Yet with her, I don’t act on it.
That, more than her outburst, is what unsettles me.
Something in me twists as I step back into my office and pull the doors closed behind me.
After I pour a glass of vodka that I don’t plan on drinking and settle back into the chair behind my desk, I replay the moments over and over again. The way her breath hitched when I stepped close. How she refused to back down. The way her voice cracked slightly onAnd if I don’t?
It takes me a while to find the center of it, get down to the root core of what it is that’s unsettling me so.
Interest.
The word tastes foreign as I roll it over in my head.
I set the glass in my hand down, untouched.
She is just collateral. A bargaining chip. A signature on the line of a deal written in blood made years ago. Viktor Morozov needed protection after the university bombing after his own fucking bomb went off too early, and I gave it to him.
I even went out of my way to get his damn daughter out of the building before she was caught in the crossfire due to his stupidity. In exchange, he handed her over to me.
Simple. Clean. Done.
Except nothing about her is really that simple.
I get up and pace the study.
The room is familiar but does nothing to ease the tension building within me, dark wood worn by decades of hands like mine tracing over the grain. The faint scents of leather and smoke cling to the air.
This study has seen more blood spilled and decisions made to alter the course of this city than most empires. Tonight, it feels smaller somehow, the walls suddenly constricting around me. Restlessness tinges at the back of my mind as if my baser instincts know something is shifting and hasn’t yet decided whether to resist it or give in.
I stop in front of the map mounted on the wall closest to my desk.
It spans nearly the entire length of the room, an intricate rendering of Moscow and its arteries. Streets, districts, transit lines, ports, financial centers—all meticulously marked and bleeding into one another in a web only a handful of men truly understand.
Red pins pierce the surface like bullet holes.
Malyshko’s districts, clustered thick and heavy in the political heart of the city where laws are drafted and buried in the same breath. Volkov’s ports lining the river like open mouths, swallowing cargo that never “officially” arrives. Kuznetsov’s banks, quiet and bloodless on the surface, where money moves invisibly into accounts only the four of us know about.
And mine.
Infrastructure. Arms routes. Private security corridors. The unseen skeleton beneath Moscow’s skin.
The Iron Pact.
Four families bound by something older than the Federation itself. Older than flags and constitutions and the convenient myths men tell themselves about order. The Pact was only ever forged in blood and sealed with money and the shared understanding that survival required unity.
We keep Moscow breathing.
We keep the Kremlin polite.
We keep the streets quiet.
Not out of kindness and the need to serve and protect. Out of control.
Without us, the city would tear itself apart in weeks. Rival syndicates would flood the vacuum. Foreign interests would descend like carrion birds. Politicians would posture and panic and pull the detonation button on fail-safes they could never enforce.
We provide the solution to it all.
I drag a hand down my face and stare at the pins until they blur.
