Lena sighs and sinks onto the couch next to me as I sulk and stew. I blame Dimitri for this. No, he's not the one who pulled the trigger, but he lives in that lifestyle of organized crime. It's no wonder men like that hover around him in his gravitational force.
I don't know how I'm going to get myself out of this mess, but if the cop is right, it's only a matter of time before those men learn that someone witnessed their crime. And when that happens, they'll start searching for me. Maybe they already are.
5
DIMITRI
The security report landed on my desk an hour ago and I've been staring at the same paragraph ever since. Yakov Volodin was executed with a single gunshot wound to the back of the head.
I knew the moment I saw his name that everything was about to get significantly more complicated. Yakov wasn't just some random guy caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was my informant—my inside line to the Kozlov operations—and he was found dead in the alley behind my casino where anyone walking by could've stumbled across his body.
The Kozlovs are making a statement and they chose my property to make it on.
I reach for my phone and dial Yuri's number before I can procrastinate any longer. This conversation isn't going to get any easier if I put it off, and he needs to know what happened before someone else tells him first.
He picks up on the second ring. "Little brother, what's going on?"
"We've got a problem." I lean back in my chair and run my free hand through my hair. "Someone was killed behind the casino last night. One of ours."
There's a pause on the other end, and I hear him moving and the noise in the background fading, probably stepping away from whatever he was doing to take this call in private. "Who was it?"
"Volodin…" Yuri only learned of my connection to Volodin a few months ago, when our cousin was off in Serbia and we needed more intel. I've had him on my payroll for a while now, but something must've caught up to him. Maybe related to us, or maybe not.
"Fuck," he grumbles, "the Kozlovs found out he was working for us?"
"That's my guess, Boss, and they made damn sure we'd know about it." I flip the report closed because I don't need to keep reading the same details over and over. "He was shot execution-style and left where our people would find him first thing this morning."
That detail alone tells me this wasn't about some petty thing he did. If the family wanted him dead for his skimming, they'd have taken care of it on their own turf. The fact that they did it on Gravitch property means they at the very least suspect him of passing intel to us.
Yuri gets real quiet real fast. He's trying to figure this out the same way I am. "How long were you protecting him?"
"Eight months, give or take. He was feeding us good intelligence, too, real solid stuff about their operations and who they're working with." I pull up one of the monitors on my desk andcycle through the security feeds showing the casino floor. "Now that pipeline's gone and we've got a body on our property."
"This is more than just losing an informant." My brother's nothing if not severe at times. The switch in his tone is instantaneous. He's pissed about this complication, and I can't blame him after the past nearly nine months we've lived through since his son's death. "They're showing us they can operate in our territory whenever they want. That's a problem."
"I know it's a problem." I watch a dealer shuffle cards at one of the blackjack tables on the feed and feel my shoulders tense. "But we can't go after them directly right now, not without knowing what we're actually dealing with. The Kozlovs don't have the resources to pull off something this bold after what's gone down. Marat is gone, and so is Victoria. Unless…"If they heard the shit we put Yaros through…
"You think they've partnered with someone?"
"I think it's possible." I switch to another camera angle and scan the crowd for anything unusual. "The Balkans have been looking for an opening ever since we took out their political protection, and the Veche family's been quiet too, but that doesn't mean they've forgotten what we did to them."
Yuri grumbles in frustration. "And that means we could be looking at multiple groups coordinating against us, God fucking dammit."
"That's what I'm worried about, yeah." I minimize the security feeds and pull the report back toward me even though I don't open it. "The timing's too convenient. Volodin gets executed on our property right when tensions are already high with the Balkans. Someone's trying to provoke us into making a move."
"Or they're testing our defenses to see how we respond." Yuri's voice has an edge to it. None of us are happy when this sort of shit happens, but as the man in charge of making decisions for the family, he carries the weight of hundreds of lives on every move we make. "How many people knew about your arrangement with Volodin?"
"On our side? Just you, me, and Rosa since she handles some of the payments." I count them off mentally to make sure I'm not forgetting anyone. "On their side, whoever he was feeding information to probably suspected something, but I don't think they had confirmation until recently."
"So either someone on our end talked or the Kozlovs figured it out on their own." Papers rustle on Yuri's end and I hear him moving around again. "Did Volodin have any family who might've known what he was doing?"
"A brother in Moscow, but they haven't spoken in years, according to what he told me." I pull up my notes on Volodin from when I first started working with him and scroll through everything I know about him. "His wife died three years ago and he didn't have any kids. He was pretty isolated, which is part of why I thought he'd be safe."
"Safe until someone decided he wasn't useful anymore or became a liability." Yuri exhales loudly, and I can hear the frustration building. "What did the police say when they showed up? I'm assuming that's how we figured out there was a body back there?"
He's annoyed, and I get it. Someone went to the police before we were able to figure this out, which means either the perpetrators did try to set us up or someone else saw this hit go down. I can't even begin to decide who that may be.
"They asked the standard questions, took photos of the scene, collected whatever evidence they could find." I pull up the security footage showing the cops cordoning off the alley. "They talked to a few of the staff who were working overnight, but nobody saw anything useful."
