Page 13 of The Agreement

Anastasia shrugged. “He only ever gets burner phones and switches them out every week.”

Jesus.

He understood the need—many guys in his line of work replaced their phones often—still, not to that extent. Dima sounded more and more like someone who was constantly looking over his shoulder. Always afraid of getting caught with his pants down.

Why?

The obvious reason was rarely the right one.

The ringing finally ended, and then a few moments later, the screen on the dash blinked with a voice message. He didn’t know why, but the message started auto-playing through Bluetooth.

Shit.

Maybe the car wasn’t a rental.

Roman startled when he heard a soft, but annoyed, voice echo over the microphone.

“It’s me. Katee. There. I called you back. Are you happy now?”

She sounded like ... a girl.

Young.

Maybe ten.

Silence spread through the Bugatti when the message ended abruptly.

He really shouldn’t ask.

Roman’s mouth worked before he could stop it. “Who the fuck was that?”

“I don’t know. She calls him a lot, though,” Anastasia replied. “Maybe his sister?”

Maybe.

Either way, Roman didn’t give a shit. And because he couldn’t afford another distraction like the phone call, he didn’t waste time rolling down the window and tossing the device to the racing pavement below.

All he cared about now was getting the car to the shop where he would hide it until it could be cut down.

• • •

Despite owning three different chop shops across New York, the one in Brighton Beach was the one he preferred working at because it was also technically his home. One of two. He kept an apartment in the city—just because.

His loft was situated right above the chop shop. When someone from the bratva needed to find him, this was the first place they came to do so. And now it looked like the cops knew it, too.

Later, when he had time to think the situation over because he had nothing else to do except stare at the cement walls of a jail cell, Roman would blame the comfort he felt in the safety of his home for his distraction. He used the clicker to open the warehouse’s shutters before driving straight into a goddamn mess.

At first, when Roman saw the three armed cops standing there—weapons already drawn and pointed at him through the windshield—he thought it was a joke. Not once had his shops been raided in the past year. And even before that, the amount of police he had on his payroll ensured he could do business without worry they were going to constantly come up on him without enough warning from his sources to keep his side of things covered.

Except it wasn’t a joke.

And he was fucked.

“Oh, my God,” Anastasia whispered, horrified.

Roman’s foot had hit the brakes on the car to stop it all of three feet away from the legs of the officers. His other foot twitched with the urge to jam down on the gas, but a rational part of his brain kept him from making an even worse mistake than he already had tonight.

“Hands up—step out of the car with your hands up!”