1. Alexei
Alexei
There’s no logic in missing someone who was never mine. Even less in wanting someone I can never have.
Then again, if logic had ever played a meaningful role in my life, I might not be lowering Ron Watkins’s body into the Everglades from the back of an airboat on a humid Miami night.
“I could have done this alone.” Dima holds part of the corpse above the water, while I feed the other end into the marsh by rope. “You don’t need to get your hands dirty like this. Not anymore.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” I twitch the rope up and down, making the corpse dance in the water. We didn’t wrap Ron’s body in plastic or add weights to make it sink. Both would only slow down the Everglades gators, Miami’s most efficient corpse disposal units.
Dima shakes his head. “You need to reconsider your definition of fun, you twisted fuck.”
“So I’ve been told.” I wink at him with my lone eye.
Dima gives me a dry look, then takes a harder grip on the bloated corpse as the gators come slithering out of the saw grass. He might be the only man brave enough to call me a twisted fuck to my face, rather than whispering it from a safe distance, which is what the rest of Miami does.
Then again, Dima not only watched me become a twisted fuck but was forced to play a key role in the horrors that made me what I am. Ours is a shared history that makes danger irrelevant and dark humor mandatory.
“There you go, Ronald.” I watch the corpse’s feet disappear, followed by half of one leg.
“In your next life, I recommend staying in the Cays.” I prod one of the gators, pushing it away to allow the others to get their share.
It’s not from some sick sense of altruism.
Spreading the meat around makes the chances of identification that much less.
“Ron could have had a nice life if he’d stuck to dealing to college kids on spring break.” Dima throws Ron’s head to a gator, who leaps out of the water to take it. “Why do these idiots always have to get ambitious?”
Because it’s man’s nature to want more, Dima.
More than the endless string of women who approach me every time I set foot in one of my own clubs. More than the smiling daughters who get served up by businessmen along with their proposals.
I start the engine and ease the airboat back into the waterway as the gators sink beneath the surface, taking Ron with them. Dima lights a cigarette and pops the tops off two beers, then throws me one as he lounges against the edge of the boat.
The problem with wanting more, I think as I hit high revs and feel the wind in my hair, is that it’s a dangerous path.
Wanting more leads men to make stupid decisions. To risk what they already have.
There’s nothing wrong with keeping one eye on the prize.
In my case, the men who stole my father’s empire only left me with one eye to watch it anyway.
But even with one eye, I always knew that I would get it back.
It took a lot of years and a hell of a lot more cuts of Dima’s knife before I managed it, but I made that fucking prize mine in the end.
So yeah, I understand keeping one eye on the prize. I understand ambition.
But ambition is different than wanting more. Ambition is strategic. A steady grind toward an attainable goal.
Wanting more is different. Wanting more is what drives a man like Ron to give up a lucrative side hustle in the Cays and think that dealing second-rate highs in my clubs is a good idea.
It’s an insatiable craving for something that can never, in any reality, ever come to be.
Ofelia Borovsky is wanting more.
I turn the airboat hard enough to almost topple Dima out of the back. He gives me a sour look, and I flip him the bird.
Ofelia Borovsky is where ambition ends and insanity begins.
Seven years should have been more than enough time for me to get that through my fucking head.
But clearly not, because the formal card inviting me to France for Ofelia’s first solo with the Orchestre de Paris is sitting unopened in my desk drawer.
And instead of preparing to join my father on the flight from Miami to Paris—a flight I promised my sister we’d both be on tomorrow—I’m dumping corpses in the marsh at midnight.
Not least because anything is better than lying in bed staring at the ceiling of my family’s Miami compound, trying not to see Ofelia’s face every time I close my eyes.
For many years the compound was my physical prison. Now it’s the memories it holds that bind me.
Memories that make me want more.
Memories that make me want to kill something.
I do a lot of killing to stop the wanting.
Fortunately, in my business, there’s no shortage of fuckers who need killing.
Dima is right—I don’t need to get my hands dirty anymore.
I’m not the rabid dog the Orlovs kept chained and hungry for years, unleashed only to do their sickest bidding.
The Orlovs are dead, and it’s been years since I succeeded Sergei, my father, as the Petrovsky pakhan.
