Page 60 of Marked By the Devil

“That’s not a vote of confidence,” I growled.

Wren put her hand on my shoulder to shut me up. “But that’s a natural question to leap to. I wondered that myself because from what Elena has said, the plans for this specific delivery of…” She cleared her throat. “This specific delivery for a particular product has been changed often. I haven’t been looking at anything else in the system about plans that are upcoming. But I did notice a lot of messages and traffic about this sting. And when I realized that they are coordinating such a large and collaborative operation with multiple agencies, I knew that they couldn’t be guessing or relying on speculation. Someone had to be giving information to someone. So, I looked a little deeper and I saw that one person had been touched with multiple points of contact recently.”

She clicked to another screen, showing the smarmy, smiling face of Rico Johnson.

“Seriously?” Adrik rolled his eyes.

“He’s been in contact with all the aforementioned heads in this operation,” Wren said, rifling through the emails and messages she’d hacked. With all the codes and aliases used, only she, as a former insider and agent, would be able to decipher them quickly.

“That moron has been a pain in the ass…” Adrik shook his head and looked off to the side.

“All of them are pains in the ass to you,” I reminded him.

He gave me a side eye only an older brother could.

Since our father’s illness and Adrik’s realization that he’d need to step in as an interim Pakhan, he struggled with the necessity of having to deal with politicians, would-be politicians, and other societal bigwigs. Rico Johnson had been particularly pushy and nosy and all-around a frustrating presence for him to deal with. As such, he’d kept him at arm’s reach, both to protect the Bratva from any other interest getting too close and because he lacked the patience for schmoozing with people who only wanted something from us with nothing but empty promises in return.

“He has been increasing his requests for meetings,” Adrik said.

“And you’ve been dismissing them all,” Alexei reminded him. “You pass it on to one of the superintendents or supervisors to deal with.”

“And if they don’t want to deal with him, they pass his meeting requests on to secretarial staff so he can be ignored for longer,” Adrik said.

“Maybe somewhere along those lines of dismissing him,” Wren said, “he’s had a chance to get intel.” She furrowed her brow, showing us more on the screen. “Because from what I can tell, he’s planting something to track what I’m looking at. At best, he’s positioned himself as a partial insider to feed Smithson and his cronies details about what I’m looking into.”

I glanced at her. “We need to have Trojan on top of this.”

She nodded. “He already is. We had a team meeting about it this morning.”

Team meeting.

I hid a smile. It was too serious of a discussion to smile and be proud of her. But I had to wonder if she heard herself. If she was aware of how far she’d come to seeing herself not as a guest or captive on some forced “stay” but as one of us.

“What if we used this to our advantage?” Alexei asked, raising his brows.

“How?” Wren frowned at him. “I mean, you are, aren’t you?” She glanced at Adrik. “You’ll pull the runners and halt the delivery plans so they can’t stop anyone on the road at the blocks, won’t you? They’re not talking about merely stopping your men and arresting them.” She went back to an email sent from Smithson to a highway patrol supervisor. “They intend to kill them. Quote, Use all force necessary to end them, quote. They’re planning to use this supposedly routine stop on the road as an excuse to kill them.”

Adrik narrowed his eyes, fuming all over again. “Of course, we’re stopping this run. We’ll use this to our advantage and prevent that from going down at all.”

Alexei sat up and cleared his throat. “What I meant is I wonder if we could use this to our advantage in other ways.” Once we were all facing him, he continued. “If Rico Johnson’s too close for comfort and able to figure out that we’ve essentially hired Wren as an informant, then why can’t we use that? To turn the tables on them.”

“How?” Wren frowned.

He shrugged. “Slip some intel that Rico could take to Smithson. Maybe it would trick him into getting caught. Or it would dupe him into contacting whatever intermediary there is between Smithson and Gregori. I don’t know. Something. If we want to be one step ahead of all of them and prevent them from getting further ahead to plan something we can’t stop, then why not?”

“No.” I didn’t mean to growl it like that, but I was not a fan of this idea at all. “No. No one is ‘using’ Wren for anything.”

“I’m not suggesting we send her out and use her as bait,” Alexei argued. “I’m saying⁠—”

“No,” I repeated sternly. My possessiveness over her wasn’t going to be ignored. Fuck him for wanting to use her or let her be a pawn. If anything they schemed would expose her to more danger, they could forget it about it right the fuck now.

“But she could be bait,” Adrik said, looking at Wren, then me. “She has the unique position between both sides⁠—”

“I’m not sure I would agree with that,” Wren said calmly. “They know I’m working here. They know that I’ve been here with you now. I’ve been spotted with Viktor, so that’s a given. Rico Johnson’s ability to get intel is a stronger avenue to explore. Because if you’re thinking about my being bait or any incentive to lure Smithson to where you could get him, I doubt that would work. I’ve already been fired. They’re labeling me as the enemy. I’m on a wanted list. I don’t think there’s any chance they’ll be happy to hear from me at all, and they wouldn’t trust my reaching out now.”

I nodded, in full agreement with all she said. “Exactly.”

“It’s something to consider.” Adrik held up his hands, likely assuming I was ready to shoot any ideas about using Wren down. “Perhaps not as bait, but something else we can figure out.”