A price Tolam would pay heavily for.
Tomorrow we would move through the city and remove every residual trace of his presence—every contact, every safe house, every man who had passed information or opened a door or looked the other way for Chechen money. The purge would be visible. Deliberate. The kind of message that didn’t require translation.
No one tested the brotherhood during a transition and walked away intact. No one looked at a new Pakhan and mistook the newness for weakness.
My anger had been simmering since Konstantin’s first call. It had not cooled during the hours of planning. If anything the careful, methodical work of the evening had compressed it—banked it down into something that would burn longer and more completely than rage.
I needed it controlled for tomorrow. Messy enough to be understood. Contained enough to be mine.
I took a final draw from my cigarette and crushed it into the ashtray.
The Dragunov name would be written into this city again before the week was out. The Black City was ours—had always been ours—and any man who needed reminding of that would receive the reminder in a form he wouldn’t survive.
Any future son would watch and learn.
I left the office and took the stairs. Sharp left at the top—Iskra’s side of the house. The corridor was quiet, the lamps on the wall turned low. Spartak was stationed outside her door and straightened when he saw me coming, stepping to the side before I reached him.
“Pakhan.”
“Did she leave the room?”
“Yes, Pakhan. Twice. She found the kitchen, washed up. Then she wandered—the corridor, the landing. She went back to her room about an hour ago. Her belongings will be collected from her parents’house in the morning.”
I noted the parents’house rather than her house. Accurate, as of today.
I grunted and opened the door.
The room was dark. The heavy curtains were drawn and doing their job, no light from outside penetrating. The light from the hallway behind me cut a narrow path across the floor to the bed and I used it.
She was entirely buried. The bedding covered every inch of her except her head and one hand resting open on the pillow, fingers loose. She had found something of mine to sleep in—one of the shirts left in the room’s wardrobe, presumably, the collar visible above the duvet. Her faint floral perfume had settled into the room, the kind of scent that didn’t announce itself but was there when you were close enough.
I stood at the foot of the bed for a moment.
My father had been right. Not about much, in my estimation, but about this—the need for an heir was not sentiment, it was infrastructure. Flesh and blood to carry the name forward. Something to build toward that existed beyond the contracts and the routes and the men who needed managing.
Strange, after years of careful discipline, to now discard the habit entirely. Condoms had been practised and automatic—the only way to guarantee that nothing took hold, that no woman could leverage an accident into an obligation. The clinical separation of it had become routine. Fucking mouths had become preferable—flesh against flesh without consequence, without the particular risk of forgetting yourself inside someone.
But that calculus had changed.
She had signed the contract. She was in my house, in my west wing, in my shirt, in my bed. The womb I had negotiated for was three feet from where I stood and it would do what it was contracted to do.
Not tonight.
Tonight the Chechens took precedence and she could sleep.
But the reprieve was temporary—a function of scheduling, not consideration. As soon as Tolam’s residual presence had been removed from this city and the northern route was secured, I would turn my attention to the remaining outstanding item on the list.
She had one use.
I intended to make use of her.
I pulled the door shut behind me and told Spartak to stay where he was.
Chapter 10
Iskra
If I was careful—quiet, patient, positioned near the right doors at the right times—I caught snippets. Fragments of conversation that told me more about the shape of this household than anyone intended me to know.
