Chapter 22: Artem

The living room was quieter than a fucking cemetery despite the five of us seated there, all looking at each other as no one said anything.

My wife was seated beside me, Yuri was somewhere to our left, and Niall, together with his right-hand man, Jacob, were both on the couch opposite us. It was an awkward meeting which I'd never thought would be possible—not even in a million years. Yet here we were.

Niall and I were glaring at each other, and we both knew the only reason bullets weren't flying in the air was because of Sierra and the babies in her womb. In his eyes, I saw his rage; obviously, he was still mad that we fucked him up and killed half of his men. If an apology was what he wanted from me, he wasn't going to get it.

Yuri and Jacob seemed to be in a staring contest, and upon Yuri's face, a pesky little smirk was plastered. It was clear that Jacob saw it as a sign of mockery, and he was so pissed.

Sierra's eyes were drifting across each of us as she discreetly chewed on her fingers. Maybe she was nervous, or maybe she was equally pissed at our silence, and if the latter was the case, then she'd burst out, snapping at us any minute now. I wouldn't be surprised at all. The way she confronted me even with a gun to her face at the warehouse was remarkable. She'd stood up to me like no woman ever had, all in a bid to save this greedy bastard's ass. He owed her his fucking gratitude because she was the only reason he was still breathing.

Seeing all those bruises on his face filled me with a deep-seated sense of satisfaction. He had a couple of deep cuts on his lips, a black eye, a swollen cheek, and plaster over the wound across his brows. My blows had done some serious damage to the scumbag.

"Oh, for Christ's sake, are you guys just gonna sit here and glare at each other all day?" Sierra snapped, losing her patience.

I leaned back on the sofa. "I've got nothing else to do, so…."

"Other than jumping to conclusions and killing half my men, you mean?" Niall's eyes were fixed on me.

"You don't give a rat's ass about your dead men. You're only pissed because you got your ass handed to you in a fair fight," Yuri chipped in, chuckling.

"It was a fucking ambush, not a fair fight, you idiot," Jacob said to Yuri, his lips twisting into a frown.

"Call me that one more time, and I can guarantee you, we'll have a rematch." Yuri's voice was unsettling, husky with a tone that indicated that he meant every single word.

"And yet you call us the mindless animals." Donovan scoffed, contemptuously shaking his head.

"Enough," Sierra said, clearly trying to hold back her anger.

"You should consider yourselves lucky that your puny brains aren't plastered on my walls," I said, ignoring my wife for a moment. These arrogant bastards were starting to get on my nerves.

"Enough," Sierra reiterated, her voice calm, but there was a warning in there.

Donovan, too, ignored her. "You don't scare me, Tarasov. Our brains might be puny, as you said, but at least we weren't the ones stupid enough to lead an ambush based on unverified information."

His comment had hit a nerve.

I balled my hands into fists. "I'd watch my tongue if I were you."

"Enough," Sierra said again.

"Or else what? What're you gonna do?" Donovan rose to his feet, glaring at me as though he was ready for anything.

The man was really pushing his luck.

"I dare you to keep talking like that, and you'll find out." I followed his lead, standing.

"I said enough !" Sierra's voice thundered across the room as she shot up, fuming profusely. Her eyes were practically burning red, and her lips twisted back into a scowl. She was mad, very fucking upset. "What the hell is wrong with all of you? Each and every one of us in this room knows that we have a common enemy, the same one who sent that assassin after me." The anger in her voice was palpable as she spat out those words, not caring that she was the youngest in the room—not to mention, the only female.

For some reason, I was proud of her boldness, spunk, and guts. She was starting to understand the power and authority that came with being the wife of the Pakhan .

"While you're in here arguing over stupid and irrelevant things, he's still out there, probably plotting God-knows-what. And I'm not gonna sit here and wait for him to make another move. The plan was to kill me; he failed, so that means he's definitely gonna try again." The words were spoken in an angry rush, her voice rising and falling as she demonstrated with her hands.

The room fell silent one more time, the weight of her words settling heavily on each of us, and although her rebuke was brutal, it was honest.

"Can't you see?" She sighed softly, a bit calmer now. " This is what they want—whoever they are: for you to keep fighting. And sadly, it's working. It's been working for a long time now." She looked at me and then at Donovan. "Isn't it concerning that two great organizations are nothing but pawns on someone else's chessboard?"

As much as it pained me to admit, she was right. The real enemy was out there, and they had been playing us for a very long time. The idea of being a pawn in someone else's game was infuriating, and I couldn't wait to channel my aggression to this mastermind, whoever the fuck he was.

The anger in Donovan's expression softened; he knew, deep down, that Sierra was right.

"Can you two please set aside your differences and talk like civilized people?" She shifted her gaze between us, and her eyes eventually settled on me. "Let's find this bastard and put him in his place, once and for all."

