“Get out,” I said, walking to the cabinet to pour a drink.
By the time I’d poured it, she was gone.
Just the way I liked it.
??????
I had been working through the documents for the better part of an hour. Ruslan and Valentin had sent through their respective reports—operational intelligence layered against the financial ledgers, cross-referenced with the upcoming movements scheduled along the White Sea routes.
I worked through them methodically, pulling threads where the numbers didn’t sit flush against the intelligence picture. There were discrepancies. There always were in a transition period. Men tested new leadership in small ways before they tested it in larger ones.
The spy report sat separately. No names on the document itself—that was protocol. Only Ruslan and I knew who they were, and it would stay that way. Knowledge distributed too widely had a habit of getting people killed.
I heard laughter in the corridor before the knock came.
Konstantin didn’t wait for an answer.
He pushed the door open with Ruslan and Valentin close behind him, bringing cold air and the smell of a Chernograd night in with them. Ruslan wore his usual dark suit, precise as ever. Valentin beside him in a lighter grey—both of them a few years my senior, both of them men I had learned from in ways I would never say aloud.
My brother, by contrast, had come straight from work. Dark leather jacket, and beneath it when he shrugged it off and tossed it over the nearest chair—a white T-shirt with a fine spray of blood across the front, rust-dark at the edges and still damp at the centre.
He caught me looking.
“What?” Konstantin said, already moving to the cabinet and reaching for the bottle.“I just came off a job. Apparently some men need convincing that debts are not optional.” He pulled the stopper and poured without measuring.“I made my point.”
“You made a mess,” I said.“Internal bleeding keeps the dry cleaning bill down.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” He handed glasses to Ruslan and Valentin before bringing one to me.“Besides. It’s not my only shirt. I didn't get a chance to change.”
Ruslan turned the glass in his hand and said nothing, which was how I knew he was amused.
I glanced at him.
Her brother had the same name. Leonid Kozlov’s boy. Seventeen years old with his voice still finding its register. The coincidence was not lost on me.
“What have I done?” Ruslan asked, reading my expression with the ease of a man who had been doing it for years.
“Nothing yet.” I took a sip.“You share a name with the Kozlov boy. My future wife’s brother.”
“Ah.” Konstantin dropped into the chair across from me, one ankle resting on his knee, glass balanced on the armrest.“The Pakhan’s new family. Congratulations, Ruslan. You’re practically nobility.”
“I’m well known and revered throughout Chernograd,” Ruslan said, without missing a beat.“No doubt Leonid had me in mind when he named the boy.”
“Yes, I’m certain that’s exactly what he was thinking,” I said.
Valentin had been quiet, turning his glass slowly, his dark eyes moving between us with the measured attention he brought to everything—ledgers, loyalty, risk. He rubbed his jaw.
“Perhaps I should consider marriage myself,” he said.“Before someone decides the man who knows where the money is buried is a liability.”
It wasn’t entirely a joke. Valentin held the full picture of theobshchak—the operational reserves cycling through the shipping front on the port road, the property holdings across Chernograd, and the deeper vault that only the four of us in this room could account for. That knowledge made him invaluable. It also made him a target, and he was precise enough to know it.
We all kept ourbykiclose. Two bodyguards at a time, more when the situation required. It was not paranoia. It was arithmetic.
“Why would you want a headache?” Ruslan said, setting his glass down.
“Why indeed,” Konstantin said, his gaze sliding to me with the ease of a man who knew he was being pointed.“Why would any man in his right mind want that?”
I said nothing.
