Igor Pavlov. I've never heard that name, yet it ignites a funny feeling in my belly that I usually get when I know there is something there. Something important.
I fire off a series of requests to Anita for more background information and for whatever we have on Viktor and his reign of terror. I also want to know more about Caterine Bellini. This goes back seventy or eighty years, but it's worth checking out. It probably has nothing to dowith the Venezuelans or Nico. Still, anything about Donna Margarita fascinates me.
The room hums. Down the hall, an orderly laughs like he’s trying it on for the first time. I look at the neat stack of soft things Stephano brought me: silk, cotton, lies. My phone sits warm in my palm like a small, well-fed animal.
Another ping: This one is from Miguel, one of my Mexican assets.
Miguel:
No eyes on Nicolas Conti // two compounds reshuffled personnel // a fuel order hit a strip near Batopilas at 03:12—unlogged. Sending tail number.
He is former military and has a flair for the dramatic. A sharp pain emanates from my side. I push it down until the world sharpens. Two days, I told Stephano, that's all I'm willing to wait this out from the hospital. After that… whatever it takes. They want to keep me for a week. A week. Please. They can save the bed for the next girl who thinks doctors are God. I’m not dying, and I don’t need a parade of interns poking at me like I’m their first real trauma.
It’s not like I had major abdominal surgery, for crying out loud. So the wound in my flank was a little deeper than the graze on my shoulder—fine. But it was still a graze. You’d think I walked in with my intestines in my hands, the way they rushed me into surgery.
Stupid doctors and their stupid love of scalpels.
If I hadn’t decided this was the easiest way to get a line to Stephano, I never would’ve set foot in a hospital. I would’ve stitched myself, cleaned up, had a drink, maybe taken a nap.
Oh well. Lessons learned: next time, don’t let bullet-happy idiots land a hit where it matters.
I scroll back to the first message: Margarita and Igor. Father: Viktor—the dead Pakhan that my father set fire to on his way up to the top.
Half-siblings. Spare heirs.
The Italian matriarch who isn’t Italian at all. She’s a Russian raven who learned to sing in Italian. And she’s been teaching the Venezuelans the chorus. The door sighs; one of Stephano’s men ghosts by. I'm so freaking bored, I check the time, check my pulse, check the urge to rip out the IV and walk to the airport.
Two days, Zhena,I promise. After that, all bets are off.
Another set of messages pops up in my inbox, this time a report on Raffael DeSantis. I scroll down, eyes catching on the old data points—birth records, adoption, the holes he doesn’t talk about—you could say we both have daddy issues—him because he never knew his father, mine because I did. We share the same hunger to prove ourselves, to be the best, to never be seen as weak. In another life, we might have been siblings, driven by the same ghosts, chasing the same impossible perfection.
And if I’m being honest—aside from all the psych mumbo jumbo—I really do like him. We’ve been friends for years, despite our loyalties to different families and a ten-year age gap—on which he's more hung up than I am.
A smile crosses my face when I remember the look on his face when we first met. Five years ago. We were both after the same hacker, one of those slippery bastards who thought he could play both sides of the table, leaking files between the Italians and the Bratva. Nestor sent Raf to find him; Grigori sent me.
We crossed paths online first, two shadows in the same circuit. His work was clean. Efficient. Elegant. I admired that. Most hackers are messy, loud, and always leave breadcrumbs. Not him. He worked like I did—silent, deliberate, surgical. For days, we chased each other through firewalls and servers, each of us tracing the other’s signal, circling the same prey.
When we finally cornered the hacker, we made an uneasy truce, took him out together, asked our questions, and then decided who would pull the trigger. I was expecting a soldier, a brute in a suit. What I got was a man with calm eyes, careful hands, and a face that went very still when he realized I was just agirl.
That second of hesitation was all I needed.
I swept his legs, dropped him flat on his ass, and put a gun to his head before he could even blink. The look onhis face was priceless. Shock, amusement, a spark of respect that he tried to hide.
He’d hesitated because I was young. A woman. He learned a valuable lesson that day and never made that mistake with me again.
Ten minutes later, he stood beside me while I made the hacker talk with skills I learned from my brother. That’s when Raf stopped underestimating me. That’s when I stopped thinking of him as just another Italian dog on a leash.
We’ve been friends ever since.
Strange friends, maybe, but real ones. The kind who don’t need to talk often, because they already know how far the other would go.
I’ve never had a reason to dig into him before. Our jobs never clashed: they crossed. But now… it doesn’t matter if I like Raf or not. My loyalty to the Bratva comes first. Always.
And so does his—to the Italians.
In this case, toStephano. From what I’ve gathered, he works for him now, after being bought out from his old boss, Carlos Orsi. It’s funny how the dots connect, then loop back on themselves. I still don’t know how the Bratva fits into this.
The report doesn’t tell me much I don’t already know—except for what it doesn’t say. There’s no mention of Omertà Infernale—Hellbound Silence—Raf’s secretcompany. Fitting, really. Built on the Mafia’s most sacred rule:omertà. Silence. Loyalty. The price of betrayal.
