Konstantin never spoke to me, despite technically being family. The most I received was a single nod on one occasion. He must have been feeling generous.
Their father never visited. Whether they went to him was anyone’s guess. No one told me anything. I had learned to piece together what I could from doorways and staircases and the fragments Spartak let slip when he forgot to be careful.
The days passed slowly.
Each night after Vadim left, my hand would find its way to my stomach before I could stop it. Hovering there in the dark. Dread, excitement and sorrow—three conflicting things with no resolution between them, all pulling in different directions at once.
It took me back to my mother.
What she might have felt when she was carrying us. Whether the feelings had been different then—before we became people who could disappoint her, before we became liabilities she had to manage rather than children she could simply love.
Perhaps feelings changed once the child became an adult.
Why else would we break what we claimed to love?
Chapter 29
Vadim
They filed into my office one by one. Tau wasn’t Bratva but his input was valuable and the shared intelligence would help him understand why I needed him close for now. It would have been simpler had he accepted my offer into the brotherhood. I respected his refusal. That was the thing about men like Tau—you didn’t keep them by pulling rank. You kept them by making it worth their while.
Konstantin poured the drinks while the others settled. Men moved forward to take their drink from him.
“How is the home project coming along,brat?” He dropped into his chair with the ease of a man who found everything mildly entertaining.“Any news?”
I ignored him and took the slim laptop from Valentin.
Those figures were for my eyes only. I worked through them quickly, using the trackpad to map the impact Tolam had made on our operations—the routes disrupted, the revenue lost, the arithmetic of what it cost when an enemy got close enough to do damage before being removed.
A loss was weakness. Weakness invited further testing.
I closed the laptop.
Konstantin held out his phone as he handed me my glass. I glanced at the image on the screen and grimaced.
They hadn’t just killed him. They’d taken his head.
“Whose man was he?”
“One of Mikhail’s,” Ruslan answered before Konstantin could.
“They cleared most of the warehouse out,” Konstantin added.
I returned his phone to him.
“Retaliation for what we did to his men,” I said.“This insurgency cannot continue. Not in Chernograd and not on our routes.”
We had spent too many years building the perfect ecosystem for our trade. Every route, every contact, every paid official—years of infrastructure that Tolam was now testing for weaknesses.
“Ruslan, Valentin—I want plans and financials for our defence on my desk. I want the captains hunting them. Their families. Their associates. Pets if necessary. There is no mercy.” I looked around the room.“Understood?”
Nods. Murmured agreements. Ruslan and Valentin were already conferring quietly before I had finished speaking.
We concluded the meeting after several more points. Tau remained silent throughout, even as Konstantin made his best efforts to provoke him—small things, the way Konstantin did everything, with just enough plausible deniability to be infuriating.
“You know he’s just going to shoot you one day,” Ruslan said, watching their exchange with the weary attention of a man who had been observing this for too long.
“Please.” Tau’s accent filtered through, the consonants sharpening slightly.“He is a colleague. His death would be far more intimate than that.”