"I don't know about you guys, but I like the sound of that," Jacob said.

It took a lot of courage to finally agree to reason together with Donovan.

"Fine," I said, retreating from him.

"Thank you," she said.

He did the same, and we all sat back in our chairs.

"Alright," she began, "first things first: What do we know about this guy?" Sierra placed a photo of the dead man on the table.

"This is the guy who attacked you?" Niall asked, picking it up for a closer look.

"Yes," she replied. "And he has the Irish mob symbol on the back of his neck."

"Which is, by the way, the reason we concluded he was one of your own," I said, directing my statement to Donovan.

"It is our tattoo, but he's not one of us." Donovan passed the photo to Jacob.

"I know this guy," Jacob said, looking at the photo.

My wife and I exchanged glances.

Jacob continued, "His name is Jeffery Finch, a local mercenary who'd work for anyone with a dollar bill. The Irish have never done business with him because he was the type of guy to turn on you the moment he got a better offer. The world's a better place without the sneaky bastard."

"So, since Jeffery Finch isn't one of us, how do you explain the threats we've been receiving from the Bratva?" Donovan asked.

"What threats?" I asked him, confused, as it sounded strange to me.

Donovan looked at Jacob, and the latter went ahead to further explain. "For months now, we've been getting threatening emails watermarked with the Bratva symbol."

"I'd never send you threatening messages via email, let alone watermark it with our symbol. I'd simply attack you, just as I did at the warehouse," came my reply.

The last statement sounded degrading, and there was a sense of unease that hovered over us for a moment.

Sierra broke the silence. "Like I said, someone is putting in a lot of effort to turn you against each other."

"But why, though?" Jacob asked.

"That's why we need to find them, fast," Sierra replied.

Donovan frowned. "How do we do that?"

"Found this on Finch," Yuri said, dropping a phone on the table. "It's encrypted, so I couldn't get in."

"If we can access that device—"

"Then we can find out who hired him," Donovan finished Jacob's statement.

"Hold on a second," Sierra said, turning to face Yuri. "You've had that this entire time, and you're just bringing it out now?" Her brows rose, and she seemed a little upset.

"Uhh…."

This was the first time that I'd seen Yuri speechless—the very first fucking time. It was almost like he didn't know how to respond to her. Sierra was seriously impressing me today.

"If I knew about this phone earlier, we wouldn't be having this conversation; we would have found him by now," she said, looking at our faces. "But that's not a problem. I can still help."

We were all quiet, wondering what she could do, and I, for one, was blown away by her confidence. I was anticipating how she'd help in this situation.

"Okay, I'm gonna say it," Donovan said, clearing his throat. "I'm confused. How are you gonna do that?"

"Dad, do you know what I do for a living?" she asked, but she didn't let him embarrass himself because, clearly he didn't know. She continued, "I'm a cybersecurity expert. Doing stuff like this is a regular Tuesday to me. I've been doing it since I was a teenager."

Again, her confidence was truly remarkable, and I was filled with pride. I could tell from the straightening of his shoulders and the soft grin on his lips that Donovan was, too.

It looked like we had one thing in common.

**********

We stood around her at the dining table as she sat in a chair, eyes glued to the laptop screen with her fingers rattling across the keyboard. The phone was plugged into the computer, and as she worked, a series of dialogue boxes spread across the screen with codes—numbers lining up in columns.

"The encryption on this phone is military-grade," Sierra said, cocking her head to the side as she continued to type. "They've used a three-layered cipher with a dynamically shifting key sequence. Clever, but not unbreakable."

I didn't understand a thing she just said, and I was positive none of the others did, either. I glanced at Yuri, and he simply shrugged his shoulders.

"I have no idea what that means, but okay," Donovan said quietly.

"It means that I'll have to reverse-engineer the key generator and then brute-force the hash tables," she attempted an explanation, her eyes scanning the cryptographic algorithms displayed on the screen.

"You do realize you're not speaking English, right?" I asked her, folding my arms across my chest as her proud husband.

She sighed softly without slowing down for a moment. "Basically, what I'm saying is that I'll have to trick the system into thinking that I'm an authorized user. Get it now?"

"Makes sense," Yuri agreed.

In a few more seconds, Sierra initiated a series of commands, and from what I could tell, it seemed like she was bypassing the phone's biometric system; fingerprint and facial recognition. Soon, a progress bar appeared, filling up slowly.

"Almost there," said, watching the bar, and the moment it was full, the phone's screen unlocked, mirroring its home screen on the laptop. "Got it. We're in."

I leaned closer for a better view, watching her navigate to the messages section, scrolling through the latest ones.

"It appears that there's a lot of activity going on here," she said, her eyes darting across the screen.

"What's that?" I brought her attention to something that had caught my eye on the screen.

