Page 1 of The Enemy's Defector
1
KATERINA
Iknew it.
I fucking knew it.
Hot tears leaked from my eyes. My vision blurred, but the image in front of me remained the same. I furiously wiped the moisture away and sucked in a deep inhale, trying to breathe through the pain of what I witnessed.
Finally, after so long of wondering and suspecting, I had proof.
Finally, I knew that my uncle had killed my father.
Again, because I had to convince myself that this wasn’t an optical illusion and that my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me, I pressedplay. The surveillance footage started over again, and just like the last ten times that I’d let this roll on the screen, my Uncle Anton lifted his arm and shot my father. This was the moment Thomas Kozlov had died, and his death was all because of Anton.
I fucking knew it!
The urge to scream remained bottled within me. This deep-seated, burning rage festered in me, making my fingers tremble as I copied the old video to my external drive. Anger filled mewith an intensity I could barely control, but I wasn’t blindsided by this revelation I’d found at last.
For years, I had a hunch that my uncle could’ve been the one to kill my father. Ever since I lost my father, I’d had no one and nothing. As the only child of a mother who died during my birth, I had no siblings. Because an enemy had fought with Anton when they were younger and he was left sterile, I had no cousins.
All these years, I was alone and missing my family, and now, I had irrevocable proof that my uncle was no family of mine.
He was a power-hungry asshole. A murderer who’d take out his own brother just to be able to call himself the boss of the Kozlov Family.
I knew it.
Having proof that Anton killed my father gave me a sense of closure I’d been yearning for all this time. The loneliness I had to succumb to wasn’t justified with this fact, but now I knew. I knew how low Anton would stoop. I knew how long I could tolerate his presence.
Because with this final key to the mystery I could never solve about my father’s death, I was done. I was gone. If I ever saw Anton again, I would die trying to kill him.
Footsteps sounded out in the hallway, and I tensed. Going completely still, I didn’t dare touch a button. I couldn’t risk breathing. Holding the air in my lungs helped me to stave off the tears at seeing the image of my father’s last moments before his younger brother shot him in the face. The gruesome image was something I’d never forget, and it would serve as the ultimate motivation to get as far away from here as I could.
The sounds of the guards walking down the corridor passed, and I exhaled slowly before I’d pass out for lack of oxygen.
Now that I had my proof, I had to get out of here. I extracted the drive from the computer and tucked the slim device in my pocket. Sneaking down to this storage area of the mansionhadn’t been easy, but so long as I could lean on a little more luck and get out of here, I’d be fine.
I was running out of time to pull this off. Anton moved around a lot, staying at the various properties he owned. With that nomadic lifestyle, he dragged me all over the place too. He didn’t “trust” me because I talked back too much. He didn’t “favor my presence” because I’d always been cold toward him, convinced he’d killed my family. And he didn’t “care to see me” when I voiced how much I didn’t like the direction he was taking the Kozlov family after my father’s death. I was the pain in the ass he didn’t want around, but he’d never trusted me to be unsupervised.
Any day now, he’d come back from his month-long trip to Greece. And the second he returned, he’d know that I hadn’t gone along with his orders to fulfill an arranged marriage deal weeks ago. I’d sent my maid in my place, praying that I’d have unsupervised and stealthy access to all the storage units to find the proof that he’d killed my father.
I had it now. A copy of that fateful day was on the drive in my pocket.
Sneaking upstairs to stop in my room, I watched the hallways and listened for the guards. I wasn’t supposed to be here, and I would be damned if any of these Kozlov men who stayed loyal to Anton would prevent me from leaving.
Ignoring the drying tears on my cheeks, I heeded my heightened senses and snuck back up to the floor where my old room was.
No one stopped me on the way. No one crossed my path.
But the second I opened my bedroom door, rushed in, then quietly but quickly closed the door behind me, I panicked at the sight of someone in here.
Rushing forward to stop her from turning and squeaking in alarm, I wrapped my arm around the housekeeper’s neck and covered her mouth with my hand.
“It’s me,” I whispered. “It’sme, Joann.”
The gentle, older woman stopped resisting, turning her wide-open and panicked eyes toward me. her frail body sagged in relief and I withdrew my arm.
“Oh, Katerina.” She spun to hug me tightly, then held me at arm’s length. “What is going on? Why are you here? Where have you been?” She strained to swallow after that rant of frantic whispers.
