She clears her throat. “You have a visitor who insisted on waiting in your office. He… He wouldn’t take no for an answer, and security seemed reluctant to intervene.”
My jaw locks, tendons rigid beneath skin that suddenly feels too tight. Only one person makes my security team “reluctant.”
“I’ll be right up.”
I don’t run. Running would signal panic to the staff, and I learned long ago that panic spreads faster than flames in a grease fire.
But I don’t take my time, either. As soon as I’m out of sight, I lunge into the service elevator instead of the main one. As floors climb—too slow, toofuckingslow, what in the fuck is taking so goddamn long?—I wrack my brain.
What the hell is he doing here? It’s been sixteen years since we last spoke, and I would’ve been pretty damn thrilled to hit seventeen. It’s better when I can pretend that that part of my life got cremated along with our mother’s body.
Aleksei has other ideas, apparently.
Finally, the doors whoosh open and release me onto the main floor. It’s quiet in this corner. Patricia’s desk sits empty. She’s made herself scarce, smart woman. My office door is closed, but I can see light bleeding out from underneath it, and I catch a whiff of menthol cigarettes. The confirmation I didn’t want and didn’t need. He always did like those stupid things. Pretentious, preening bastard.
I push open the door.
Aleksei Izotov sits in my chair, his feet up on my desk, the menthol cigarette smoldering between his tattooed fingertips.He’s got one of my Michelin plaques in his free hand, examining it. As I walk in, he stubs out his cigarette precisely in the middle of the flower, then flicks the butt halfway across the room. It lands on the carpet at my feet.
I step on it and grind it to nothing beneath my heel, then sigh and look up.
He hasn’t changed much—same sharp cheekbones we both inherited from our mother, same cold blue eyes, though his are darker than mine. Meaner, too. His suit looks like sharkskin, gleaming and gaudy. A tattoo creeps up his neck from beneath his collar. That wasn’t there sixteen years ago.
Two stars at the tip of an eagle’s wings. I know what that means.He wears the crown now.
“Little brother.” He checks his nails, chews at the end of one. As if he’s bored. “Nice trophy.”
“Thanks. I earned it.”
His brow arches. “You must be proud.”
I shrug. “It’s a plaque, it’s an ashtray, it’s meaningless. I don’t give a shit one way or the other.”
“And yet it must feel so good to be baptized in the fine waters of legitimacy, does it not?” He grins. One of his teeth is gold-capped. That’s new, too.
I stay where I am, one foot inside the door. Christ, it’s gonna take me ages to get the smell of menthol out of here. I’ll have to rip up the carpet and start over. “You’re in my chair, Al.”
He ignores me. “Our mother would be proud.” He drags his eyes up to mine, slowly, lazily, as if gravity weighs more on him thanit does on the rest of us. “Her precious little Semyon, feeding the rich instead of robbing them.”
I cringe at the name I haven’t heard in a long time.Moy Semyon, my little prince, my baby, my boy—her voice croons in my ear like she’s right behind me. It takes every ounce of willpower I have in me not to turn around and check.
“Quit the fucking bullshit, Al. And don’t talk about her.”
“Why not? She was my mother, too.” He swings his feet down but doesn’t get up. “Though you’d hardly know it, the way you’ve erased us all. Tell me, does anyone here even know you speak Russian? Or do they actually believe Bastian Hale sprouted fully formed from American soil?” The overexaggerated Midwestern twang he puts on my adopted name makes me cringe almost as much asSemyondid.
I step into the office and close the door behind me. No need for Patricia to hear this, assuming she’s even still on this floor. “What do you want?”
“Can’t a man visit his brother? It’s been sixteen years, Semyon. That’s a long time.”
“Bastian. My name is Bastian.”
“Of course it is,” he says with a sardonic chuckle. “Bastian Hale, icon, legend, restaurant mogul. An upstanding citizen who receives fucking flower plaques. No relation to the Izotov boy who used to cook in the back kitchen while I collected debts in the dining room.”
That’s another memory whispering from just behind my shoulder: me at eleven, before the tattoos, before the grease scars pockmarking up and down my forearms, working the lineat Tolstoy’s while Aleksei, all of seventeen, made grown men twice his size piss themselves over protection money. Even then, we were on different paths. I was learning to break down chickens; he was learning to break fingers.
We both spilled our fair share of blood.
“You always were too good for the family business,” Aleksei continues. “Even Mama knew it. ‘Semyon will be something special,’ she used to say. ‘Something clean. Keep him out of the mess,da, Alyosha?’”