"Looks like there's an exchange with someone using a code name: Zeus ," she replied. "There are no other identifiers, just a bunch of encrypted texts." She looked up at me. "Whoever this is, they're careful—no traceable metadata. I'm impressed."

"What now?" Jacob asked.

"Now, I'll have to dig into the messaging platform's servers, crack their logs, and cross-reference IP addresses," she replied, her fingers a rapid blur of movement.

"English, please," Donovan said, rubbing his eyeballs.

She peered up at him. "I'll have to trace the origin of these messages."

"You could've just said that," he muttered to himself.

Watching Sierra work was a great privilege, and I realized that I hadn't given her much benefit of the doubt. She was clearly good at what she did, and the fact that she was having fun while at it was remarkable. Within these last few minutes, my confidence in her had grown exponentially. If there was someone who could find this Zeus guy, it was her.

"Got him," she announced, her voice laced with triumph.

The image of the man plastered on the laptop screen was shocking, and my blood boiled at the identity of the one responsible for turning me and Donovan on each other.

It was Chris, my supplier.

"Fucking backstabbing son of a bitch," I growled, frowning at his deception and betrayal.

Sierra shook her head. "Glad Madelyn dumped your ass."

"He's your weapons dealer, isn't he?" Donovan asked me.

"It all makes sense now," Sierra began, turning to look at me. "That night at the club, Chris was the one who told me to go through the back door to get what I forgot. He must have known that I was Niall Donovan's daughter, and he also must have known that you were gonna be killing that guy in the alley around that same time."

"He wanted you to witness it," Jacob said to her.

"Exactly," she replied. "Because one of the rules of the Bratva is—"

"No witnesses," Yuri finished her statement.

"Chris orchestrated all of this," she continued. "He wanted Artem to kill me for being a witness. That way, it would provoke you into taking action." She settled her eyes on Donovan. "But what he didn't anticipate was that Artem was going to show mercy and eventually marry me, so he tried again by using Finch." She paused and continued, "But the question remains: Why? Why go through all this trouble just to turn the Bratva and the Irish mob against each other?"

"Because he wanted the two mafia families to crumble," I replied, his motive finally kicking in. "Chris has always been ambitious. I guess he got tired of being a supplier and wanted to get us out of business so he could take over."

"He doesn't know we're onto him, which means we have the element of surprise," Jacob pointed out. "I say we pay him a visit."

"On that, we agree," Yuri grumbled, concurring with Jacob for the first time in history.

"He messed with the wrong families," Donovan said through gritted teeth. "Let's go kill that son of a bitch." He walked away and Jacob followed.

Yuri left after them, and as I was about to step away, Sierra held my hand, gently gripping my wrist. "Be careful."

I saw the concern flickering in her gaze, and it warmed my heart. Truly, she cared for me, and deep down, I knew that I cared for her, as well. I was wrong in believing she'd betrayed me.

"Come back to me," she added, a palm on my cheek. "I'll be waiting."

I gave a faint smirk and slowly walked away, determined to fix things when I returned. She'd proven beyond reasonable doubt that she was mine, and I'd never been more proud of her.

**********

The Irish mob and the Bratva working together was a sight I hadn't thought I'd live long enough to see, but here we were, fighting side by side, with me and Donovan calling the shots.

Chris had his own men, but they were no match for both our gangs combined, especially now that we'd taken them by surprise. The shooting didn't take long, and soon, all of his men were down.

I kicked down the door to his office, and we barged in on him standing by the window with his gun pointed at us.

The moment he saw us, he lowered his weapon, clearly shocked that we were the ones who had invaded his territory. "Mr. Tarasov. Mr. Donovan." He swallowed hard.

"Surprised to see us together?" Donovan asked him.

"Chris, Chris." I clicked my tongue, walking over to the front of his desk as Niall and the others occupied the space. "You're good. ‘'ll give you that. But you were sloppy, and that was your mistake."

"I…I don't know what you're talking about," he stuttered.

Donovan didn't waste any time shooting him in the arm. Chris grunted in pain, dropping his weapon.

"That was for my daughter," he said to him.

"You attacked Sierra for your own selfish reason." I frowned, shaking my head. "You never should have done that." I pulled my trigger and shot his other arm. " That's for betraying me."

Staggering back with a yell, Chris glanced frantically between the two of us.

Donovan shot his left leg. "That's for messing with the Irish."

Chris wailed as he limped. "Please, please , show mercy."

I aimed at his forehead, ignoring his cries. "Sierra is untouchable."

"No, no, please, don't!" He managed to stretch out his hand as he babbled, his face crumpled in resignation.

His pleas fell on deaf ears as I squeezed the trigger. The bullet forced his head to jerk, and he fell backward, dead. Threat neutralized.

Donovan glanced at me, and we both nodded subtly.

For now, there was an understanding between us.