Chapter 28
they don’t make henchmen like they used to
DEMYAN VOLKOV
“The fuck you mean, they chase you off?” Demyan Volkov demanded, his fist clenching his phone. The phone’s sharp edges bit his fingers, but he didn’t release. He was strong, not weak like leisure class, not cringing like bourgeoisie, and a fucking phone would not make him stop.
In the footage from one of his men’s bodycams, a grainy video played on Volkov’s phone.
Their boxy black cars screech-stopped around three black SUVs in a cement-boxed parking garage.
Shouting in Russian, English, and French chirped out of his phone screen, then the image went dark as an arm covered the camera lens when the man wearing it reached cross-body for his gun.
But no shooting.
The video returned, showing first men waving their arms, then a car’s interior swallowed the view of the garage.
No bodies of Romanov’s men littered the cement, nor his men.
No bleeding. No grabbing gory wounds.
Just shouting.
Posturing.
Volkov wanted to spit on floor at this disgusting display of cowardice.
He needed bold men, ambitious men, not this, whatever this was. “Disgusting, Pavel.”
The man on the other end of the line growled back at him in Russian, frantically explaining himself.
“I do not want excuses. I want Romanov to be fucking terrified like Vladimir Putin terrifies people. Is Nicolai Romanov fucking terrified?”
The lilting excuses coming out of the phone made Volkov want to reach through the cell signal and electrocute the testicles of this pathetic excuse for a man.
“Did you give message to Romanov or not?”
The man gibbered, admitting that they hadn’t talked to Nicolai Romanov himself because he’d never shown. They’d just yelled at his Swedish and Indian and German mercenaries to bring him, but they had not.
All those foreign operators because Nicolai Romanov might be the heir of the last tsar of Russia, but he had no country, no territory he ruled over.
He had no army, no real power.
His blood was his only weapon, and the power to bleed is not a threat to a man like Demyan Volkov.
“This is not good operation, Pavel. We will try another operation to contact Nicolai Romanov and explain his choices, and if that does not work, then we move to stronger measures.”
“What measures can you take? He is already married, in Coptic Orthodox crowning, to this American woman. There is nothing to do,” Pavel wheedled. “He is married for his life because history and religion is his power. Without Church, he is nothing but old story to scare the children.”
“There are always other roads to take, Pavel,” Demyan said, using this as a moment to impart knowledge in how the world really worked to one of his captains.
How Pavel received such teaching would determine whether he rose in the organization someday or fell, and fell terribly.
“If circumstances are such that Tsesarevich Nicolai will not marry my Alina, then we change circumstances, or we change tsesarevich.”
“You can’t mean—”
“I mean we do not limit ourselves to petty bourgeois options. We rule ruthlessly because that is what it takes to rule Russia and the world. It has always been so, but now we are the tsars.”