Trapped with the Mob Boss: A Mafia Romance (Petrov Bratva) by Nicole Fox (best book recommendations txt) 📗

Let’s just find him is what she means, but I know she’s just as scared as I am that we will find him. Focusing on his phone seems less ominous.

We walk up the floating wooden stairs and all the doors on the second floor are closed. “Which way?”

Bella grabs the glass railing for support and then stands tall, pointing to the door to the right of the stairs. “That’s his office.”

I lay my hand on her shoulder. “Do you want me to go first?”

She hesitates and then shakes her head. “No, I’m fine.”

Taking slow, measured steps, Bella crosses the stair landing and lays her hand on the knob. As she turns it, I’m holding my breath, and when the door finally swings open, she sags with relief. “Clear.”

This room doesn’t have a body in it, but there are five other rooms left to search. “Do you want to look for his phone in here while I check the other rooms?”

Bella’s mouth twists to the side, and I can tell she’s warring with herself. She came inside even though I advised against it, but now, faced with the reality of actually discovering her dead dad, I know her resolve is beginning to waver. After a long deliberation, she nods. “Sure, that sounds good.”

I grab her hand, bring her knuckles to my lips, and then leave to search the other rooms. If anyone was in the house, they would have come for us by now, but I still keep my gun at the ready just in case.

The first door is a closet full of bright yellow rain gear and a box labelled “Christmas decorations.” The next is a bathroom that looks virtually untouched. When I push the third door open, the door stops mid-swing, catching on something, and I jump back and draw my gun. The door bounces a few times, but otherwise the room is silent. I peek my head around, hoping I won’t find the senator’s dead body, and instead find a butterfly-patterned body pillow on the floor.

One glance around the room, and I realize I’m in Bella’s childhood bedroom. The walls are pink and covered in band posters and concert tickets. Mixed amongst old bottles of nail polish and perfume are a few stuffed animals and an open jewelry box with a ballerina inside. The room is a mess, but not torn to shreds like downstairs. The foldable closet doors are open with a few sweaters dangling from hangers and the bedding has been thrown around, but otherwise it’s in fine shape. And mercifully free of any dead bodies.

The next two rooms—what I deduce are the master bedroom and a guest room—are both more of a mess, but still clear. I find a laptop on top of the dresser that I grab, and I’m just finishing my sweep of the master bedroom, checking the bedside table drawers for any sign of the senator’s phone, when Bella calls out.

“Found it!”

I jog down the hallway towards the office, and Bella is standing behind the desk with her dad’s phone in her hand, forehead wrinkled. “He changed the passcode, though. I can’t unlock it.”

When she looks up at me, she seems to remember all at once what I was doing, and her eyes go wide. “Did you find anything?”

I hold up the laptop. “Just this.”

She sighs with relief and then snaps her finger, gesturing for me to hand over the computer. “His phone backs up to his laptop, and I think I know the password.”

She plugs the laptop into the charger coming from a cord hole in the corner of the desk and flips it up, drumming her fingers nervously on the keyboard while she waits for it to boot up. Finally, she taps out a password that has to be sixteen digits long and hits enter.

“Yes,” she hisses, dropping down into the computer chair. I move around the desk to see the screen. As soon as it turns on, there’s one file in the center of the screen. Everything else has been removed.

“What is that?” I ask.

Bella shakes her head. “I was always hounding him about cleaning up his home page. He saved every file to his desktop and it was impossible to find anything.”

“Are you going to open it?” Before I can even get the words out, she’s double-clicking on the file. A Word document pops up. It’s a letter.

Dear whomever it may concern,

If you are reading this, then the shit has officially hit the fan. I can’t be too upset. It has been a long time coming. Everything started when I was studying abroad in college. I met a few men in a bar—Russian men could drink me under the table—and they liked my political aspirations and career trajectory. One drink led to another, and the next thing I knew, I had agreed to use my power to help them out. To me, it was no more than a drunken empty promise, but to them, it was a binding agreement. When I came back to the States and rose to power, they called in their favor. I’ve been bowing to their wishes ever since. I made more criminal connections to try and undo the first and most dangerous of them all, but no one seemed capable of untethering me from The Society. And now, it appears it’s too late.

Bella pushes the computer away and spins around in the chair, swiping her arm across her teary eyes. “I can’t read this.”

“He’s confessing to everything,” I say, pushing back the screen so I can finish the letter. “It reads like a—”

“A suicide note,” Bella sobs. “What else could it be?”

I shake my head and then stand up, gesturing widely. “I don’t know if you noticed, but there isn’t a body.”

“Because he didn’t commit suicide,” she says, wiping away tears once again and standing up. “He would never. But he’d let people think he did.”

I raise my eyebrows. “You think he’s faking his own death?”

She nods. “And confessing to crimes he didn’t