2. Ivan
IVAN
Luna Ambrose walks into a room the way a match strikes, and now, Hugo is on fire.
He notices us the moment we cross the threshold. The color drains out of his face in a way that is, I will admit, deeply satisfying. He’s standing near the head table with a glass of champagne and his new father-in-law, looking exactly as he always looks—polished, handsome, and performative.
And when we walk in, the performance stuttered.
Luna makes a small sound beside me. “Look at his face?—”
“No.” I keep my eyes forward, nodding to a man I recognize from the hotel’s catering contract. “If we look, then he knows we’re doing this for him. Let him wonder what is going on. Let him stew on it.”
She glances away. I can feel the effort it takes her. She smiles at a passing guest she has never met in her life with the warm ease of someone who belongs here entirely, and I revise my estimation of her upward by several degrees.
For all his bitching about this woman, Luna is rather impressive. She takes my cues well, not faltering in the slightest. I wonder how long she’s been performing for rooms, too. That kind of talent comes from years of practice.
We make a slow circuit of the room. I stop to greet two men I do business with, a city alderman who owes me a favor he pretends not to remember, and a woman who manages three of my legitimate properties. I introduce her to Luna without elaboration.
Elizabeth smiles. “So nice to meet you. Wasn’t the wedding lovely?”
“The best of the season so far ,” Luna says like a cheeky debutant.
“I know exactly what you mean. This early in the season, you never know what you’ll find.”
They chatter, and I make note of the fact that Hugo doesn’t approach.
He won’t. He’s smarter than he is wise, which means he knows better than to make the first move without understanding what he’s walking into.
During a lull in conversation, Luna leans close enough that I can hear her without her raising her voice. “You were right about how to play this.” A pause. “He’s fuming.”
She laughs then, and it’s a better sound than anything else in this room, which is full of an orchestra and two hundred people performing wealth at each other.
This arrangement is temporary, but there’s no reason a man can’t appreciate a thing he does not intend to keep.
I shift my gaze toward him, and sure enough, he’s pinching at his coat, as if there’s something on it. Fuming, indeed.
When the orchestra shifts tempo, I offer my hand.
She looks at it, then at me. “Are we dancing?”
“We are.”
“Do you actually dance, or is this one of those things where you stand in one place and sway with authority?”
“Come and find out.”
She takes my hand.
The song is fast enough that it requires genuine effort, and Luna meets it without hesitation—she moves well, easily, without self-consciousness, and I find myself adjusting to match her rather than leading outright, which is not something I typically do.
We draw attention, which is not surprising.
I’m known, and if they don’t know me, I’m large. I tend to gather eyes wherever I go.
But more than that, Luna is enchanting.
Her onyx black hair is striking against her pale ivory skin—elegant black paint on a blank canvas.
And the crisp white curl near her temple, like a forties starlet, swirls near her bright green eyes.
By its root, a mottled scar at her hairline.
The white streak is from some kind of old injury she doesn’t bother to hide.
I like that. And I like that she smells like flowers.
The tempo moves through me, and as I follow the music, a memory surfaces. An ugly one.
The argument was nothing new, taken piece by piece. Hugo has been sharpening his resentments for years, and I’ve let most of them pass because the cost of responding was higher than the cost of endurance.
I’ve always understood cost. It comes with the job.
But yesterday he had assembled all of it at once—every grievance, every cruelty—and delivered it in the corridor outside the hotel ballroom where his wedding rehearsal dinner had just concluded, in the voice of a man who had finally decided he had nothing left to lose.
After all, he’s the public face of the organization.
The one who shows up at the legitimate functions, the one who talks to the cameras for us.
Hugo has a good face. Classically handsome, confident. He knows how to move in a room full of important people. In another life, he would’ve made a great politician.
But I’m his stepbrother, and I run the Fedorov Bratva.
So really, in this life, he’s just our mask.
I maintain power, in part, because my stepbrother knows how to talk our way into rooms we wouldn’t otherwise be invited to. His work keeps part of the business legit, and that’s an invaluable person to have.
For now.
But his impending wedding cracked something in him. I don’t know whether he felt guilt over dumping Luna the moment a strategic woman became available or if he was merely feeling his importance, but Hugo lost his composure long enough to piss me off last night.
“You’re a relic,” he’d said. “The men who matter have moved past you. You dress it up in loyalty and tradition, but what you are is afraid.”
He had more champagne in him than judgment, so I let it slide. That was a mistake. I should’ve called him out then and there, but for the sake of familial harmony—what little of it there is—I tried to hold my tongue. “You’re drunk. Go sleep it off.”
He spat, “And you will die alone in that oversized penthouse you call a home, Ivan. No one wants to stand beside a man who looks like you. Who is like you .” His eyes moved over my face, my hands, with the contemptuous ease of someone who has rehearsed this too.
“Look at you. You’re a monster. What woman would want you? ”
“Perhaps one day, we’ll find out. Do be careful on the stairs, Hugo. I’d hate for you to have an accident.” I had stomped away, letting the threat hang in the air.
I’m human. His bullshit stung.
Hugo’s fourteen years my junior—my forty-eight to his thirty-four—but he still knows how to get under my skin.
