I picked up the phone, glancing at the screen. Three missed calls. A text: "I’m coming to the war room. We have a problem."
I set the phone down and looked at the board one final time. White was winning. Black was losing. The outcome was inevitable, assuming both players saw the position clearly.
But that was the flaw in chess, wasn't it? Both players had to be equally matched for the game to matter. Otherwise, you were just executing an algorithm. Playing out a script written seventeen moves ago.
If only life were as easy as chess.
But I was about to learn it wasn't.
Kostya didn't knock. He never did. The steel door swung open hard enough to make the frame shudder, and my middle brother filled the doorway like a natural disaster given human form. Six-five, two-forty, all of it muscle and bad intentions. His boots were loud on the concrete despite his training.
"We've got a problem," he said in Russian. His default when it was just family.
I didn't look up from the chess board. "Define problem."
Kostya's jaw tightened. I could feel his impatience from across the room, radiating off him like heat. He wanted action. He always wanted action. That was why Mikhail made him our enforcer instead of our strategist.
"The Belyaevs—" he started.
"Let me," said a smoother voice from behind him.
Maksim appeared in the doorway, somehow making Kostya's bulk look even larger by contrast. My youngest brother was dressed like he'd just stepped out of a Forbes photoshoot—tailored charcoal suit, cashmere scarf draped casually around his neck. He carried his ever-present tablet in one hand and balanced two paper cups from The Brooklyn Bean Bar in the other.
"Move," Maks said to Kostya in English.
Kostya moved. Not because Maks could make him—that would require a tactical nuclear weapon—but because Maks had coffee and information. In our world, both were currency.
"I brought you the Ethiopian roast you like," Maks said, crossing to the table and setting one cup by my elbow. His movements were precise, economical. He didn't disturb a single chess piece. "And before Kostya makes the situation sound like the apocalypse, it's not."
I finally looked up. Met Kostya's dark eyes first—frustration and barely leashed violence simmering there. Then Maks's lighter brown gaze—amused, calculating, already three steps ahead of wherever Kostya had stopped thinking.
My brothers. Both necessary. Both dangerous in their own ways.
"The Belyaevs are sniffing around our territory in Brighton Beach," Maks continued, setting his own coffee down and pulling up something on his tablet. "Three cars, six men, asking questions at the restaurants on the boardwalk. Dimitri's place, the hookah lounge, Vladimir's jewelry store."
The Belyaevs were a new force in New York. They’d come over from Moscow recently and were making waves. Bad waves.
Kostya crossed his massive arms. "They're testing us."
"Obviously," Maks said.
"We should send a message."
"Obviously," Maks repeated, this time with that edge that meant he was mocking Kostya's bluntness.
I picked up the coffee Maks brought. It smelled delicious.
"Sit," I said.
One word. Quiet. But they both moved immediately. Kostya dropped into the chair nearest the door—his exit training never turned off. Maks took the seat across from me, positioning his tablet so I could see the screen.
The hierarchy was clear. It always had been. Not because I was bigger than Kostya—I wasn't. Not because I was smoother than Maks—I wasn't. But because our grandfather chose me, and in the bratva, the Pakhan's word was law.
Even when that Pakhan was seventy-eight and supposedly retired.
Even when his chosen successor was thirty-three and unproven.
I studied my brothers over the rim of my coffee cup. Kostya was vibrating with barely contained energy, his scarred knuckles drumming an impatient rhythm on the mahogany table. Maks looked relaxed, but his fingers were dancing across his tablet screen, pulling up files, cross-referencing data, doing a billion things at once the way he always did.
