Page 72 of Forced By the Bratva

If this external group was moving through the same shell structure she’d already traced, she was the only one who could follow that thread properly.

I needed her. Not just to keep safe. But also to help me solve this.

“Hey,” she said softly, closing the door behind her.

“Hey,” I replied with the same tone, a small grin slowly creeping across my face.

“You wanted to see me?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Please, take a seat.”

In the midst of all this madness, she still managed to look so beautiful even when she wasn’t trying. And the sight of her alone made my dark day seem bright.

She sat in the visitor’s chair, tucking her hair behind her ear.

“How’re you feeling?” we chorused, our voices blending as one.

I watched her smile broaden in a way I hadn’t seen before.

“You first.” It happened again.

I cocked my head to the side, my expression soft and welcoming.

“Okay, this is weird.” She chuckled.

“I believe it’s called dual telepathy,” I teased, making an attempt at a silly joke.

“Really?” She raised her brows in disbelief.

“Yeah. It’s when a couple gets to a point in their relationship that they start reading each other’s minds.”

She laughed. Harder than I expected, and it warmed my heart, broadening my smile. She knew I just made that up. Dual telepathy was obviously not a thing, but she got the joke.

Why would anyone want to harm such a beautiful, harmless human being like Iris? Whoever these people were, as long as I was alive, I wouldn’t watch them take her. Never.

After holding each other’s gaze for a moment, she broke eye contact and asked why I had called for her.

Over the next few minutes, I began feeding her carefully controlled pieces of information, testing how she handled them and watching whether pressure made her sharper or more scattered.

It made her sharper.

As we buried ourselves in the files, she caught a discrepancy in the payment intervals that the analysts had dismissed as a rounding error.

She laid the pages side by side and showed me how the same amount reappeared three times under different company names, each time just after a dissolved account should have gone dark.

I checked the original ledgers myself. She was right.

“This surveillance gap,” she said, pointing to a section of the report. “Nobody flagged this. The cameras at the east gate went dark for four minutes during the breach. That’s not equipment failure. That’s a deliberate window.”

I checked it against Ivan’s notes. No one had caught it.

“You’re right.”

“It means whoever did this had someone controlling the camera feed in real time, not just forged credentials at the gate. Active manipulation during the attack.”

“That requires access to our surveillance network.”

“Exactly.” She looked up at me, sharp and certain. “Which means this isn’t just an external team hitting you blind. Someone inside is still feeding them real-time information.”