Page 15 of Keeping My Enemies Closer: Pt. 2

Kasimir~

I was still angry, but not like I’d been earlier this morning, and that was a good thing.When Zoya had confessed about Marcelle approaching her about the money, it’d taken everything in me not to get the woman’s address, then show up to dismember her while alive.

Everything in me.

Luckily, Viktor had been able to talk me down once I had ordered Zoya upstairs, and once Viktor had left, I’d gone upstairs, then had made it Zoya’s responsibility to keep me from murdering the entire city.With her body not available to me, I had made her sit in my arms, telling me every fucking detail of her life from the moment that she could remember walking on her own.I had forced her to talk me down by leaving no stone unturned about her life, and now I was fairly certain that there wasn’t anything about the woman that I didn’t know.

She had also fallen asleep in my arms afterwards, and once I had put her to bed, I had called my father and brother, demanding a meeting, and they’d both been wise enough to agree.In fact, Viktor had gone straight to my father’s after leaving my house this morning, but that had been expected.

So, with Zoya sleeping and a note to let her know where I was, I was at my father’s house with my brother and sister-in-law, and while Viktor didn’t like Aurora leaving the house much, the auction was her baby, and so she deserved to know what was going on.It was also comical how my brotherandmy father were doting on her like she wasn’t a seasoned killer.

“Well, considering how thorough the vetting process is, we know all that we need to know to find this Marcelle Jensen outside of work,” Viktor remarked.“I can’t see this being too difficult a situation.”

“What do you have on the woman?”my father asked.

While all of us were standing inside my father’s library, Aurora was sitting comfortably, and that’s why my father had chosen his library to meet.The chairs in here were a lot more comfortable than the ones in his office, and everyone was coddling the carrier of the future Korolev heir, which they should since she’d already reached her eighth month of pregnancy.

At any rate, Aurora opened the folder that she’d brought with her, always prepared.“Well, since Kasimir and I had last spoken, we had already figured that it had to be Marcelle, so I had already pulled everything that I could on her because I wasn’t about to let the deception slide,” Aurora answered.“And from what I’ve been able to gather, Marcelle Jensen is thirty-one, has worked at Ruby Red’s Diner for about three years, and she lives alone.”

“Family?”I asked.

“Both of her parents are alive, but they live in Utah,” she answered.“Three years ago, they’d chosen to retire, buying a goat farm, and doing God knows what up there.”

Viktor chuckled, though he was still all about business.“So, they retired and moved at around the same time that Marcelle began working at Ruby’s.Is it a coincidence?”

Aurora shook her head.“No, it’s not.Before that, it shows that Marcelle had a couple of waitressing jobs while in college, but that’s all.College had also turned out to be a bust, and from what I could deduce from the paper trail, her parents had been helping her with her bills up until they’d decided to retire, leaving Marcelle no choice but to get a jobandkeep it.”

“Siblings?”

“None,” she answered.“It’s just her, which explains why she has some entitlement tendencies.”

“What about the men in her life?”my father asked.“If she has no brothers, then who were the two men who attacked Zoya and her mother?”

“Her father has one brother, which gives her two cousins from his side, but both are women,” she went on.“As for her mother’s side of the family, she has one brother and one sister, giving Marcelle three cousins on that side, but two are women, leaving just one male heir.As for the possibility that it was him and a friend, he’s in the Coast Guard and currently lives in California.”

“And the father and uncles are too old to have done this,” my father surmised.

“When Zoya had been questioned by the police, they had asked her to guess their ages, and she’d said somewhere in their thirties,” I confirmed.

“No boyfriends?”Viktor asked.

“Well, while her credit report can’t tell me that, her lease and all the utilities are in her name only,” Aurora answered.“Her bank accounts are also in her name only.Poppy was very thorough when I asked her to get me everything that she could on the woman.”

Poppy Montgomery was the best hacker that we had on the payroll, and not only was the woman sharp as a dagger, but she was loyal as fuck.She had come to work for us when her sister had gotten caught up in a drug deal gone bad, and while Ruin Montgomery was now doing well, Poppy had sold her soul to us, and we’ve been taking good care of it ever since.

“What did her social media give you?”Viktor asked.

“From the pictures that she posts, she appears very single and very ready to mingle,” Aurora drawled out.“Now, while I’ve got nothing against a woman doing what makes her happy, Marcelle’s not inclined to delete pictures of previous dates before posting about her current dates.It’s all there for anyone to judge.”

“So, then...what?”my father asked.“Are we now tasked with pulling up all the guys that she’s slept with to narrow it down?”

We all glanced at each other until Aurora cleared her throat.“Well, as to that...I have a solution that will work faster than tracking down all the men that she’s slept with.”

“What is it?”I asked.

“Let me take care of her,” she stated, and I inwardly winced as soon as the words were out.

“No fucking way,” Viktor bit out as I’d expected.