Page 36 of Tarnished Tyrant (Zhukova Bratva 1)

I shake my head. “That's what you get for tatting ‘sandwich’ across your knuckles.”

“I was eighteen. And it’s a good icebreaker.” He clenches the ‘wich’ hand into a fist and smirks. “Good jawbreaker, too.”

I hold out my hand, silently asking for the dossier he put together.

“There isn’t as much out there about Belle Dowan as you’d think,” he warns as he passes it to me. “She doesn’t have any social media.”

I drop the folder on my desk and flip it open. “If you rely on Instagram stories for your intel, you're fired."

“You can’t fire me. I know too much.”

“Then I’ll kill you.”

“Don’t tease me with a good time, Nikolai.” He perches on the arm of the leather chair across from my desk. “But of course I have other sources. I’m a professional.”

“Then what did you find?” I ask, flipping the folder closed. “I want the elevator pitch version. I’m busy today.”

“Why do I even put the dossier together if you aren’t going to read it?” he grumbles.

“Because if you didn’t, I’d fire you,” I say. “And as you said, I can’t fire you. So I’d have to kill you. Matter of fact, if your annoyance outweighs your usefulness at any point, I’ll kill you. And if I’m just in a bad mood one day, I’ll kill you. So I suggest you start talking. Before I kill you.”

“Ever the charmer,” he sighs mournfully. He starts to recite the facts. “Belle Marie Dowan. Born and raised in a trailer park outside of Omaha, Nebraska, but moved by herself to Oklahoma when she was eighteen. Her mom has a list of arrests longer than my arm, all of them for drug use and possession.”

“Her mother is a junkie?” I wince. “That would explain why she’s traveling with her younger sister. She’s probably taking care of her.”

“Maybe,” Arslan says. “She studied accounting at University of Oklahoma and then took her current job with McCorman Partners Auditing. She’s fresh out of college.”

“Young,” I say absentmindedly. “She looks older, though.”

“Is that important?” Arslan asks.

“What?”

“That she looks older?”

I frown. “It doesn’t matter what she looks like.”

Arslan leans back, his arms crossed. He has a stupid expression on his face, and I know that any second now, he’s going to make me regret not kicking him out of my office and reading the dossier myself.

“It matters if you like her.”

I huff out a laugh. “‘Like’ her? Am I twelve?”

“No, you’re thirty-eight, and I’ve never seen you show this much interest in a woman before. It’s noteworthy.”

“She’s doing our audit and causing trouble. I have to show interest in her to make sure the police don’t show an interest in us.”

He narrows his eyes. “Maybe it’s that… or maybe you want to fuck her.”

“Or maybe I already have,” I spit back.

A dopey smile spreads across Arslan’s face. I hoped my confession would shut him up, but I should know my best friend better than that by now.

“Before or after you kidnapped her sister?”

“I didn’t actually kidnap anyone,” I say. “And it was before. Before I even knew she was going to be our auditor, actually.”

He frowns. “You spend a lot of time I don’t know about in Oklahoma?”

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