He just shakes his head sadly. “I mean it. I do. We’ve tried all the other ways, and the clock’s ticking. So it’s you, or we all get swallowed up.”
Fuck him.
Fuck this.
Just,fuck.
“Fuck you,” I say out loud, just in case Kir can’t read the expression on my face. “I can’t believe you’re roping me into this bullshit.”
This bullshit.That’s what we’ve been calling it for weeks now, ever since Kir first filled me in on the topic the night I met Cassandra.
The short version is that there’s a new player in the New York criminal scene. Someone well-organized and well-funded, with unclear leadership and unclear goals. All we know is a name.
The Vainakh Syndicate.
Kir and his father, Lukas Lazarev, have been the kingpins of the Lazarev Bratva for a long time. As such, they’re the obvious target if you’re a foreign power looking to make a name for yourself Stateside. The Lazarevs have the most cash, the most power, the most territory, the most to lose. And given their instability over the course of this year as Kir and Lukas navigated the fallout after the circumstances around Kir’s mother’s death were publicly revealed, thanks to Kir’s now-fiancée, New York Times reporter Jillian Pierce—yeah, it’s a long fucking story—it seems like now is a ripe time to dethrone them.
But, as I told Kir when he first explained the Vainakh issue to me a month and a half ago, none of that has shit to do with me.
Or so I thought.
The issue is that none of Kir and Lukas’s normal methods have worked. They’ve unleashed the full might of the Lazarev Bratva on the city and come up with a grand total of…not a damn thing.
No one is willing to talk about Vainakh, no matter whether they’re being persuaded with money, torture, or both. It’s a ghost town, with a new boogeyman lurking in the shadows.
And theywantmeto go monster hunting.
I couldn’t believe my ears when they first told me. Have they not been listening for the last decade and a half? I wantoutof the Bratva, not deeper in. I saw what it did to my father and I saidno fucking thank you.
But that’s the thing about being born in the pits, like I was: Getting out is hard fucking work.
They think that I’m the perfect choice—which I know is code for “theonlychoice”—to figure out who is legitimately protectingthe Vainakh Syndicate and letting them wedge their bloody foot into Lazarev Bratva territory.
At first, that just meant lurking around bars and seeing who I could get to talk to me. That’s the reason I was at Khaza at all on the night I met Cassandra: information gathering.
I got distracted and came up empty, for obvious reasons. Stupid me, I thought that would be the end of it. But now, as time burns away and the Vainakh Syndicate has begun nibbling at the edges of Lazarev territory and Lazarev revenue streams, the ante is being upped. Suddenly, I’m supposed to be a spy, a tracker, a hitman, and an executioner all in one. I’m supposed to find the head of the snakeandcut it off, all by my lonesome.
This is not what I want. Not in the least.
But it’s also the only way I get a clean slate.
For myself, and for the one person I cannot afford to leave behind. The one person to whom I owe everything: my freedom, my life.
Brooding onthatsubject is the last thing I feel like doing tonight, so I close my eyes and breathe until my heart settles into its usual glacial crawl.
“Mat.” Kir’s voice pulls me back to the present moment. “You in there?”
“Unfortunately.”
“So what’s it gonna be? Can we count on you?”
I take another pull from the neck of the bottle and wince when it burns me hard enough from the inside that my still-healingribs issue a warning spasm. “You know what it’s gonna be, motherfucker. You wouldn’t be sitting here if you didn’t.”
Looks like I’m working for the Bratva again.
Fuck.
The doctor’s appointment is useless. “What do you mean, ‘things like this happen’?” I snarl at him.