He’s known how since his mother married my father all those years ago.
He was nothing but a nerdy teenager with a chip on his shoulder back then, but he always knew how to get on my nerves.
Maybe all younger brothers are this way. I’m not sure.
I can’t help that I’m six and a half feet tall. No, I will not stop lifting weights, so I will remain this large as long as I’m breathing. The scars… I could take steps to stop accumulating them, but that would hinder my business. The tattoos? They’re a part of who I am.
And he has always hated every inch of me.
He resents that I’m his boss, that I’m the reason his life is so easy.
All he has to do is show up, look and sound good, and that’s it.
He’s overpaid and underworked, and he hates me for it.
I always assumed it was because I don’t bother to engage his mind in his work, but I stopped analyzing him long ago. It’s not worth the effort.
Hugo is something I endure because he makes me money. Any brotherly bond that could’ve existed was extinguished long ago.
Now, on this dancefloor, with his new wife watching from a table and his face doing something terrible at the sight of me with Luna, I’m not a relic.
Here, I’m the pakhan of an organization he will never run, in possession of a woman he discarded and is now regretting, and the accounting, as far as I’m concerned, is settling itself very nicely.
The song ends. Luna tips her face up toward mine, slightly flushed, and says, “You actually dance.”
“You sound surprised.”
“I had the sway-with-authority theory going pretty strong.”
“Noted.”
She laughs again. There it is again. That music in her.
We move to the bar, and I order. “Russian Standard for me. Luna?”
“Singapore Sling.”
The bartender blinks once before starting her cocktail, and she seems satisfied by his reaction. But my bartenders aren’t the type to not know a classic, and our drinks are up in under a minute.
Armin finds me as soon as he walks into the room. My sovetnik is compact, sharp-eyed, Cypriot by birth, Chicagoan by temperament, and he looks at Luna with his trademark unreadable assessment. “Mr. Fedorov.” Then, with the calibrated courtesy of a man who understands optics, “Good evening, miss.”
“Luna, this is my associate, Armin. Armin, Luna is my date this evening.”
She smiles charmingly. “I’ve met more people at this reception than I did in all my years with Hugo. It’s a refreshing change.”
She lore-drops brilliantly. She made it clear we’re together, and that she was Hugo’s girlfriend for a time, all without making it awkward.
I watch Armin recalibrate in real time, the way a man does when something turns out to be more than he expected. He smiles and holds up his glass. “To changes, may they always be refreshing.”
We drink, and he excuses himself. I explain to Luna, “He does these little check-ins at stressful functions to keep tabs on my mood. He thinks I don’t know, but I do. I’ve known Armin Kazarian far too long not to see what he’s doing.”
“What’s his real job?”
Sovetnik. “Something between an assistant and an advisor.”
“Does everyone here work for you?”
“A reasonable percentage.”
She considers this, turning her glass slowly. “And Hugo?”
“Him, too.”
She nods, not pressing, and I find I don’t mind that she doesn’t press. Most people want more than I’m offering. Luna Ambrose seems to understand discretion better than most.
Across the room, Hugo excuses himself from his new father-in-law and takes his wife’s hand with the studied ease of a man who’s performing contentment for an audience.
Olga Witte—Olga Dumas, now, though the name will take getting used to—smiles up at him with the unclouded warmth of someone who does not yet know she should be asking questions.
She’s very young. But that’s not her fault.
It’s her father’s. Pyotr Witte is a traditional man. He kept her in all-girls schools throughout her life, sheltering her from the realities of the world. I suppose I understand the urge, but now, she’s tied to Hugo. A fate I would not wish upon anyone.
Hugo doesn’t look at us directly. He hasn’t once, not since that first moment at the door. He’s good at this—acting like he doesn’t care—but I know him well enough to read the tension in his shoulders and the way he holds his glass a fraction too tightly.
He wanted to marry into Pyotr Witte’s weapons empire. He wanted the alliance, the elevation, the proof that he could build something I couldn’t take from him. And he has all of it, technically. The marriage happened. The alliance exists. Technically .
Pyotr is not the kind of man who gives something for nothing, and certainly not his daughter. It makes me wonder what Hugo promised him in exchange. Pyotr has long wanted to do business with me.
The next few weeks will be enlightening.
Luna says something to the woman beside her at the bar—a guest I don’t recognize—and within sixty seconds they’re discussing something that makes them both laugh, heads tilted toward each other like they’ve known each other for years.
Why Hugo thought so little of her, I will never understand.
I’m not built for rooms like this. I’m built for the work that happens before and after rooms like this—the calls, the pressure, the mathematics of loyalty and consequence.
I’m here tonight because my absence would have been its own message, and I’ve spent years ensuring that every message I send is intentional.
The orchestra moves into something slower. Around us, the room softens and rearranges, couples drifting toward the floor. I glance over at Luna. She’s turned back from her new acquaintance, and she meets my eyes with the directness that I’m beginning to understand is simply how she looks at things.
The slower song would mean a different proximity. A different kind of conversation. I would have the chance to pin down what flower she smells like.
And if I share a slow, intimate dance with Luna in front of all these important people, Hugo will have a fit.