Page 70 of My Wedding Night Massacre

He looks at me the way he looked at me across the wedding ballroom three years ago. Like he already knew how this ended and waited for it to arrive.

The morning light comes through the window behind him. The city outside is waking up. Somewhere across it, in a villa on the outskirts, Pavlina is in a room with our son, both of them waiting.

I step through the door.

41

Slava

Bogdan looks at me the way he’s looked at everything in his life. Like he already ran the numbers and arrived at a position before anyone else in the room knew there was a calculation to be made.

“Slava,” he says. Not surprised. Not afraid. Just my name, placed in the room the way he places everything, where it will do the most work.

I close the door behind me.

He unfolds his hands, sets them flat on the desk. “Sit down.”

“No.”

He looks at me for a moment, reads the answer in my face, and nods once, already moving past that option. “Then let me say what I need to say standing.”

I don’t answer. He takes the silence as permission, which is the last permission he’ll get from me.

“What I built is bigger than either of us. You know that. You’ve seen the map, the accounts, you understand what three years of consolidation looks like when it’s done correctly.” His voice is level, no warmth, just the voice of a man presenting a case he believes in. “I made a calculation. You were a variable I couldn’t control and I removed you. That’s not personal. You’d have done the same.”

“I wouldn’t have,” I say.

“You would have,” he says. “Given enough time and enough reason, you would have. You’re your father’s son.” A pause, brief, letting it land. “Which is exactly why I’m telling you this now. You’re not a man who burns down what he can use. You’re a man who takes it and runs it better than the person before him.”

I say nothing.

“I underestimated you,” he says. “That’s the honest accounting of it. I thought you were young, in love, distracted. I thought the marriage would make you slower. I was wrong. I see that now. You built something in three years from nothing, from a hospital bed, with no resources and no allies, and every door closed to you. That’s not the work of a man I should have dismissed.” He holds my gaze. “That’s the work of a man I should have kept.”

“You had your chance,” I say. “You chose the massacre.”

“I chose wrong,” he says, and he says it without flinching, without the performance of remorse, just the flat acknowledgment of a miscalculation. “I’m telling you that directly because you’re the only person in this city worth being direct with. Everything I built is yours. All of it. The accounts, the routes, the men, the alliances. I’m sixty years old, and I built it for Pavlina’s children. For your children.” His voice drops. “Denis is my grandson. That’s not nothing. That’s blood. That changes the mathematics of this room, whether you want it to or not.”

“Denis is my son,” I say. “That’s the only mathematics in this room.”

He absorbs this, then adjusts. I watch it happen behind his eyes, the pivot to the next position, the next angle, always one more in reserve.

“You want the organization,” he says. “You’ve already started taking it apart from the outside. I felt the Baladin connection go, I know what that means. But dismantling takes time, costs pieces, and creates enemies you don’t need. I can give you the whole thing intact. Clean transfer, no war, no months of consolidation, no men wondering which side to land on. One conversation. You walk out with everything your father built, plus everything I added to it. That’s the offer.”

“That’s not the offer,” I say. “You’re not in a position to make any offers.”

His eyes sharpen. Something that might be respect moves through them. He sighs and sits back on his chair.

I come around the desk.

He starts to rise again, but I hit him before he’s out of the chair.

My fist connects with his jaw with everything I have behind it, three years of it, and his head snaps sideways so hard the crack of it fills the room. He goes back into the chair, the chair rolling back hard into the wall, and I follow him before he’s stopped moving, grabbing the front of his jacket with my left hand and pulling him forward to meet my right.

“That’s for the ballroom,” I say, and hit him again.

This one opens his lip, the skin splitting at the corner of his mouth, blood appearing immediately, bright and sudden across his chin. His hand comes up, a reflex, trying to get between his face and the next one. I bat it aside and hit him across the cheekbone with everything my right hand has left. I feel the bone flex under my knuckles, feel the impact travel all the way up through my elbow, and my second and third knuckles split open against his face. The blood is both mine and his, smeared across his cheek, wet on my fingers.

“That’s for my father’s men,” I say. “The ones you put in the ground.”