“He may have information on Vance,” I replied, taking a drink of my wine. Liam glanced up, waiting for Fedel to speak, but before he could, Jinx started the jet.

“Well sit down, Fedel,” Liam stated.

He was more than happy to, and I respected that he was working hard to make sure I didn’t ever have to put him in his place again.

“You said he might have something?” Liam asked, and Fedel pulled out what looked to be letters in code and some in Russian.

“I haven’t been able to decrypt them all,” Fedel replied quickly. “However, from what I can tell, this is Vance’s Step Two.”

“You skipped a step?” I asked, picking up the papers.

“It wasn’t clear until now. Step One was getting started with Alexei Rozhkov,” Fedel replied, pulling out the photo of the old Russian mob boss with a scar across his neck. Some brave soul had snuck into his bedroom and slit his throat but the bastard still lived.

He was one of the most powerful men, alongside Orlando and Sedric. Was being the key word.

“Did your people kill him?” I looked to Liam.

Liam shook his head. “Father had been hacking away at him for years. Then when Declan stole the rest of his fortune, the man was basically crippled. He couldn’t afford the high quality smack anymore. No junky would even blink at his shit. His men left him, he lost his houses, friends, everything, and my father wanted to kill him, but I thought it would best to make him live in the slums he created. All he had was some precious fourteen-million dollar red diamond, which I thought was just a rumor until we heard someone stole it.”

Fedel looked at me, snickering as I just drank my sweet red wine. The whole cabin became silent as Liam and his men’s eyes slowly fell on me. My people boasted with pride, but Liam stared at me in shock.

What the fuck were they shocked for? As if stealing a rock was the worst thing I had ever done.

“You stole it,” Declan said, slowly rolling it around his tongue, and Neal looked jealous.

“I needed a new coaster?” I replied. It wasn’t a big deal to me. Liam didn’t speak, he simply leaned back into his chair and frowned out the window.

“How old were you?” Neal asked, leaning back as well, as if I was about to give him a fucking bedtime story.

“It was the weekend before my eighteenth birthday. I wanted to get myself something nice, pretty, and shiny. So I did a little digging, found his not-so-secret safe house in northern Russia, and thought why not? I haven’t pissed off any Russians yet, and stole it.” It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, but I did it.

“She was in and out in eight minutes,” Fedel added. “Three minutes to break in, two minutes to kill two of his men, a minute and nineteen seconds to grab the jewel, and then forty-two seconds to get out.”

“What happened to the last minute and forty-one seconds?” Declan asked, but his mind seemed to be racing.

“The last minute and forty-one seconds to send the house up in flames,” Jinx added over the intercom, making me smile.

Jinx didn’t often show his face—he preferred to keep hidden from everyone—but that didn’t mean he wasn’t always listening. Plus, he would know. He was the one who picked me up.

LIAM

Are you fucking kidding me! Seriously! At seventeen, I was a sophomore in college still trying to get rid of my acne and my awkward bullshit, while she was blowing up houses and stealing a rare jewel in the bloody motherland.

Pinching the bridge of my nose, I turned to Fedel. “What does this have to do with Vance?”

The idiot was so busy getting high off his past memories he almost forgot why we were talking about this.

Declan pulled out a photo of a red-haired woman. “Meet the woman formerly known as Saige Rozhkov.”

“He had a daughter?” I replied but the closer I stared, the more I saw the resemblance.

“Formerly?” Mel asked him as she glared at the redheaded woman in the photo.

“By the end of tonight, she will be Saige Valero,” he replied, and both Mel and I put our drinks down.

“What the fuck?” Mel and I said together.

“From what I’ve learned, the man who slit old Rozhkov’s throat was Vance when he was on his rise to power. He wanted Saige to marry Amory. However, the old man wouldn’t have it. That’s when he went to Orlando, but he was rejected again. So Vance took a step back, and I guess allowed both your families to destroy Rozhkov. But since you let him live, Vance went back and killed him, but not before torturing every last secret out of him. Even though Alexei was destroyed, he still had the names. As both of you know, old names come with old favors. He pulled every last one of them after the fall of Rozhkov,” Fedel explained quickly as he looked through more papers.

“Then why does he need this Saige?” I asked. He had the power already. The girl seemed to be useless.

“Because they’re foreigners,” Mel whispered, and I could see her connecting the dots in her mind. “Vance and his brothers came from Italy where my father all but banished them. The Russians hate outsiders. This Saige is a pawn. Something to make his men stand straighter behind him.”

Made sense. “Does she know?”

He nodded and frowned. “She’s the one who sold out her father’s location to Vance. She apparently misses the power—these encrypted letters are hers. I thought they were ranting’s of a mad woman at first—”

“Today is the day,” I read the letter aloud, which had the worst grammar, even in Russian. “Today is the day I take my rightful place on the throne. My father was fool and lost everything. He didn’t know how to play the game. But I do. I have spent years planning my revenge and now with the power of the Amory. With the power of the Valero, I shall be queen. I will cover the earth with the blood of my enemies. Starting with Irish Cunt and Italian whore.

“And this is why we do not keep journals. It’s dated for today,” I added as I handed it to her. I knew she couldn’t read it, but she looked ready to rip it from my hands.

“So she’s batshit crazy. Give me a location and I will kill her now whether it’s true or not.” Mel’s eyes narrowed in on the paper. If she wasn’t careful, she would set it on fire.

Fedel frowned. “I don’t have one. These letters were taken from her personal tablet. However, they are bouncing from eight different countries. We see everything she types but have no idea where she is.”

“What makes you think this is real? She cannot honestly be stupid enough to be writing her innermost thoughts and plans,” I asked him. He said he hadn’t verified it yet, and despite how true it may have seemed, it could have been a lie.

“As requested, a notice was put out about the death of Orlando. Because of that, Amory went back to Russia. However, it wasn’t just him who came home—all the Valero did. Most of them spread out through Moscow. But all within walking distance to the Black Hotel where there is no one else staying but a Mrs. S.,” Fedel explained, and all I wanted to do was bash his head in. The downside to ruling an empire was the lack of fucking vacation days. I was looking forward to this camp.

“Tell me about Mrs. S. personally,” Mel demanded softly as she stared at the photo of her.

“Saige Rozhkov, age twenty-six, born in Stavropol, Russia to a prostitute of a mother. Her father basically wanted nothing to do with her, from what I could find. He had two other sons, and I guess she wasn’t cool with being treated as a second-class citizen, so she killed both boys at sixteen. She got her father’s attention, and he made her his heir. She has been a black widow of sorts. However, she doesn’t need to marry them to suck the life out of them. She’s trained herself in hand-to-hand combat, taught herself how to fly almost anything, and she can speak Italian, French, English, Spanish, Hebrew, and Russian. She’s cold, and she’s merciless,” Fedel finished, and at the end of his little biography, he looked straight to Mel.