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“Why?” he asks.
“Curious.”
“Lyubopytnoy Varvare na bazare nos atarvali.”
I frown. “What?”
“Curious Varvara had her nose snatched at the market,” he translates.
“Is that your version of curiosity killed the cat?”
“You’re smart,” Luka says, flat and dry. “Now, get back to work.”
I press my lips into a thin line. Trying to learn more about Mikhail and his brothers is proving to be like pulling teeth, a slow and painful process. These Antonov men are some of the toughest nuts I’ve ever had to crack.
I’m about to get up for my fifth cup of coffee in the hopes of giving my brain a much-needed energy boost when I see it. A gasp rushes out of me when I manage to isolate a strange, fragmented section of code deep within the CyberFort computer servers.
“I found it!” I exclaim, moving in to cut off the segment at the source. With the press of a couple of buttons, I manage to remove this particular subsection of the server from the rest of the network, elated that I was able to pull it off. The virus is still alive and well, but at least now it won’t be able to do any more harm.
“What happened?” Mikhail asks, rushing out of his office.
“She found it,” Luka explains. He’s moved to stand behind me, hovering over my shoulder as I continue to work diligently.
I click my tongue, perturbed at what I find. “Don’t start celebrating yet, boys. We’ve got a problem.”
Mikhail gets in close, standing just to my side. With one hand on the back of my chair, he dips down to look at my screen. From what I’ve read, he’s an accomplished computer engineer himself, but I spell it out for him anyways.
“I’m afraid the virus has corrupted the information in this sector. It’s not much. Maybe five percent of all CyberFort’s client data.”
“Any way to tell which clients?”
I do a little digging. The virus has a chokehold on the files, but I’m still able to glean an answer based off the file names alone. “Jonathan Young & Co.”
Mikhail shoots his brothers a look; they know something I don’t. Their tension lingers in the air, everyone visibly uncomfortable.
“Did you get a ransom amount?” Luka asks his brothers.
Mikhail nods. “He’s asking us to join again.”
“That’s it?”
“Afraid so.”
“So we either lose a client we…pursued,” Pyotr mumbles from the other side of the table. “Or we give him what he wants.”
My ears burn. “How do you know the culprit is a man?”
Dimitri shrugs, wearing a charming grin. “We don’t.”
He’s asking us to join again.
I glance up at Mikhail, sensing his unease. This has to be related to the Bratva. There’s no way all this is just a coincidence.
“I can try and salvage the data,” I offer. “But it could take me a while, and there’s no guarantee I can save it all. It looks like a good chunk is too corrupted to repair.”
Mikhail places a hand on my shoulder. The contact is brief but comforting. The warmth of his palm soothes the tightness in my muscles in an instant.
“No need,” he says. “Luka will take care of it. I’ll smooth things over with Young.”
