Page 60 of Forced By the Bratva

I had my suspicions—people I was almost certain had a hand in this. But I might be wrong. At this point, everyone could be the traitor, and that meant that I couldn’t trust anyone on the council.

Except my brother.

Without wasting time, I gathered my evidence and set up a meeting with him.

The location was the warehouse near the river, where we often met to discuss sensitive matters that were meant for our ears only.

Officially, we were discussing shipment routes. Ivan brought a folder of manifests as cover and laid them out on the metal table between us like they mattered. Neither of us touched them.

“Show me what you found,” he said.

I laid it out the way Iris had shown me. Payment cycles that repeated too cleanly to be chance. Shell companies that still moved money months after they’d been dissolved on paper. Transport logs with dates that didn’t match any job either of us remembered signing off on.

Ivan listened without interrupting, arms crossed, face blank the whole time. That was normal for him. What wasn’t normal was the stillness that settled once I got to the disappearances.

“No rival group shows up in the records,” I said. “Nothing outside. Whoever did this worked from the inside.”

His brows knitted together. “Are you saying there might be a traitor in our midst?”

I gave a curt nod.

“That’s a serious allegation, brother.”

“It’s an allegation if there’s proof.” I tapped on the file in front of me. “It’s right here. Written in black and white. It’s a good thing she saw it and connected the dots. I probably never would’ve…”

“Hold on,” he cut me off. “She?”

The hint of disappointment on his face told me this conversation was about to take a whole new turn.

“You mean your wife?”

A pause.

“Yes.”

“Jesus Christ, Ilya…” He rubbed his eyeballs.

“Don’t try to change the subject,” I said, my voice firm. “I called you to talk about the problem. Not who found it.”

His jaw tightened. “How deep did she go?”

“Ivan…”

“How deep?”

I exhaled sharply. “Deep enough to see the pattern clearly.”

“How.”

“She used to do this for a living. Cleanup work. Tracing fraud through corporate books. It’s what she’s good at.”

Ivan’s eyes narrowed a fraction, and I watched him recalculate in real time. “She’s not supposed to have access to internal ledgers, and you know that.”

“She found them by accident.”

“By accident?” His eyebrows shot up, an abrupt huff falling off his lips. “And you actually believed that? Come on, brother.”

“You’re digressing,” I said, feeling a surge of anger sprinting through me.