Chapter 1
Nikolai
Ifonlylifewereas simple as chess.
I moved the white knight to f3, then walked around the mahogany table to consider black's response. Eleven PM on a Tuesday, and I was alone in the war room—exactly how I preferred it. The board was Italian marble, each piece hand-carved ebony and ivory. My grandfather Mikhail had given it to me when I won the New York Championship at nineteen. Back when winning felt simple.
The war room sat in the basement of our Brooklyn compound, all exposed brick and recessed lighting. Every angle calculated. Every shadow purposeful. The table was solid mahogany, big enough to seat twelve but usually hosting only me and my brothers. On the wall behind me hung a framed architectural blueprint—the main floor of the compound, every room, every exit, every sightline measured and documented. My design. My precision.
I studied the board. Fischer versus Spassky, 1972, Game Six. The game that broke Spassky's confidence, the one where Fischer's Queen's Gambit Declined evolved into something unprecedented. I wasn't just replaying it. I was improving it. Finding the moves Fischer missed, the lines he should have seen.
My whiskey sat untouched beside the board. Two fingers of Pappy Van Winkle in cut crystal. I'd poured it an hour ago. The ritual mattered more than the drinking.
Black needed to respond to the knight. I circled the table again, my footsteps silent on the concrete floor. From this angle, I could see the mistake coming. Black would castle kingside—the obvious move, the safe move. But obvious and safe weren't always correct.
I made black's move anyway. Castling kingside. Sometimes you had to let the obvious mistake play out to understand why it failed.
Control is everything. My father taught me that before the heart attack killed him three years ago. Before Mikhail had to shoulder the burden again at seventy-eight, when he should have been enjoying retirement. Before the weight of the Besharov bratva fell to me, piece by piece, move by calculated move.
The recessed lights hummed above me. I'd specified the exact color temperature—4000 Kelvin, neutral white, no warmth to soften the edges. I didn’t care if things were attractive. Aesthetic. No. I needed to see clearly. Always clearly.
I moved white's next piece. Pawn to e4.
It looked simple, but it was the breakthrough that transformed a quiet positional game into a stranglehold. It shattered black’s pawn structure, leaving them with weak, hanging pawns in the center. Seventeen moves from now, white would have totaldominance. I'd already calculated all of it. Every variation, every desperate attempt by black to break free.
That was the beauty of chess—you could know the ending if you were smart enough to see it coming.
Life should work the same way.
My phone vibrated against the mahogany, face-down. Kostya's ringtone—a double buzz, pause, double buzz. I glanced at it but didn't reach for it. The move wasn't finished yet. I walked around the table one more time, studying the position from black's perspective.
Always finish what you start. Another lesson from my father, delivered over this same board when I was twelve years old. He'd been teaching me the Sicilian Defense. I'd wanted to abandon a losing position, start over with a fresh game. He'd made me play it out to checkmate. Made me feel every consequence of every mistake.
"Life doesn't let you start over, Kolya," he'd said, his voice rough from vodka and cigarettes. "You play the position you're given. You find the best move in a bad situation. You never surrender."
Four months later, he was dead. Heart attack in his study, alone, probably calculating debts and territories the same way I now calculated chess positions. Grandfather found him slumped over his desk, a pen still in his hand.
I picked up my phone. Eleven seventeen PM. Kostya never called this late unless something needed immediate attention. But I made black's next move first—pawn to d5, challenging white's bishop. The wrong move. Black should have developed the knight. But that wasn't what Spassky played, so I followed history's script.
My phone vibrated again. Same pattern. Kostya was persistent.
I completed white's next three moves in quick succession, walking around the table between each one. Development, control of the center, pressure on black's kingside. The game was unfolding exactly as I'd calculated. Fischer's brilliance, refined by my analysis. Perfect.
The whiskey caught the light as I finally sat down. I should drink it. The ritual wasn't complete without the drinking. But my stomach hadn't been right for weeks—stress burning through me like acid, no matter how many times I told myself I had everything under control.
Everything is under control.
I'd been telling myself that since my father died. Since Grandfather pulled me into his study and said, "Six months, Kolya. I'm giving you six months to prove you're ready. Then the families vote, and you become Pakhan."
Six months had become six months more, then another six. Mikhail kept finding reasons to delay. "You're not ready yet," he'd say, even as I handled every crisis, solved every problem, proved myself over and over.
What he meant was: You're not hard enough yet. You still think strategy can replace violence. You still believe in control over chaos.
Maybe he was right.
I reached for the phone, but stopped. One more move. Just one more. White's queen to e2, cementing control over the critical center files. Black's position was deteriorating. In eight moves, it would be hopeless. In seventeen, it would be absolute paralysis.
The phone buzzed a third time. Kostya didn't give up. It was one of his more irritating qualities, paired with his most useful one—absolute loyalty.
