“An hour is not sleep.” My doctor had said.
My brother had screamed about it, and my Gregor had said, “You’re in decline.”
Gregor was not a man who wasted words.
At thirty-two, I was old enough to know better than to let one vanished omega dismantle the machinery of my life. But apparently, age hadn’t made me sensible. It had only made me better dressed while unraveling.
Outside, London was gray. And unyielding gray as rain slashed against the boardroom windows, streaking the glass like claw marks.
The Thames, visible from the floor-to-ceiling windows, churned under a sky the color of a bruise.
“Bloody weather,” my father’s right-hand-man, and my uncle, grumbled.
The Pakhan’s boardroom smelled like whisky as they argued about the same shipment of Turkish arms they had for three consecutive meetings.
I stopped listening approximately two and a half meetings ago. They hadn’t noticed. This was either because I had a great poker face or a lack of their observational skills. I suspected it was both.
We were in London now, but we’d been in Prague on business when it had all gone wrong. Prague, where the snow had fallen like a shroud over the city, muffling the sounds of the Old Town Square, turning the Charles Bridge into a silent, white tunnel.
The hotel suite had smelled of a scent that should not have been possible. Not just ours, but ours and hers together.
That scent, the one that had clung to the air like a ghost, was the reason Gregor had refused to let the maids clean his shirt. The one she wore when she was deep in heat. She said it smelled of all of us, right before she begged for more.
My father, the Pakhan, sat at the head of the table, his broad frame draped in a tailored suit that had once fit him like a second skin. Now, it hung on him like a reminder that he was sixty-eight years old and suddenly looked it.
In the last year he had aged in ways that tailors or hairdressers couldn’t fix. His once dark hair was now streaked with white, and the lines around his mouth had deepened into something permanent. And those hands that had once broken bones with a single strike now trembled slightly when he reached for his glass.
The Bratva didn’t speak of such things. Weakness was a luxury we couldn’t afford. But I saw it. We all did.
"Artem, the Turks are still demanding a forty percent increase on the next consignment," Volkov said, his mustache twitching like a disgruntled caterpillar. Volkov had an opinion about everything that happened, but while he’d been talking for fortyminutes, I’d been thinking about the scent match and Irish fire for nine months.
"No," I said.
Volkov blinked. "No to the forty percent, or no to the Turks?"
"Yes."
Volkov opened his mouth, closed it, and looked at the Pakhan. My father was watching me. He’d built an heir from the ground up and was now watching as I failed in real time. He’d seen it. The machine I’d become. I could still move assets across borders with the efficiency of a man who had nothing left to lose.
But I was different. I had lost, and that was the problem. I’d lost it nine months ago in a Prague snowstorm, and I’d been staring at the empty space ever since.
"Artem." The Pakhan’s voice was gravel and authority, a tone that had once made underlings tremble. Now, it just sounded tired. "Are you listening?"
"I’m listening," I said. "You want to retaliate against the Turks. I want to wait. Retaliation is emotional. Strategy is profitable. We wait."
I’d said this very same sentence, in various forms, about fourteen times in the last month. About the Turks. About the Dublin situation. About the missing cargo from Rotterdam. The words changed. The meaning didn’t.
Ivan was to my left. My thirty-year-old brother. My enforcer. The man who had put a hole through the wall of the Pakhan’s east wing last Tuesday. It wasn’t because someone had insulted the family, but because the barista at the lobby coffee shop had put caramel in his flat white, and the smell of it had reminded him of her. The hole was still there. The barista had been reassigned to another building.
We did not talk about the coffee incident.
We did not, in fact, talk about a great many things. The Petrov Pack had developed an impressive catalog of subjects that werepermanently off-limits, and they all led back to the same five-foot-five Irish woman with black hair, green eyes, and a scent that had ruined us.
Champagne, storm-clouds, and caramel.
The same notes lived under our skin, but on her they had become unbearable. She was our scent match. The moment all three notes came from her we knew she was in heat. We also knew she was ours.
And that was the thing that had haunted my dreams for nine months, the one that had turned my brother into a man who punched walls and my bodyguard into a man who carried her hair tie in his pocket like a talisman.
