“You know what happened to me.”
Maybe I did.
Maybe I was living it.
Maybe that was what she’d been trying to tell me all along.
Chapter 2 – Kirill
Rain hammered against the penthouse windows like a thousand tiny fists demanding entry, but I’d barely noticed. My world had shrunk to the glow of six monitors bleeding blue and green light across my face, casting shadows that made the room feel like the inside of a server farm.
“You need to let this go, Kirill.”
Vladimir’s voice crackled through the speaker, gravelly and uncompromising. Even through a phone line, the man commanded respect.
I leaned back in my chair, the leather creaking beneath me. My fingers drummed against the armrest, the rhythm matching my pulse. “Let it go?” The words tasted bitter. “He made a fool of me, Vladimir. Stole millions right under my nose. From our accounts. Bratva accounts.”
“I know what he took.”
“Then you know I can’t stop.” My jaw clenched hard enough to make my teeth ache. “I’ll rip every shadow apart until I find him. Search every corner of this godforsaken city, this country, this world if I have to. Till my last breath.”
A long pause. In that silence, I could almost see him sitting in his Moscow office, ice-blue eyes calculating every angle. Vladimir didn’t waste words. When he spoke, you listened, or you paid the price.
“Remember what happens when your blood runs too hot.”
My hand stilled on the armrest. The memory hit me like a sucker punch to the gut—two men, training room floor slick with sweat and something darker, my knuckles raw and screaming. I’d been fifteen. Hadn’t meant to kill them. Hadn’t meant for the rage to consume everything until there was nothing left but red and the sound of bones breaking.
“Keep your head this time, Kirill. Remember our deal.”
The line went dead.
I stared at the phone for a long moment before setting it down with deliberate care, as if it might detonate. Outside, lightning split the sky, illuminating Chicago’s skyline in stark relief. The city looked different from up here, innocent almost. But I knew better. Darkness lived in every corner, and it didn’t discriminate.
If it hadn’t been for Vladimir, I wouldn’t be here at all.
When Douglas’s betrayal had blown my world to pieces, the Bratva nearly tore me apart. They wanted blood. Mine. They didn’t care that I’d been played, that I’d trusted the wrong person. In their eyes, I was responsible for every ruble that vanished, every account that got drained. The old guard wanted my head on a pike as a warning.
But Vladimir knew the truth.
He’d raised me alongside his own son, Andrei. Took me in when I was five years old and my parents wrapped their car around a tree on a Moscow highway, leaving me alone in a world that didn’t have room for orphans. Vladimir stepped in that same day, not out of obligation, but because my father had been his best friend. Because loyalty meant something to men like him.
He saw things in me that others didn’t. The fire. The brutality simmering just beneath the surface, the kind that could destroy everything if left unchecked. That’s why he didn’t let me stay on the enforcement path, despite my talent for it. Despite the fact that violence came to me as naturally as breathing.
Fucker shoved me into tech instead.
Buried me in servers and code, till my hands learned to destroy with keystrokes instead of punches. Till I became the ghost in the machine, the one who saw everything and left no trace. It was safer that way. For everyone.
But especially for me.
I stood, pacing to the window. Rain slid down the glass, distorting the city lights below into watercolor smears of red and gold. My reflection stared back at me, my jaw tight with tension I couldn’t release and a face that looked older than thirty-eight. This life aged you in ways that had nothing to do with time.
Two years ago, I got my first real lead on Douglas. It wasn’t much—a shadow of a transaction, a ghost of a login from an IP address in Chicago. But it was enough. Vladimir let me move here, let me chase the bastard who’d made me look weak. Who’d stolen from us.
But there was a condition. Only one.
Don’t kill anyone.
I pressed my palm against the cool glass, fingers splayed. The promise sat in my chest like a stone. I’d agreed because I had no choice, because Vladimir’s protection was the only thing standing between me and a shallow grave in the Russian wilderness. But every day, that promise felt heavier.
