Page 125 of Mafia King’s Dangerous Vow

I look at her profile in the fading light and understand that if I love her badly, I could destroy everything she is trying to protect. The temptation is clean and brutal, and it doesn’t ask permission. I could give her blood. I could give her a corpse. I could give her the immediate satisfaction of her father’s name spoken in past tense.

It would be easier than giving her patience.

Tamara’s fingers tighten around the handkerchief. She doesn’t look at me.

“Don’t let him run.”

I turn my hand palm up on the seat between us. For a moment, she only looks at it. Then she takes it.

“I won’t.”

Every part of me wants to give her what she is asking for right away. But if I move too quickly, Kalinin relocates the boy. If I move too openly, Anna Morozov becomes an obstacle in someone else’s plan. If I move for Tamara’s pain instead of Ivan’s safety, I become another man arranging a child’s life around adult need.

I will not be that man.

I take out my phone with my free hand and send a message.

Me:

My office

Nine tonight

Igor answers first.

Understood

Mikhail follows three seconds later.

Do I get dinner first or is this one of those dramatic starvation meetings?

Yuri sends no reply, which means he’s already on his way.

Nikolai Volkov answers after two minutes.

For you, always

For Igor, depends

Yakov Gagarin answers last.

Nine

Tamara turns her head as the messages ping. She doesn’t ask what Yakov can do, or whether Nikolai is coming, or what begins when five men meet in my office after dark. She knows enough now to understand that names become action long before anyone explains the shape of it.

“Will they help?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“All of them?”

I close my fingers more firmly around hers. “All of them.”

She turns back toward the window.

By nine, we are gathered in my office, forty stories above downtown Manhattan, with the city burning beneath us and the river a black sheet beyond the glass.

Igor stands by the bar with an untouched glass in his hand. Yuri is at my desk, tablet open, three folders arranged in a line. Yakov Gagarin sits near the fire without removing his overcoat, which tells me everything I need to know about his mood. He doesn’t speak often. When he does, the room listens.