Chapter One
In which Konstantin blows shit up.
Konstantin…
“Our last year, brother.”
Lucca toasts me with his beer bottle, and I click my glass of vodka against it. We sat on the stone ledge, legs dangling, outside the open floor-to-ceiling windows in the common room in our suite, watching the wind tear over the sheer surface of the cliffs bordering this side of the Ares Academy.
Our rooms face the vivid, stormy blue of the Atlantic. Despite the blazing fireplace keeping the main room toasty, we’re still sitting out here like idiots, freezing our asses off and watching the waves beat futilely against the cliffs.
Rubbing the back of my neck, I groan. “It’s hard to be excited when I know every faculty member will attempt to wash us out of the program before June.”
Lucca shrugs. “We survived the first three years. By now we know all their tricks.” He took another gulp of beer. “I hope.”
“You and me both,” I said.
“You’ve been a gloomy asshole since you came back from the Trans-Siberian railway trip,” he nudges me with his shoulder. “Something going on with you and Mariya?”
“Besides the usual bickering and her never-ending snotty behavior?”
Lucca laughs, “Oh, you give as good as you get. Did something happen that night?”
We both know what night he’s talking about. The explosions, how they rocked the train cars, the heat searing my skin, I still see it in my dreams.
Stalling for time, I get up to refresh my drink and grab him another bottle of beer.
“Thanks,” he says, tapping his bottle to my glass. “So? What happened?”
“I… fucked up,” I admit.
Lucca settles himself more comfortably. “Oh, I know I’m going to want to hear this story.”
When Maksim, Pakhan to the Morozov Bratva, agreed to his American-born wife Ella’s wish to take a week’s trip on the Trans-Siberian railroad from Moscow to Vladivostok, it became an extended family vacation. Ella is an incurable romantic and after she’d seen a documentary about the railway being the longest in the world, there was no stopping her.
But a Morozov “family trip” isn’t just for them. There are important alliances through marriage and close friends. Because the Morozov Bratva is allied with the Toscano Mafia through marriage, Giovanni, Dario, and their wives boarded the luxurytrain with us. The Turgenev Bratva is allied through my upcoming marriage to Mariya, and we all came as well.
Each family that joined the trip came with their own security forces. By the time we boarded the train, there were over a hundred of us. Even though we’re traveling halfway across Russia, Maksim made certain that the security protocols would be insanely tight. We were better protected than any king or president would be.
“The trip was pretty cool, even though I still thought it was the worst fucking idea in the world as a security risk,” I said. We stopped in cities I’d never been to even as a native-born Russian, like Tyumen to see the ancient Trinity Monastery with its gold-capped domes. We walked along the Yenisey River in Krasnoyarsk and sampled the Pelmeni dumplings in Irkutsk.
“How about the train?” Lucca asks.
“The train Maksim procured for the trip was some serious high-end shit,” I said, “a black and red series of cars with all this fancy gold detailing. The interior of the train cars looked a lot like the Four Seasons in St. Petersburg, you’ve been there, right?”
“I get the vibe,” he nodded, “crystal chandeliers, expensive furniture, and lots of gleaming wood paneling and polished brass accents? Hopefully, high-end liquor?”
“Slava bogu,yes, thank god,” I laugh. “We had less than two weeks before we had to head back here to the Ares Academy and being stuck on that train and on my best behavior in front of my parents was not how I’d intended to spend my last days of freedom before our professors attempted to murder us in our last year here.”
“And the attack? When was that?” Lucca asks. I’d only had a chance to make a couple of quick calls to let him know we were alive after we could get off the train.
“We had three stops left,” I said. The wind was getting colder, but my Russian blood didn’t feel it as much. “We were having dinner that night when Maksim’sObshchakcame rushing in. He barely managed to say we were under attack before a train car behind us exploded into shrapnel.
“I’d been waiting for it,” I snorted. “The heads and heirs of three major crime families all together on a train in the middle of the fucking Gobi Desert? It would have been easier to strip naked and stand in the middle of Red Square, hand our enemies a gun, and invite them to start shooting!”
“Walk me through this again?” Lucca asks, “I’m trying to picture how you handled a gun battle on a train. Oh, and the tank and the helicopter.”
On the train…
