1
MAKSIM
My suit jacket settles across my shoulders like armor, tailored precision over controlled violence. I button it with the same deliberation I'd use to load a gun. Each motion measured, each choice final. The silk lining whispers against my shirt, cool and expensive. My cufflinks catch the late July sun. Platinum. Engraved with the Severyn crest. A ritual performed a thousand times, a reminder that the boy left bleeding on a Moscow floor is dead, and what rose in his place doesn't break.
"You sure about this?"
Zakhar's voice cuts through the humid air. He stands to my left, arms crossed, shoulders squared. Always the sentinel. His question isn't about doubt. He knows I've calculated every variable, considered every contingency. But he asks anyway, because that's what brothers do. They witness your choices even when they can't stop you from making them.
I adjust my left cuff. The scar tissue pulls tight across my knuckles. Phantom ache from bones broken twenty-five years ago, healed wrong, reminders carved into flesh and nerve. My hands haven't played Rachmaninoff since I was fifteen. They've done other things instead.
"It's the logical step." My voice carries no inflection. Facts don't require emotion, and I deal in facts.
The Ainsley mansion looms before us, all weathered limestone and desperate grandeur. Old money trying to remember what power felt like before it started slipping through their fingers. The circular drive spreads beneath our feet like a stage, gray stone baking in the heat, and we're the final act in a production Arthur Ainsley can't afford to cancel.
Two black SUVs idle behind us, engines ticking as they cool. Armor plating. Bulletproof glass. Enough firepower in the trunks to start a small war. We don't do anything halfway. You either commit to survival or you die.
Alexei shifts to my right. Restless energy coiled in muscle and ink, the summer heat making him shed his jacket like a skin he never wanted. He's scanning the property, mapping exits, sight lines, potential threats. Even standing still, he vibrates with barely contained violence. It's not rage. It's readiness. The man who stops moving is the man who dies, and Alexei refuses to be still.
I think of the path that brought us here. Three boys who should have died in Moscow. One left for dead in ashes, two abandoned to freeze in an orphanage that made Dickens look optimistic. Wesurvived by becoming what survival demanded. Zakhar's iron discipline. Alexei's feral hunger. My methodical calculation. We don't talk about those years. We don't need to. The scars speak for themselves.
Now we stand at the threshold of legitimacy, and all it costs is a marriage.
"We have more money than we know what to do with," I continue, still working my cuffs into exact alignment. The fabric must sit flush. Details matter. Sloppiness gets you killed. "But capital without influence is just numbers in accounts. Arthur Ainsley opens doors. Political circles. Society infrastructure. The kind of power that doesn't require guns."
"Power built on quicksand," Zakhar observes. Low. Factual. No judgment, just assessment.
"Which is why he needs us." I finally look at him. "The Albanians want their money back. Arthur lost it trying to be clever with other people's investments. We have what he needs. Protection, time, and enough weight to make the Albanians reconsider their collection methods."
Alexei laughs, sharp and dark as broken glass. "At the cost of your freedom,pakhan."
I turn and stare at him. He meets it without flinching, that feral grin still playing at the corner of his mouth, daring me to deny it. As if anyone could cage me. As if I haven't spent every day since I was fifteen refusing to be trapped, controlled, made helpless again.
"No one owns me." Each word drops like a stone into deep water. "This is an exchange of assets. Strategic. Mutually beneficial. Nothing more."
Alexei's grin widens, but he says nothing else. He knows when to push and when to let silence do the work.
We move as a unit up the stone steps. Our footfalls synchronize without discussion. Years of operating as one organism, breathing together, killing together. The door opens before we reach it.
A maid in a black uniform stands on the threshold. Middle-aged, tired eyes, the particular exhaustion that comes from working in a house that's slowly dying but won't admit it. She barely meets our gaze, trained to make herself invisible.
"Mr. Severyn?" Her voice carries the false brightness of someone performing hospitality out of fear, not welcome. "Mr. Ainsley is expecting you. Please, follow me."
The interior of the mansion confirms what I already knew. Rectangular shadows on walls where paintings used to hang. Furniture arrangements that don't quite work, pieces moved to fill gaps. The air smells like polish trying to mask decay, old wood and older money slowly rotting from the inside out.
Perfect.
Arthur Ainsley is exactly where I need him. Desperate. Out of options. Ready to sell anything—anyone—to stay alive.
The maid leads us down a corridor lined with family portraits. Generations of Ainsley men staring down with the particular arrogance of people who've never had to fight for anything. Their eyes follow us, these dead men in their gilded frames. Judging. Dismissing.
They're all dead. We're not.
She stops at a heavy oak door, knocks twice, and opens it without waiting for a response.
"Your guests, Mr. Ainsley."
Arthur rises from behind an ostentatious desk. Dark wood, gold inlay, the kind of statement piece designed to intimidate. On him, it fails completely. He's in his fifties, soft around the middle, with the blotchy complexion of a man who drinks to forget his failures. His smile is too wide, too eager.
