Just as our lips touch, we hear the patter of little feet.
“Mommy, Daddy, you are home now!” Arron says, flying into the room with a space man teddy bear in his hand, and Solenne right behind him, holding her dragon.
“We are home. What are you two monsters doing up?” I ask, shifting to sit up in bed. Simon does the same as the twins’ crawl onto the foot of the bed, climbing it like it was a mountain as their little fingers pull at the blankets for leverage.
Out of nowhere, Solenne drops a book onto my lap.
“It’s story time,” she insists, wedging herself between Simon and me as though that space was made for her.
Arron looks tentatively at the space that is not filled by Solenne. I grin and shift over so he can fit in there, too. He chooses to nuzzle in on his father’s side, and Simon wraps his arm around him.
“What are we reading?” Simon asks, picking up the book.
“The boy who stole the moon!” Solenne says excitedly. “I choosed it for Arron. It’s a new one!”
Simon’s deep, soothing voice begins to fill the room with a story about a boy who stole the moon. My heart warms, my worry melts away, and I find myself relaxing at the rhythmic tone of his storytelling.
Maybe I was too harsh on him. Maybe he can keep us safe.
My eyes close, and I drift slowly into dreamland with images of a boy pulling the moon on a string behind himself.
Chapter15 - Simon
There are documents spread across my desk that paint a picture of Alek Mykros. But this is the picture he wants the world to see. It’s carefully crafted to convey a specific image of a man who poses no threat to anyone. Even his tax records and banking history… It’s all there. The humble properties he apparently owns are nothing like the mansion he actually lives in. The Hyundai he drives is a family car, nothing like the Bugatti he drives in real life.
This isn’t the real him. This is what he wants people to see.
From here, just looking at this, he appears to be an older gentleman who runs two legitimate companies that make a fair but not huge amount of money. Enough to live a comfortable life with his family. All records are well kept for tax purposes. His social media pages are minimal, featuring a handful of candid family shots and a few images of him at charity events and similar social events. His face is never fully facing the camera and is always slightly obscured. But not something you would notice unless you were taking notes.
He looks like someone’s grandfather. A pleasant person with a mediocre, comfortable life.
Beneath the surface, when I dig much,muchdeeper, things start to get interesting. And even though I’ve done the biggest deep dive I have ever done on an individual, I am convinced that this still isn’t everything there is to know about Alek Mykros. Honestly, I am shocked at how well he hides himself and his real businesses.
There are tworealversions of him.
The man.Cruel, arrogant, brutally manipulative, willing to doanythingto get what he wants. He acts as if he owns people, treating them as commodities and pawns in his games.
And the myth.
The myth is someone called The Ghost. Neither a single man nor an organization. It is anideathat has life and can move things and people, make them disappear, or make it as though they never existed in the first place. The Ghost is well known in Bratva circles, but very few people link Alek Mykros to the myth. And even if they do, it is only in whispered rumors that don’t dare say too loudly in case they end up disappearing too.
It takes every connection I have to come up with a list of names. Names of families that The Ghost has helped in some way or another. Names of families that are indebtto The Ghost.
Families that can be called upon at any time to return the favor.
It’s then that I start to understand what Selene meant when she was trying to tell me not to underestimate his reach and his influence and what he is capable of. I scratched the surface here—and it goes deep.
This man has an army waiting to move for him. An army of people whose secrets he has locked away, ready to use as ammo against them.
The first thing I do is make several calls to increase security on every Volkov family member, including my own penthouse. I also hire external, new security teams that I can be sure have not been infiltrated in any way, as backups for the teams already in place.
I sit at my desk, biting my lip, mulling over the potential of where this situation will lead. There are far too manypossibilities to consider. Far too many things that could go wrong. Far too many angles he could strike from.
My stomach knots with tension and worry.
I’m deep in thought when Raya walks in.
“Hello!” she says cheerfully. “I just stopped by to drop off some toys for the twins and say hi to Selene. Just saying hi to you before I head out again,” she says, flopping onto the chair opposite me. I look up at her with a blank expression on my face, my mind still flooded with the research I’ve been doing.