I could outsource the bullets, torture, and grim, bloody work it takes to run Miami’s biggest bratva clan.
Move the entire organization off the streets and into cyberspace.
Make my father happy by leaving the back rooms and dirty deals behind, become the kind of white-collar criminal organization everyone seems to want to be these days.
Except, somewhat ironically given how many people want to kill me, the dirt is what keeps me alive.
Miami might be a heaving swamp of coin, corruption, and death, but it’s my swamp. Like the gators, I rule the darkest waters and thrive on death.
Miami needs a twisted fuck like me, or the darkness will spiral out of control and take the entire city down with it. I might be hated by my competitors, loathed by the law, and feared by almost everyone else, but I’m a necessary evil, and they all know it.
I’ve rebuilt the Petrovsky clan into the hardest, fiercest bratva clan Miami has ever seen, and I plan on keeping it that way.
There isn’t a girl, gun, or game in town I don’t own a piece of.
There might be parts of the swamp I don’t personally run, like the drugs, but I control those who do, not to mention charge them a fortune for the privilege.
And I’m still the one who kills them when they fuck me.
It’s one of the reasons the Petrovsky clan came back so fast, and so hard, after the years of Orlov rule.
People had forgotten how to get their hands dirty.
Learned to earn maximum money for smallest risk, all while staying as far away from the swamp as possible.
By the time I overthrew the Orlovs, Miami had forgotten what real war looks like.
The city had become a playground for coffee criminals whose reputations were made with one bullet and a flashy deal.
None of them were prepared to meet a gator from the swamp who’d spent the past decade being starved and tortured.
But alligators know how to go hungry. For years, if necessary. Know how to hide far beneath the surface until everyone starts to think the water is safe.
It took me less than a year to restore order and remind Miami what a real predator looks like.
I know it kills my father that I’ve stayed in the game. He’d love to see me settled in Spain, close enough to Roman and Darya that I can dangle their growing brood on my knee at Sunday dinner.
But the swamp is the only game I know. The swamp is what the Orlov coup forced me to become.
And nobody wants a predator sitting at their family table.
I’ve diversified, sure. I’ve been a full partner in Andersson Technologies since Lars and I had the idea for it back when we were two teenage geeks rooming together at boarding school. The various tech companies under that umbrella alone make me a small fortune.
But the swamp is what I do.
And long ago, fate decided it was where I belong.
Not to mention its more vital role: the swamp stops me from wanting more.
Miami is the ugly, impassable quagmire sitting between me and Ofelia Borovsky.
It’s what stops ambition from becoming insanity.
“So.” Dima leaps into the water and takes a rope as I nudge the airboat up to the ramp.
“You going to take a flight to Paris or just keep finding assholes to kill? Because much as I don’t like pissing you off, your father isn’t exactly a picnic, and since he mentioned tonight that he was grateful I’d be taking care of things in your absence, I take it he’s under the impression you’ll be flying to France with him in the morning. ”
I jam the lever into reverse so hard the airboat judders in the water.
“And the idea of fucking with Roman Borovsky,” Dima continues as I shut the boat down, “is just as unappealing.” He shoots me a dry glance as he tugs the boat onto the ramp.
“In the phone call you made me take for you, Roman made it clear he’s expecting the whole family to be in Paris for this party.
And you’re family, dirtbag. Whether you like it or not. ”
He walks away without waiting for an answer, his back presenting an extremely attractive target for the knife in my belt. Except that throwing it would deprive me of the pleasure of knocking Dima on his ass, which I definitely intend to do at the next opportunity.
Unfortunately, he’s also right.
I am Roman’s family.
Roman is married to my sister. And Ofelia is his daughter.
Which makes her my niece by marriage, if not by blood.
In families like Roman’s and mine, that kind of technicality is irrelevant. Honor runs deeper than blood in our world.
Ofelia Borovsky is as family as it fucking gets.
And even if she wasn’t, she’d still be off-limits.
Ofelia is the original sin. The apple I can’t pick.
In her life, I’m not a gator in the swamp. I’m the fucking serpent that came into the garden of Eden and almost destroyed her completely.
The only way to make sure I don’t somehow finish the job is to stay as far away from her as possible.