Liam leans back and studies me for a moment. "The quarterly sit-down with the council representatives is next week. Formality, mostly. Territory reports, financials, the usual."
"Alright."
"Malekonosh is coming."
I go still. Gregor Malekonosh. One of the senior council members, old guard, the kind of man who thinks the Bratva peaked in the nineties and every change since has been a personal offense. He's been vocal about the marriage mandates, not because he opposes them but because he doesn't think they've gone far enough. He wanted the old customs enforced in full. Sheet ceremonies. Virginity inspections. Wives treated as property rather than partners.
"Fine," I say. "He can come."
"There's more." Liam pauses. Rubs the back of his neck. A tell I've known since childhood. He's about to tell me something I won't like. "Matty heard something last night. At the Savitsky meeting."
Matty is one of our guys. Low-level, quiet, useful because people forget he's in the room. "Heard what?"
"Malekonosh was talking. Drinking, mostly, running his mouth the way he does. And he made a comment." Liam's jaw tightens. "About your wife."
The temperature in my body drops by ten degrees. My voice comes out level, because it has to. "What did he say?"
"He called her the Orlovs' sullied bride. Said the Irish branch got what they deserved. Second-hand goods for a second-rate family." Liam's eyes are steady on mine. "And then he said something about how a used-up bride should be grateful the council found anyone willing to take her at all."
I don't move.
I sit in the chair and I breathe and I feel something inside me go very, very quiet. The kind of silence that exists at the center of something about to detonate.
"Who heard this?" My voice doesn't sound like mine. It sounds like something scraped clean of everything except intent.
"Matty. Two of Savitsky's guys. And Tomaas Linchenko."
Linchenko. The man Tanya's father was going to match her with before I stepped in. The man who would have punished her for not being pristine. Worse, her own father heard Malekonosh call my wife damaged goods and he sat there and let him.
"Where is Malekonosh now?"
"Aidan."
"Where is he?"
Liam leans forward. "He's at the Savitsky compound. He's there until Thursday. And before you do what I can see you planning to do behind those very calm eyes of yours, I need you to think about this strategically."
"I am thinking strategically."
"No, you're thinking about breaking Gregor Malekonosh's jaw. Which I understand. Believe me, I understand. But he's a council member, and putting your fist through a council member's face has consequences that go beyond the satisfaction of the moment."
I stand. The chair scrapes back against the floor. My hands are at my sides and they're steady, perfectly steady, because the rage isn't in my hands. It's deeper than that. It's in the part of me that lay awake in a hotel room in Prague and swore I'd find my way back to the woman who'd left, and in the part that watched her hold a baby in my mother's kitchen and saw something in her face that even she didn't know was there.
Tanya has spent her entire life being reduced. By her father. By the council. By every man in this world who looked at her and saw a commodity rather than a person. She spent two years believing she'd successfully destroyed her own value, and she was wrong, because her value was never what they said it was.
And now a man I could kill with my bare hands is sitting in a compound thirty miles from here, calling her worthless because she wasn't a virgin bride. Because she made a choice about her own body and this world decided that made her less than.
"I won't break his jaw," I say.
Liam's eyebrows rise. "No?"
"No. I'm going to do something worse. I'm going to make sure he understands, publicly and permanently, that my wife's name doesn't go in his mouth. Never. Not at all."
"And how exactly do you plan to do that?"
I look at my brother. I let him see exactly what lives behind the quiet, the same way I did when I told him I wanted Tanya. The same controlled, absolute certainty that tells him the conversation is already over and the only question is whether he's going to help or get out of the way.
"At the quarterly meeting," I say. "In front of everyone. Malekonosh wants to talk about tradition and purity and the old ways? Fine. Then we do it properly. I'll stand in front of the full council and I'll tell them exactly what kind of man Gregor Malekonosh is. A man who drinks too much and talks too freely about another man's wife. In the old traditions he claims to love so much, that's a blood offense. And I will make him pay."
