Wherever Dimitri Volkov goes, his elite cleaner won't be far behind.
The woman who escaped me. Who haunts my thoughts now like a ghost.
She'll be there.
In Sanremo. At that casino. Close enough to touch, close enough to catch, close enough to finish what we started in Bogdan's dark office.
I can accomplish two objectives with one operation, eliminate the threat to my family and claim the prize I lost.
The smile that spreads across my face is slow, dangerous, and utterly genuine.
Fuck, maybe I am a little crazy.
I scroll through the attachments in the email, taking in details about the casino's layout, the guest list, and the security protocols. My mind is already working through approaches, considering weapons, calculating angles of fire and escape routes.
This is the part I love, the cold calculus of violence, the precision of elimination.
I forward the intel to my encrypted cloud storage, then delete the email from my phone.
I open a different encrypted application and begin typing instructions. I need reservations at a hotel near the casino. I need weapons waiting for me in Sanremo. I need any intel on every camera, every guard, and their rotations.
I need to be present, but blend in, be invisible until the moment I pull the trigger.
I hit send on the messages and pocket my phone, already mentally preparing to pack. Suits that blend with the European elite. Formal wear for the gala. The specific tools required for close-quarters assassination.
Three days until Sanremo.
And potentially, three days until I find my beautiful Russian nightmare and settle the score between us.
This is my most important job yet.
And I'll be damned if I'm going to fail.
8
DANIKA
"Excuse me, ma'am, can you take a picture of us?" a man asks, pointing to his wife.
"Sure."
I take his phone. The screen is warm from his hand. He jogs back to the woman, who's quickly fixing her hair.
He slips an arm around her waist and pulls her close, and she laughs, tilting her head against his shoulder. They look at me, smiling brightly beneath the Astronomical Clock.
"Ready?"
I snap three photos in quick succession. Through the screen, I watch them frozen in happiness, a couple who probably spent months planning this trip, who argued over restaurant reservations, who'll post their favorite one on their socials, and maybe even frame one of these to put on their mantel.
As I look at them, I realize there's a part of me that wants this. Not the touristy bullshit or the staged smiles, but the simplicity. The normalcy of being someone who takes vacations instead ofcontracts. Someone whose biggest concern is whether the hotel has good Wi-Fi and a continental breakfast.
But that life seems so far out of reach, it might as well exist on another planet.
"Thank you so much," the man says, and I smile and hand him back the phone. The woman waves goodbye, and off they go, disappearing into the crowds clogging Old Town Square.
I know people say Prague is a tourist trap. While beautiful, it's overpriced and overrated. Packed wall-to-wall with Instagramming twenty-somethings and middle-aged couples checking boxes on bucket lists. All of it is true, of course, but that's exactly why I like it.
Here, I'm invisible. Just another blonde woman in jeans and a T-shirt, wandering cobblestone streets with a coffee in hand. I can pretend I'm normal. That I'm anyone other than a trained killer who works for the Bratva. Here, I can be that version of me who didn't grow up learning how to shoot a gun before she learned to drive. That I was never saved by Ivan, but maybe went to school, studied international relations, and travel for work and pleasure.
