"I can imagine," I'd said, blushing slightly as I shuffled papers on my desk.
"Ever had a Russian lover, kotyonok?" he asked, his voice low, seductive.
Later, I would ask Viktor what 'kotyonok' meant. He had given me a scrunched-up face, then a head shake and told me it meant 'kitten'.
"No."
"No?" he asked, rounding my desk, tilting his head to the side to watch me in such an intense way that I had to fight the urge to squirm in my chair. "You won't regret," he said, giving me a smile and going toward the door. It hadn't exactly escaped me that he hadn't said "you wouldn't regret", but "you won't regret", as if doing so for me was an eventuality. Like, maybe, he wanted to be that first Russian lover.
So maybe a part of me blamed my cluelessness on my girlish crush on one of my bosses.
But, truly, it likely wasn't even my fault.
It was all so well hidden.
If maybe I was less of a perfectionist about work, I might have missed it.
Later, I would figure the reason Viktor hired me was because I 'just' had an online degree, that maybe I wasn't as educated or as observant of details as someone who went to a university.
He was obviously wrong.
And one snowy, miserable January morning alone in the office that I couldn't seem to get warm enough, I first started noticing the inconsistencies. It was just small things at first that I had always just written off as unknown income, cash register miscalculations or unaccounted for business expenses. That was until I started to see that each month, each of those amounts was exactly the same. And, granted, I knew enough about finances to know that, hey, freak similarities happened on occasion. But not every single month for a year.
So then, trapped in the office during what turned out to be a blizzard, I started digging.
It didn't take long until I felt a pit get planted in my belly, heavy, foreign, uncomfortable.
Most of the inconsistencies were wholly unexplainable.
It wasn't the registers.
It wasn't pay back for money owed.
It wasn't anything but cash deposits of unknown origins.
I loaded up the coffee machine and went looking through the filing cabinets, praying to find something that pointed to something other than some sort of illegal transactions.
That's when I found them: the files that changed my whole life.
With shaking hands, I reached for my cell, opening an incognito window so there would be no history of my search, and I looked up the Kozlov brothers. And, let's just say, it didn't take me long to figure out that the people I was working for weren't just some successful Russian businessmen. Sure, they truly did own legitimate businesses like their restaurant and pub and pawn shop. But they owned those to launder the dirty money that they got through other means, namely bringing in poor, hopeless women from their homeland and auctioning them off to the highest bidders. It wasn't, in the traditional sense, human trafficking. Granted, the women were promised things they generally didn't get, namely rich husbands who could help them support their families back home, but the women weren't exactly unwilling. They just had no other options. But still, in the law's eyes, it was the sale of human beings and completely illegal. Apparently, law enforcement had been trying to nab them for years. But they never screwed up.
That was, until they hired me I guess.
See, there was a lot of things I could still claim to be: a little unobservant, too trusting, not much of a two-step thinker, but I was not, and promised myself I would never be, gullible or naive ever again.
And I damn sure wasn't going to be involved with even more criminals.
Hell, I had kind-of, in a way, been helping them conduct their money laundering while I worked for them.
I was not, was abso-fucking-lutely not, going to get myself wrapped up in another sweep when the cops eventually did have something to come after them with.
So with a sweat breaking out over my whole body, I made two sets of copies of all the information I had. I placed each set in separate manila envelopes and sealed them. I tucked one into my purse and held one against my chest under my jacket as I made my way out of the office on shaky legs and trudged through eight inches of snow all the way to the closest police station.
I was met by a one Detective Conroy Asher who was tall and fit and way to freaking good looking for a cop. He took me into a room and took the folder from me, looking over the contents with a furrowed brow. When he looked up at me, though, instead of seeing the glee I expected for finally giving them a piece of information they needed to finally nab the Kozlov brothers, I saw concern.