Page 4 of Forced By the Bratva

I sat back in my chair and stared at the screen for a moment. There had to be a logical explanation for that. And there was.

Estate accounts don’t always shut off right away. Automated transfers can run for weeks before anyone catches them. I told myself that, but deep down, I didn’t believe that was the case here.

That discrepancy was more unsettling than I cared to admit. So I kept digging, and the deeper down this rabbit hole I went, the stranger things got.

Next, I looked into the employee files, mostly out of habit, just to see if anything else looked off.

A handful of records had been wiped completely. Not corrupted from the breach. No, these were deleted—on purpose, and deleted well. Whoever did it knew what they were doing.

That’s not shady at all, I thought, sarcasm lacing the voice in my head.

In what was left, I started noticing short notes tucked into date fields and shipping logs where they didn’t belong. A few words at a time. A date. A location.

Nothing that explained itself. But one phrase kept showing up, over and over, in different files that otherwise had nothing to do with each other.

“Asset removal.”

I wasn’t someone who jumped to conclusions. I liked to build them, piece by piece, and I didn’t say anything out loud until I was certain. But I sat there, running through every boring, ordinary explanation I could think of for “asset removal” appearing next to a person’s name, a location, and a date, and none of them held up. Not one.

I told myself I only wanted proof. Something concrete to report to my supervisor, so it wouldn’t sound like a conspiracy theorist.

I copied the files to a private drive. The transfer bar crawled across the screen, and I watched it with a racing heart.

The second the transfer finished, my screen froze. Just for a second. Long enough to notice, short enough to almost convince me I’d imagined it.

Then a window flickered open in the corner of the display—a remote access prompt. It was gone before I could read more than the first line.

My cursor jumped on its own, half an inch to the left, and then everything went still again, as if nothing had happened.

I yanked my hands back from the keyboard as if it had shocked me.

For a few seconds, I didn’t move. I just watched the screen, waiting for it to do something else. It didn’t. The cursor stayed where I’d left it. My open files were exactly as I’d left them.

Without hesitation, I disconnected from the server manually, unplugged the Ethernet cable instead of trusting the software, and shut the laptop halfway, like that would help.

My heart was racing faster than the situation probably warranted, a bead of cold sweat trickling down my temple.

I told myself it was leftover malware. The breach two weeks ago could easily have left something behind, some backdoor nobody had found yet. That explanation should have been enough. But it wasn’t.

I got up and instinctively headed to the front door to make sure it was locked. It was.

I knew it was; I just needed to check it anyway. Then I went to the window and pulled the blinds shut after scanning the streets outside.

It felt like I had tampered with something I shouldn’t have. And now I couldn’t help thinking that the “glitch” on my computer might be tied to something more dangerous than I’d thought.

I sat back down at my desk and stared at my computer’s black screen for a long time.

Someone else had been in that network with me. I didn’t know who. I didn’t know why. But I knew for sure that whoever they were, they had seen exactly what I’d been looking at.

And the worst part was that they might have known I’d seen it too.

Fuck.

Chapter 2 – Ilya

His breathing was ragged, his eyes swollen, his toes barely touching the floor as he hung there, both hands chained above his head. He was stripped from the waist up, his skin marred with fresh scars—whip lashes and knife cuts.

“Please…” he begged, voice too weak to rise above a whisper.