It didn’t matter.
She fingered her cross hanging around her neck and whispered a quick prayer just in case the whole one-way ticket to hell thing was a certain event in her near future. Maybe a confession when—reality check, if—she made it out of here in one piece wouldn’t be such a bad idea either. In any event, extra brownie points with the Big Man had to help against the devil ruling from her shoulder.
She checked her watch again.
Shit. Twenty minutes. Tops. Should be enough, but it would be pushing her luck.
Before she could change her mind, she leaned forward and pressed her ear to the door. Nothing. Gripping the doorknob to her bosses’ office, Rhia checked it quietly, turning it slow one way then the other. Good. It wasn’t locked.
With one last breath, the snick of the knob released and she was welcomed by a small lamp on the corner of another desk. A decidedly masculine one. Soft golden light poured from beneath a beige shade to highlight polished wood and offered a glimpse of a massive bookcase the entire length of the back wall.
Faint cigar smoke and the smell of leather filled her head as masculine elegance greeted her.
To her right moonlight filtered into the room between narrow slits in the curtains to reveal the backs of two oxblood chairs covered in supple leather and pushed up close to the deeply stained desk fitting of a king. Or kings, since it was the only one in the room.
Long shadows reached across the office like fingers of a giant to play across the vast expanse of a couch.
Opposite the couch, a wide window revealed the floors below, and beside that was a bank of dark monitors.
The door snicked closed as determination pushed her deeper into the half-lit room. Hunched over as not to be seen, she carefully clung to the shadows undetected. Papers were stacked neatly along one side of the desk, Indigo’s doing no doubt, while the other end was clear of all but two empty tumblers. The lack of personal photos that normally cluttered offices didn’t go unnoticed. The scent of the space plus the sight of those abandoned glasses told her exactly who inhabited this room. She could almost see Sevastyan’s long, elegant fingers wrapped around that glass, Roman standing by the window looking down on his people.
She weaved around the leather armchairs and grabbed the first folder off the top of the pile. The club’s name sprawled across the front in midnight black ink. Nothing of importance. She set it aside and went for another. Receipts, order slips, and stockroom reports filled each of the files. “Damn it. This can’t be it.”
With trembling fingers, Rhia pulled out the match case from her bodice. There wasn’t a lot of time, but she knew she was in the right place.
She peeled back the creased and worn cardboard flap. “Come on, Father, speak to me. Show me what I’m looking for.”
Her father’s familiar scribble and a detailed penciled version of Sevastyan’s spider tattoo graced the inside flap of the matchbook. Beneath it sat the cold case number she found in all her research of unsolved missing girl cases. The one Maya mistook for a phone number.
But so far neither had helped her find answers to why her father was dead.
Chimes knifed the silence, signaling half past the hour from some clock hidden in the darkened room.
She swore softly.
Indigo would be back soon. With her heart hitting warp speed, she restacked the files. There had to be more than this, but where?
Offices usually had filing cabinets, but the only thing Volkov seemed to favor was cold stone walls and a fetish for plush furniture in leather. She turned to the bookcase and traced her fingers over the rough spines. Some were long and about three-quarters of an inch thick, resembling the same kind of ledgers she recalled from her father’s offices.
She plucked one from the shelf at eye level and cracked it open. Name after name filled the lines of each page followed by date and country and position in society. Some she recognized—a movie star or two, a rock star known for having wild parties, and a handful of politicians who made the news frequently. All the others were a mystery, but her imagination could fill in the blanks given the dollar signs beside their names. Not many people made that kind of money to throw away. Not legally anyway.
But that wasn’t the oddest part. Why would they want to keep a record of names and amounts? And family members were listed, too, in another column—uncle, mother, sibling, and the list went on to name children and any of their offspring, each category marked.
Rhia flipped several more pages until she came to a section and her heart stopped cold.
With her fingers pressed to the crease, she ripped and tucked the first piece of evidence she feared didn’t exist inside her bodice and thanked the Universe for the first time the restrictive contraption was tight enough to hold the pages in place against her abdomen.
Rhia placed the book on the desk and quickly snapped pictures of the other pages with her phone, not wanting to risk taking too many for fear of being noticed.
Finished, she grabbed another and repeated the process. The information inside identical, only the names changed.
Her father’s office once had mountains of the things dating back a couple of decades that held all kinds of information on her father’s dealings. When she stepped in as the company’s accountant, it had taken her a good six months to transfer everything over to a modern digital system and database. As the world’s leading international shipping company, they dealt with millions of pieces of information, but her father’s records looked nothing like what she saw here.
She placed the book back on the shelf. Unsure what a list of names would get her, she checked her watch. With quick motions, she made sure everything was as she found it on the desk. Choppy motions, nerves, or a combination of both sent her off-kilter, and she caught herself on the edge of the shelf.
A hinge creaked and she tightened her fingers around a heavy gargoyle-shaped bookend, scared soulless someone was walking through the door. She didn’t dare breathe. Cold air caressed her bare thighs and backside. She jolted upright.
She blinked into the dim room when no one appeared. “What the hell?”