The curve of her ass in that light. The way she’d saidthank you, quiet, sincere, with no idea what it did to me.
But in this version she was thanking me for something else entirely.
She was beneath me, breathless, begging me for more, and I gave her everything she was asking for and then more?—
I came hard. With her name locked behind my teeth. With my hand braced against the tile, the water running down my back, my breathing ragged in a way it hadn’t been since… I couldn’t remember when.
I stood under the spray and stared at the drain, letting the long-forgotten feeling course through me. Not guilt. Hunger. She was sleepingin my house. She was, by every measure of power and ethics and basic human decency, off-limits.
I don’t do off-limits well. I don’t hold back naturally. My entire life is an exercise in taking what I want and managing the consequences.
I turned off the water, got dressed, and went back to my office, even though it was 3:00 a.m.
And now, hours later, I’m still thinking about it. But that’s the only place where this can live — in my head.
I will maintain the distance required by her position and mine.
She is my daughter’s tutor. She lives under my roof. She has no power, no resources, no alternatives. Any advance from me would be coercion dressed as choice, and I am many things — violent, manipulative, morally compromised in ways that would fill a prosecutor’s career — but I am not a man who takes from someone who can’t say no.
No matter how much I want to.
That’s the line I’ve drawn, and I will hold it.
The soldier who’s been spending beyond his means has a name: Grigori Laskin. Twenty-eight. Outer circle. Runs collections on the South Side. Low-level enforcement. Work that puts you close to cash and far from oversight. He bought a new car three weeks ago. A BMW. Paid cash. Then a new two-bedroom apartment on the fifteenth floor of a building that charges rent his salary can’t cover.
“He’s skimming from the collections,” Alexei says during the briefing later that day. “The numbers don’t match. He’s taking between eight and twelve percent off the top of every run.”
“How long?”
“Two weeks. Maybe longer. He’s not smart enough to hide it well. The spending is the problem. If he’d stayed quiet, kept thelifestyle the same, we might not have caught it for another month.”
“Greed makes men stupid,” I say. “What’s the total?”
“Approximately four hundred thousand.”
Not a significant sum in the context of our operation — a rounding error, a decimal point. But the principle is absolute. Stealing from the Bratva is not a financial offense. It’s structural. It undermines trust, which undermines hierarchy, which undermines everything.
If Laskin steals four hundred and breathes, the next man steals eight, and the man after him steals a million, and within a year the organization hemorrhages not money but authority.
“Bring him to the warehouse,” I say. “Tonight.”
Alexei looks at me, raising a brow. “You want to handle this personally?”
He’s right to be surprised. I haven’t handled an interrogation personally in over a year. I delegate. Alexei is for the physical work, the hands-on enforcement that I’ve strategically distanced myself from as the organization has grown.
The Pakhan gives orders. Others execute them. That’s the structure. Power is maintained through distance, through delegation, through the careful cultivation of a reputation that makes the actual violence unnecessary.
But today I want to be in the room.
“Personally,” I confirm.
He doesn’t ask why. He knows better. But I see the question form behind his eyes and dissolve — the professional’s instinct to understand his boss’s motivation overridden by the soldier’s instinct to obey his commander.
I know why. I don’t say it, but I know.
I need to keep my hands busy.
The warehouse on Loomis is the one we use for conversations. It’s isolated. The walls are thick. The floor is concrete with a drain in the center. The nearest occupied building is over four hundred yards away.
