Page 9 of Cruel Kiss

He nods. "Has to be. Nobody outside the family knows those codes. Whoever sent that order was one of ours, or they got it from one of ours."

"Lev knows them."

Again, he nods. "Lev knows all of them. He helped Igor write half of them. If anybody alive still speaks that language fluently, it's him."

It fits. It fits way too well, which I don't like, because things that fit too well are usually things somebodywantsyou to see, for reasons only they fully understand.

But I set that aside for now. One piece at a time. That's how she'd do it. Cali. One clean data point, then the next. No jumping ahead to rash conclusions.

"Plus, the scale," I say.

Navi tilts his head. "What scale?"

"The one in her bathroom. It sent her a weigh-in just before this happened." I look at the door again, the broken hinges, the splintered frame. "That's how she knew someone was inside. The scale told her."

Navi shudders. "Christ. That's a spooky coincidence."

"It's not a coincidence at all." The more I think about it, the more sure I am. "You don't break into a woman's home to take her, and detour to see if your diet is working. This was deliberate. A message."

Navi's frown deepens. "I dunno about all that, brother. A message for who? And why? She's the only one who'd know what a weigh-in on that thing means."

"Exactly." And there it is, the thing that makes my skin crawl. "Whoever sent that man knew the story. A scale sending her a number in the middle of the night is the single most terrifying thing you could do to Calista Meadows specifically. They know shit. From the beginning."

"Who could know something like that?"

I eye him and say something I would much rather not say. "Me. Her… and you."

Navi's face goes ashen. "Ronan, you're not serious."

Even as he says it, I know how fucking wrong it is. I shake my head. "No. Of course not. Just that someone we don't want looking at us is staring without blinking. I'm just not sure where their eyes are directed."

The night gets very quiet around us. We both look in separate directions, at the Bratva patrols manning their stations, ensuring not one single pigeon sets a toe on this block that doesn't belong here.

"Okay," Navi says. "Okay. So it's Lev, and Lev's got somebody close. A mole, whether they know it or not." He blows out a long breath. "That tracks with the leverage angle. And it explains the other thing. He took Pyotr for the money trail, so now, he wants to snatch Cali up for… what, precisely?"

"He doesn't want her for leverage." I hear myself say it before I've fully thought it, but the second it's out, I know it's right. "Or—notonlyfor leverage. Think about it. If all he wanted was something to hurt me, he'd take one of the kids. God forgive me for even saying it, but a man like Lev, that's his move. Kids don't wield knives, so you nab the six-year-old who can't fight back."

"Then why her?"

"Because he doesn't want a hostage." My mouth has gone dry. "He wants the operator. He wants the person who can actually run the machine. That tool's no good to him sitting on a server if nobody knows how to run it. He wants her hands on the keyboard. He wants what I wanted, in the very beginning."

Navi's jaw dropping tells me I'm on the right track.

"That's it, isn't it?" I say as I gather steam. "He wants her tech and he wants her running it, and he doesn't care whether she comes willingly or in the back of a van wrapped in a blanket. Because to a man like Lev—and to the man I used to be—those are the same thing."

"You're not that man anymore."

"Aren't I?" I laugh in self-loathing. "I did enough bad shit to seem like I still am. And now, some ghost of my father's is doing the exact same thing to her, using my own dead father's codes to lock my own men in place while he reaches for the one thing I love." I dig the heel of my hand against my eye, but it doesn't lessen the pressure of this oncoming migraine.

Navi whistles an overwhelmed breath. "Where do we even start?" he asks aloud. "There's so many possible leaks."

I start running through the list in my head.

There's Grigor, who's been with us since before my father died. He handles the crews on the docks. Old-school kind of guy. He misses the old days, sure—half of them do—but Grigor's got a bad hip and a granddaughter he dotes on and he's never once, in twenty years, done a single thing to make me look twice at him. It doesn't feel like Grigor.

But then, a good mole never does. That's the whole problem with the exercise. The ones who feel wrong are usually too obvious, and the ones who feel right are the ones you'd never suspect, which is exactly why they're useful.

There's Anatoly. Younger, hungry, ambitious in a way that could go bad if it ever got pointed the wrong direction. But Anatolywasn't around for the Igor era, certainly not enough to long for those times. Somebody would've had to persuade him, recently, which is possible but it's a tall order.