𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐌𝐚𝐝𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬

2 | My Line of Work Isn't Ethical Nor Legal

Y/N

My townhouse has a small narrow courtyard out the back where I spend a lot of my free time. Designing it was my latest project that I delved into because I wanted it to be my happy place. Despite the size, I have a few mini 'areas' in which I spend my time. It's a narrow 'L' shape, which was tricky to ensure I utilise the space efficiently.

When you first go outside, you come to a small wooden deck that I lacquered and stained myself over the course of several days, with a hanging hammock for reading and relaxing in the sun. Going down the few little steps you get to the main grassy entertaining area which takes up most of the space; a sprawling lounge setting surrounding a sunken fire pit built into the ground. This is where my guests usually convene.

Moving past that larger area, you come to the corner of the 'L' shape. For most people, it looks like a dead end with outdoor twinkly lights and hedges, but the path around the corner is past the hedge. This is where my secluded little hot tub space is, an area which is private and serene. That's where you find me now, soaking in the warm water as the brisk afternoon air hits my face and shoulders. I have my AirPods in, listening to a Russian language course.

"Я скучаю по тебе, I missed you," I say aloud, repeating after the man in my ear. My job requires me to do lots of different things, but learning Russian surprised me. Then again, it's only a few phrases.

"Тебе это нравится?, do you like this?" I repeat, fumbling the pronunciation of the last word and sighing when the audio was too fast for me to hear the instructor say it again properly.

My phone started to ring and I tapped the answer button with a semi wet finger from the water before leaning my head back on the headrest of the hot tub.

"Priya, good morning!" I say cheerily to my boss.

"Y/N, happy Monday hun! Just a quick one on the Yurochka file, when do you think you'll be able to close it out? The client is asking about the timeline on completion," she said, the subtle clicking of her nails against the keyboard in the background.

"Russia is a few hours in front of us so I'll have access to Yurochka's computer by end of day today. Tell the client that once I receive payment I'll be able to transfer it over to him," I said checking my phone for any wired bank transfers from the client; none.

"Cheap bastards haven't done it yet... Alright, I'll let them know you won't transfer the data until after payment. That's all from me, if you want to pick up any more assignments when you close this one out, let me know," she said before we said our goodbyes and hung up.

My new line of work is far more interesting than anything I have done before. It hits the spot of helping people, cheating the system and fucking over the government. Private investigators are legal in many countries, although there are many laws they cannot break. In our jobs, we break them all.

Priya met with me almost a year ago with a lucrative job offer. At first, I assumed it would be any old private investigation job seeking out data and working with anxious housewives and angry business men. But Priya ran her business differently.

Entirely women, she curated the perfect niche team to execute various jobs that legal private investigators would have to say no to. Wire tapping, hacking, smuggling, mercenary roles, cyber breaches, theft, you get the idea. Each of us girls specialise in different areas. Some of the girls do more physical jobs like drug smuggling or theft, some are more low key.

Of course, with the laws we are breaking, comes a hefty pay check at the end. Priya doesn't execute any of the jobs herself anymore, she delegates tasks to us girls and we choose whether we want them or not. If we say yes, Priya takes a percentage of the cash we receive.

Honestly, it's a dream job.

The current assignment I have, I have been working on for several weeks. Yurochka Aminov is a notorious arms dealer in Moscow who has done wrong by many of his former associates; now they want him dead. Of course, Priya has a strict no kill rule in our business. But that doesn't mean we won't help someone else kill him.

My current assignment is to hack into Yurochka's systems and infiltrate his entire weapons business, because once he's dead, so are his contacts. So the client wants to leverage his relationship with existing business partners before they wipe him out. But someone this high up in a crime world doesn't necessarily have an easy-to-hack computer, no, no.

To do this, I need to tap in wirelessly. And to do that, I need him to grant me access. But why would someone grant computer access to a stranger? That's where my strategy role comes in. Tonight, I have a video call with Yurochka posing as a Russian call girl. The X rated site was easy enough to hack and duplicate as my own, so Yurochka thinks he's logging into his favourite porn site, when in actuality it'll be my own domain.

Wearing a wig, dark makeup and an outfit to outdo a stripper, he'll be too distracted to realise that his servers will be getting hacked. It's funny though, as much as Priya taught me majority of this process, I learnt a lot myself. And fuck, when I'm working in a job like this, my security is like the fucking White House. It'll be impossible for any of this to track back to me. Plus, I'll be doing this from a hotel tonight.

So, I'll get my tits out, he'll give me audio and video access by joining the call in the first place and once he leaves the fake site, I'll still be able to see exactly what he's doing on his computer. That'll allow me to track everything he clicks, views, watches and pays for.

When I finally receive the fucking payment from the client, I'll cleanse the data from Yurochka's computer, put it on a hard drive and give it to Priya. That's then mission accomplished.

There's a good reason I agree to these types of jobs. For this one in particular, the client only wants the list of distributors that Yurochka sells to. But if I'm wiping multiple sources inside his computer, that means I have all this extra data for myself; I'm building my own collection of criminal information.
Win win scenario.

The payments are quite large for the time and effort we are spending on each job, not to mention the obvious illegality of it all. For this specific job, the client has agreed to transfer me $25,000. It's honestly a small price to pay given that the jail time for me would be much larger. But hey, I'm good at what I do and twenty five grand is a shit tonne of money for a few weeks work.

There's a benefit to working in this industry again though, I can keep tabs on The Family and their work. The amount of clients Priya gets who are affiliated with them in one way or another, is incredible. I know I shouldn't care about what Tom does, but I can't help but need to know what he's up to.

With the amount of traitors in that mafia that I know about, I could the entire syndicate it in a day. But having the information to myself is way more valuable than seeing Tom Holland's life crash and burn.