t already destroyed it.

As if to prove my point, the kid in question walks toward us between the lines of machines, head down. Unlike the rest of the tech kids, who all wear baggy pants and T-shirts, he’s sporting pressed chinos, a button-down shirt, and a neat haircut.

Ambitious, clearly.

He has headphones on, nodding to some beat only he can hear. He’s barely a foot from the op center’s fishbowl window when it penetrates the faulty wiring of his brain that we’re here. It takes another long moment for him to realize thatI’mhere.

It never ceases to astonish me that people can be so fast on a keyboard and so fucking slow in real life.

“Everyone out onto the floor.”

I don’t want to get blood all over the op center.

The tech kids move out onto the polished concrete floor of the server center with alacrity. I nod at a round table near a vending machine, and they obediently take their seats.

The guilty kid doesn’t bother removing his headphones before he pulls out a chair. I kick it to the wall before his ass even gets close. He stares at it, then up at the porn playing on the op center screen, with a sullen expression.

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