Brother. He was jabbing me, saying without saying it that I’d betrayed him. I hadn’t. If anything, Lana and I would solidify the alliance between his family and mine. There was something else at play here. There had to be, or he wouldn’t trade his niece in a deal with the new Italians and go after the old ones I’d dealt with.
His hand started twitching.
Endurance was a matter of pride. When lions fought, only one came out an alpha, but Mikhail and I weren’t fighting forleadership of the same pride. We each had our own pride to worry about. Wait a second. That was it. Something was wrong with his pride. Before he shot me and I shot him, I flipped my gun around and dangled it on my fingertip.
Blue eyes the same color and shape as Lana’s glanced at my gesture.
I sat back down, Sig on his desk.
He stayed standing, barrel pointing at me. Mikhail was a proud male. He’d never admit something terrible had happened within his organization under his leadership. But something had. Desperate measures. He’d taken desperate measures to fix it. What? Money. Something had happened with the money.
“You know you can trust me,” I said. “We’ve bled together, made it through the best of times and through the worst of times. What’s going on?”
“The Feds are on me like flies on honey.”
“They’ve always been on you.”
He sat down, gun on the table, still pointing at me. “This is different. I woke up last week with frozen bank accounts, had to go digging for cash to pay people.” We buried money we couldn’t launder. Old school had that right. “They froze everything. I put my house up for sale.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
“You need the Italian deal for the cash flow,” I concluded. “I’ll give you thirty percent.”
“Not enough.”
“The South Africans are wanting to chat. We’ll go at them together. Fifty-fifty.”
“I can’t wait that long.”
“So fucking borrow the money.”
He pressed his lips together.
I continued, “Pride will bury you, Mikhail. Just ask for money.”
“I want the Italian deal.”
“All of it?”
“All of it.” He picked up the phone. “I have men on standby. What’s it gonna be?”
“You realize the cartels will move in if we don’t hold together.”
“Let them try.”
“Sixty-forty,” I said.
“In my favor,” he countered.
I stood and headed for the door. He wasn’t gonna shoot me anymore. He might have at the start, but we passed that point. This was good.
“Forty-five,” he said.
“Forty is all I can do.”
“Fine. Forty and my niece back.”
