“You lost Mikhail,” she says softly.
I flinch.
That name is never spoken.
My younger brother. Caught in a street war that wasn’t his, all because a gang back home wanted to make an example of me.Think you can leave here, succeed, without us?I’d been running money, a mule, for them for a while. Until I left.
Thepoitsiyafound him.
“He was your first weakness,” Olena says. “This one—Audrey, the child—they’re your second. The difference is you let Mikhail go. You have to let them go, too, Konstantin.”
DidI ever let Mikhail go?
I stare down at my hands. Calloused. Steady. The hands that built this empire.
The hands that bled to keep it.
Olena sets the drink down without taking a sip. “Fix it, Konstantin. Or lose everything.”
Night falls. The penthouse doesn’t feel any more or less empty.
I pace the long hallway between the kitchen and the windows, glass in hand, drinking something older than most of the men I’ve killed. I should sleep, but it’s been impossible, as if the fight is still happening—as if I’m still on my knees in the atrium, the thug at my back, the pipe’s metallicclang.
Outside, the city pulses.
Inside, the cut at my waist throbs. I could make one call and get painkillers to dull it, but vodka does the same just fine.
At two-fifteen in the morning, my phone rings.
Not the secure line—the personal line.
For a moment I hope it’s her. Audrey changing her mind. Asking me to come back. I haven’t made her leave the country house, can’t bring myself to do it, but Kashmere has reached out to say she’s been packing. Slowly. Agonizingly.
As if she’s considering…
But the name that flashes onto the screen is that of my enemy. Sartorre. It shouldn’t surprise me. I did, after all, kill three of his men only a few nights ago.
I answer without speaking.
He chuckles.
“You’re up.”
“You always call this late?”
“Only when I know you’re not sleeping.” There’s still an edge of an accent to his words, though he, like me, tried hard to assimilate.
I pace to the window. “What do you want?”
“I heard about Sal,” he says casually. “Can’t say I’ll miss him. Thank you.”
“You confirmed it, then. That he was leading the coup.”
“I suspected. In the last days, he went rogue. Stopped answering my calls. Made demands he didn’t earn. You did me a favor, Konstantin.”
I grit my teeth.
Giuseppe’s voice is smoother than the wine he traffics. “You’ve made a mess, but not one you can’t clean. I trust Redline’s already been.”
