He looked around and spied one of his men, Vlad, in a corner standing guard. “Vlad!” he snapped at him.

The man straightened at once and hurried over. “Yes, Pakhan?”

Mikhail jerked his head in the direction of the horny brunette. “Get that woman out of my house right now. And you better tell your colleagues if I see one more strange woman in this villa again, I’ll have all your heads.”

Vlad nodded jerkily and rushed toward the pool girl.

Her feet barely touched the floor as Vlad spirited her out of there in a jiffy. Mikhail had been right. His men had decided he was horny and had been sending a steady parade of women his way to see if one of them could coax him out of his foul temper.

Too bad none of those women was Mira.

She had been very bendy, too, he thought, torturing himself with memories of her flexibility and her wet eagerness. Despite the relatively cramped quarters of the vehicle, she’d been able to twist and turn and move just right. She had driven him out of his mind with lust, and he wanted more of her.

He had never been this hard in his entire life.

He rose to his feet, his thoughts in a whirl. This was madness. He had a lot of work to take care of, a lot of responsibilities to see to, and all he could think of was how much he missed fucking a woman he’d met only once.

Two of his men burst into the pool area at a run just then, their faces twisted with worry.

Mikhail switched immediately into predator mode, all thoughts of lust wiped from his mind. His head lifted as he sensed danger. “What’s wrong?”

“Dostoevsky grabbed three of our men off the streets this morning. Word is he’s sent them into his torture chambers,” one of his men said urgently.

Torture chambers. The two words rang like an urgent alarm in Mikhail’s head. The mafia world was cold and dark and he knew its inner workings like the back of his hand. No one sent an enemy to his torture chambers unless he wanted information from them. What was Dostoevsky’s game now? What new information was he seeking about him?

Mikhail jerked out his phone and typed in a number. Like any self-respecting mafia lord, he’d planted a mole in Dostoevsky’s home. It hadn’t been the easiest thing in the world to do, but he had done it. Perhaps his mole could confirm what exactly the old coot was up to.

“Sam, what the hell’s going on?”

A familiar voice chuckled in his ear. “Sammy Boy cannot come to the phone right now, Nikolai. He’s too busy picking up pieces of himself from off the highway.”

Mikhail froze as the voice registered. That was Dostoevsky, and if the man himself had answered Sam’s phone then it meant only one thing—he had discovered Sam was a mole and done away with him. Considering Sam had been deep undercover for three months and had never been found out until this morning, it meant the three men Dostoevsky had captured were already singing like canaries.

His heart wrenched inside of him at the awful realization that he would have to kill three of his own men to get them to stop talking, and he would have to do it right away.

“Just try to think about how many more of your dirty little secrets I’ve found out,” Dostoevsky continued. “How many of my people have I planted around you, men and women?”

Something about the inflection of Dostoevsky’s voice when he said the word women made Mikhail stiffen in anger and shock. That night with the redhead in the limousine flashed before his eyes. It had been too good to be true.

A beautiful red-headed virgin walking into a club alone, willing to enjoy a one-night stand in the arms of a perfect stranger before fading into the night like Cinderella—it was the stuff of fairytales, he realized now. She had to have been a spy! Dostoevsky had planted her! She’d been a wonderful actress and he’d been an absolute fool to fall for her air of innocence and wide eyes. She must have stolen something from him for his archenemy; maybe a paper, a flash drive, a picture?

He tried to remember if he’d said or done anything he shouldn’t have while he was in the throes of passion, or if he had lost any vital documents. But try as he might, he came up blank.

She had looked so naïve and harmless. She’d been anything but. She was a cold, manipulative, and calculating bitch.

A niggling of doubt entered his mind. Could she be the one Dostoevsky meant? He had said “women” after all, and there had been a steady parade of strange women through his villa this past week until he’d put a stop to it a few moments ago.

Suddenly, a memory of Mira’s secretive smile and the way she had escaped into the night first chance she got flitted through his mind. He was almost twice her age and she’d looked at him out of sultry, lustful eyes as though he were the best thing since sliced bread. Something about her mannerisms had screamed wealth and sophistication despite the not-so-expensive dress she’d been wearing.

Oh, she was a spy alright. Mikhail could feel it in his bones—Mira had been a whole lot more than just an average young girl looking for a nice time. She wasn’t any ordinary girl; she had to be one of Dostoevsky’s practiced whores and spies.

With a vicious oath, he strode into his villa, walking so briskly that no one could keep up with his long strides.

He headed straight for the underground room only he had access to. It was one of the requirements of being head of the Bratva, there were some best-kept secrets.

He would find that redhead if it was the last thing he did, and he would take his revenge out on her. She must have leaked the routine of his men to Dostoevsky, which was why the cretin had known where to pick up the three men he now had in his custody.

Whenever new men joined his Bratva, he got Jon, his head of labs, to insert some sort of device into them as an insurance. It was a small chip that could quickly become a kill switch if any of the men tried to—or were forced to—be unfaithful. Now Mikhail was headed to the lab to activate the kill switch to keep those three men from talking their heads off any further. He was going to have to kill his own men in cold blood, and he had that redheaded bitch and her master Dostoevsky to thank for it.