Chapter 23

Chapter Twenty-Three

“ T oo much celebrating over the weekend?” Elene was looking at Tatyana with an amused expression. “I gave you time off so you could rest, not so you could party.”

They were sitting in Elene’s office, Tatyana on her laptop and Elene at her desk. There were spreadsheets, files, and printouts scattered over the coffee table, and the remnants of dinner waited on a tray near the door.

Tatyana laughed weakly. “Well, when someone buys you an entire bottle of champagne and you have no one to drink it with, it’s a crime to let it go to waste.”

It had been three days since Oleg had left her slightly drunk and very sexually frustrated at her hotel door, and Tatyana was still confused by what had happened.

He had been soft and sweet and gentle with her. Yes, he’d been domineering and high-handed too, but she wasn’t going to pretend that his sweeping her off her feet, ordering champagne and caviar, and kissing her senseless didn’t work.

It worked. It had very definitely worked.

And then in a blink he was angry and she was alone.

Again.

She was starting to think their night in the back of his car had been a fever dream.

“Men,” Tatyana muttered.

Elene’s eyebrows went up.

“Sorry,” Tatyana said. “My mind wandered, but I’ll have those files for you shortly.”

They’d been working all day, but they were waiting on an email from Grimace, who thought he could crack the last of Zara’s accounts that night, leaving only the paperwork of foreign attorneys to deal with, which would be Elene’s forte.

Once Tatyana found the signing documents from Zara’s email server, Elene would start on the process of claiming ownership of ZOL’s foreign properties under the SMO umbrella.

“Ah, men.” Elene smiled a little bit. “Good men are priceless. And there is nothing worse than a bad one.”

Tatyana peered through her reading glasses at the older woman she was starting to idolize. Elene Beridze was the CFO of a vampire-owned multinational corporation, trusted adviser to a thousand-year-old immortal, and commanded a staff of humans and vampires who hung on every command.

In short, she was a complete badass.

Tatyana had also seen the pictures of Elene’s adorable professor husband on her desk along with pictures of their two gorgeous children.

Tatyana wanted to be Elene when she grew up, and she was starting to feel like if there was anything positive to come out of this insane situation—other than gobs of money, obviously—it was meeting Elene.

“What would you classify Oleg as?” Tatyana asked her. “A good man or a bad man?”

“Neither,” Elene said. “He’s a vampire.” Her head popped up when she saw something on her screen. “An email from Grimace.” Elene waved at her. “Translate.”

Tatyana opened the messaging app that she and Grimace used to communicate and clicked on the message her old friend had sent.

—pidge, your wish is my command. You owe me a date when you’re back in Kyiv and the world is a happier place.

She quickly typed back. —you get a date when you’re old enough to buy me a beer.

—low. I turned eighteen last summer.

That was news to Tatyana. She’d been teasing—she thought he was in his early twenties—but that confirmed that the best hacker she knew had started breaking into military servers when he was fourteen.

In his own way, Grimace was as terrifying as Oleg.

—you’re a wunderkind, Grimace.

As she typed, a stream of user names, passwords, and authorization keys streamed across a window that popped up in the corner of her laptop. Grimace had not only found the last of Zara’s accounts, he’d grabbed the passwords and set up two-step verification on all of them so that she wouldn’t be able to access them anymore.

“Get ready.” Tatyana opened a secure window and started typing. “Account one is in the Maldives.” She let out a sharp breath. “Five hundred thousand.” That was less than she expected. She typed in the next. “The next one is Swiss.”

Elene walked across the office and looked over Tatyana’s shoulder. “How many accounts?”

“Five total.” They’d already recovered two of them, and both those accounts had held nearly ten million. “Four in Switzerland.”

Which had some of the best security in the world, meaning Tatyana would never have cracked it without Grimace’s help.

But agreeing to split the commission with him still meant that SMO already owed her over a million dollars.

She keyed in the authentication code for the first Swiss account and almost fell over. “Another eight million.”

“The first of four?” Elene smiled. “I knew it was over thirty million.”

By the time Tatyana had finished and sent statements to Elene, the total of Zara’s theft, not counting the money in real estate, was 42,560,017 Swiss francs.

Over fifty million US dollars.

She was riding back to the hotel in Elene’s car, still in shock.

Elene glanced over as she drove. “We owe you over five million dollars now.”

There were security cars in front of them and behind them, but Elene preferred to drive her own sleek Mercedes sedan. Tatyana was riding in the passenger seat, watching the city go by and wondering how a person’s life could change so much in the space of two months.

Two months. That was all the time that had passed since she’d walked boldly into SMO’s offices and made a deal with a vampire.

“As soon as we submit the paperwork to transfer the money,” Elene continued, “how would you like to be paid? Have you decided? Or would you prefer to let me help you open your own Swiss account now?

“Oh my God.” Tatyana was breathless. Even with Grimace’s cut, she had over three million dollars now. “Um… yes, a Swiss bank account might be helpful.”

Elene smiled. “I have a few connections there. I could probably find a bank that would give you one or two percent interest on an amount like that. You could easily live off the interest when you go back to Sevastopol.”

“Right.” She felt a knot in her chest ease. It was over. It was actually over.

She could have a life again. Her mother would be protected. The farm wouldn’t be in danger from the taxes ever again. She could… She could breathe. For the first time since her grandparents had passed away, Tatyana would be able to breathe.

Elene stopped at the red light behind the guard’s car. “Of course, if you’d be interested in continuing employment with SMO, I would hire you. You’re very talented, Tatyana. Very smart.”

Tatyana looked at Elene’s profile in the red glow from the signal light. “Do you need to ask Oleg?”

Elene scoffed. “I am in charge of the hiring for SMO. Not Oleg.”

Tatyana nodded. What would it mean? She could stay in Odesa. She could… get her own apartment. She could have her own space again.

Your mother.

That was the sticking point, wasn’t it? Her little bubble of hope rose, then sank. That was always the sticking point.

“I’ll think about it,” she told Elene. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me.” The light changed, and she started into the intersection. “You’d be an asset to?—”

The delivery van came out of nowhere, slamming into the black sedan in front of them and pushing it across the intersection as Elene’s Mercedes slammed into the side.

Airbags exploded; there was a sickening crunch and the sound of gunfire.

Everything went black.