Page 63 of Forced By the Bratva

In private, he had started doing small things I wasn’t sure he even noticed. Like reaching out to brush my hair behind my ear, holding my gaze longer than necessary, and stopping by my room just to check on me.

If I fell asleep reading on the couch, I would wake with a blanket pulled over my shoulders. No one else could do that except him.

Sometimes, he would show up in my room with a cup of tea already made the way I drank it—no sugar, just a little milk.

Once, after a particularly tense run around the estate, he asked if I had eaten. When I said no, he threatened to fire the chef for ignoring my hunger. I had to laugh it off, telling him that food was ready yet.

Those moments felt almost ordinary. Domestic, even. They settled under my skin in a way that made the rest of him harder to accept.

Then someone else would walk into the room, and the softness disappeared, replaced with his usual toughness. It was clear that he wasn’t the same man when he was with me.

I got the more affectionate version of him while the rest of the world was stuck with the cold, ruthless beast they knew him as.

One evening, I witnessed his dual personality during a dinner at the estate with a handful of Tarasov associates.

They were seated around the long table, discussing logistics, politics, and shipments. At first, the conversation stayed careful. Measured.

Beside my husband, I sat and kept my eyes on my plate most of the time, listening more than speaking.

Near the end of the meal, one of the men—a little too free with the wine—set his glass down harder than necessary.

“I’ve been looking at some of the older transport numbers,” he said, voice carrying just far enough. “People are talking like money is still moving through accounts that should be dead. Like there’s some big internal problem.”

Ilya glanced at me across the table before asking him, “You don’t think there is?”

“No. Not at all.” The man continued, “I went through what I could get my hands on. The numbers don’t support it. Nothing’s missing in the books I saw. If there was a real leak, it would show clearer than this.” A pause. “If you ask me, it feels like someone’s reading patterns that aren’t there.”

The table fell quiet, and the remaining men exchanged covert looks among themselves. One cleared his throat, as if warning the previous speaker to keep his mouth shut.

Ilya didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t even shift in his chair.

“Interesting.” He set his glass down, looked at the man, and said, “So you mean to tell me that whoever found out about the missing funds didn’t know what they were doing?”

The question was quiet. Almost polite.

The man hesitated. Color crept up his neck. “I’m only saying the evidence doesn’t hold. Closed accounts stay closed. The amounts people are whispering about don’t match anything I’ve reviewed. Maybe the concern is coming from outside information that wasn’t fully checked.”

Ilya let him finish. Then he spoke, still calm, still even. “You reviewed the books, you say. Which ones?”

The man was quiet, his eyes shifting across the faces of the other men.

“Don’t look at them,” Ilya said, his voice low and intimidating. “Look at me.”

The man swallowed hard.

“Show me the pages you checked. Give me the dates,” Ilya added, his gaze unwavering. “Tell me who signed the original closures and who you believe is still authorizing the transfers that keep appearing after those dates.”

The man opened his mouth, then closed it. He tried again. “I don’t have every file in front of me—”

“No,” Ilya said. “You don’t. You have a partial review and a theory you decided to test at my table.” A pause. “You framed it as doubt, but what you actually did was suggest the people raising the concern are either mistaken or chasing ghosts.”

Cold sweat trickled down the man’s temple like he was hot all of a sudden despite the cold weather.

“That the real problem is the ones who noticed the money moving, not the ones moving it.” Ilya didn’t raise his volume once.

He simply kept going, pointing out every gap, and by the time he finished, the man’s face had gone pale.

Ilya gave a short nod to two of the men standing near the wall. “Escort him out of the premises.”