I bristle.
“Do not worry aboutmymen,” I say. “My father is gone now. His soldiers… they answer only to me. No compromise, no hesitation. And if anyone isn’t sure about how I run things, they will find out very quickly that I’m every inch the man my father was, may God rest his soul.”
“Good,” Viktor answers, seemingly reassured. “I think we are done here. The sun will be coming up soon. I have matters to attend to. We will speak again soon, I am sure.”
“Excellent,” I answer.
We both stand and shake one another’s hand. The respect is there even if the real trust is going to be earned over time. The truth of the matter is that our families have clashed many times over the years. In fact, you could probably trace the various conflicts and tensions all the way back to Russia.
But this is the life we lead.
And it is business too.
There is no room for sentiment, old grudges, or ego.
The kinds of pakhans who fall into the trap of ego and emotion are the ones who rarely make it beyond five years before a rival puts a bullet into the back of their head. I am very much aiming to not fall to that fate.
I watch as Viktor and his two guards leave the restaurant. I turn to my two guards and tell them that it’s time for us to leave too.
“Home?” my lead guard asks.
“Gym,” I reply. “It’s too late for sleep now. I’ll catch up on that later.”
“As you wish,” my guard replies.
Together, the three of us exit the restaurant onto the city’s cold streets. It’s not even dawn yet and everything is quiet. I actually like this time. My life isn’t a peaceful one. It never has been. I was born into a criminal legacy, my father being the fourth Antonov to lead the family. From a very young age I understood what the sound of gunshot meant, the implications that came with it. Even if I didn’t see a man fall until I was in my teens, I heard bullets fly and men holler in pain.
Fuck.
Sometimes I wonder whether this is the life I would have chosen. But that’s the thing… there never was a choice, not as far as I was concerned. Even my mother made it very clear to me that my destiny would be to one day take over the running of the family business from my father.
And when that day came six months ago, I knew that it was simply the next step in the destiny that had been mapped out for me since the very first day I came into this world.
“Boss… are you coming?” my guard asks, his hand holding the SUV door open as the other guard turns the engine on.
“Yeah, of course,” I answer, my mind back in the real world.
I step into the SUV and lean back in the plush leather seat as we pull away into the night. Viktor will no doubt be thinking on our meeting. And I know that is what I should be doing too. But now that my father is in my head, I find my thoughts are with him.
On the day he died, my father was old. There were murmurings that he had lost his edge, that he wasn’t quite the pakhan he used to be. I could even see that myself. It was as if something changed in him after my mother died a couple of years earlier. Yes, my father was still ruthless and more than capable of thinking tactically and seeing all the plays from his rivals.
But there was somethingmissing.
It was as if the hunger to make us the dominant family had gone. My father’s relentless ambition had given way to a kind of drifting malaise. Now it all seemed to be about holding position, keeping control of what we had, rather than expanding and truly becoming the number one family in the city and beyond.
And this didn’t go down well with other senior figures in the family.
More than that, it gave a signal to my father’s many enemies elsewhere that he might be a softer target than before. And this is what proved to be his undoing.
All it took was a single gunshot to the chest as my father left his favorite coffee shop and his long reign was all over in a heartbeat. The fact it happened on his own territory made it even harder to believe. That the gunman managed to escape undetected will always be a black mark against the family—whoever organized the hit is still out there too, and this is something I won’t rest until I get to the bottom of.
Both my father’s long term guards took bullets too, one of them dying and the other one escaping only by a whisker as the bullet went in one side and out the other without hitting any major organs.
When the call came through to me, I knew it was my time now.
No time to grieve properly. No moment to contemplate whether I wanted to take on my father’s mantle. Not even enough time to say a prayer.
From that moment onward it was all about business.
