Page 69 of The Russian's Revenge Bride
“By letting him think his plan worked. By making him believe he’s successfully positioned himself as the hero of this situation.” I moved back to my desk, already planning the next phase. “He wants to be indispensable? We’ll let him prove just how indispensable he really is.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that someone with Dmitry’s connections and resources could be very helpful in identifying other threats to this organization. Someone with his network of contacts could help us eliminate competitors and consolidate power.”
“You want to use him.”
“I want to bleed him dry of every piece of information, every contact, every advantage he’s built up over the years.And then, when he’s no longer useful, when we’ve extracted everything of value from his network….”
“Then we kill him.”
“Then we kill him in a way that sends a message to anyone else who might be thinking of playing similar games.”
Lev grinned, and for the first time in days, it looked genuine. “I like this plan.”
“Good. Because we’re going to need to be very fucking careful about how we execute it. Dmitry is smart, experienced, and paranoid. If he suspects we’re onto him, he’ll disappear faster than we can blink.”
“What about Eleanor?”
“What about her?”
“Does she need to know about this?”
I thought about my wife, probably sitting in her office right now, working on her fashion show and trying to pretend that the world wasn’t actively trying to kill her. She deserved to know that the threat was more complex than we’d realized, that the danger was coming from inside our own organization.
But she also deserved to focus on her dreams without constantly looking over her shoulder, wondering which of the people around her might be planning her destruction.
“Not yet,” I decided. “Not until we have this handled. She’s got enough to worry about without adding paranoia about our own people to the list.”
“Understood.”
“Lev?”
“Yeah?”
“When this is over, when Dmitry is dead and his network is destroyed, I want you to promise me something.”
“What?”
“I want you to promise me that we’ll never again let someone get that close to the heart of this organization without knowing exactly where their loyalty lies.”
“I promise.”
“Good. Because the next person who threatens my wife isn’t going to get the luxury of an elaborate death. They’re just going to fucking disappear.”
Lev nodded, understanding the weight of the promise he’d just made. In our world, trust was the most valuable and dangerous commodity. And Dmitry Chertov had just proven that it could be weaponized in ways that threatened everything we’d built.
Chapter 19 – Eleanor
The late afternoon sun cast long shadows across the sidewalk as the car slowed at a red light, the weight of the day settling into my bones like concrete. Three fittings, two vendor meetings, and a conference call with the venue coordinator had left me drained, but there was something satisfying about the exhaustion. It meant progress. It meant my show was actually going to happen.
I was scrolling through Zara’s latest media strategy updates when movement on the sidewalk caught my eye. Two figures walking close together, their body language intimate in the way that only comes from years of shared secrets and comfortable silences.
My mother. And Garrison Thatcher.
Their fingers were intertwined, her honey-blonde head tilted toward his salt-and-pepper one as he pointed out something in a gallery window. She was laughing, the kind of genuine, unguarded laugh I hadn’t heard from her in years. Maybe decades.
“Stop for a minute,” I told the driver, earning a confused look.
