Crowned By the BRATVA Heir (The Bratva Crown Trilogy #3)

Nick

Alexei is sweating.

There’s a shine along the hairline, a dampness at the collar that wasn't there twenty minutes ago when Dmitri brought him in. The rest of him is holding together. Hands flat on the arms of the chair, chin level, eyes forward. A man performing composure for an audience that isn't buying it.

I lean against the edge of the desk with my arms folded. The lamp throws a circle of warm light that stops two feet short of where he's sitting, leaving the upper half of his face in shadow.

Dmitri stands behind the chair. Close enough that Alexei can hear him breathe.

"Tell me about the transfers," I say.

Alexei swallows. "Pakhan, I can explain."

"That's why you're here."

He shifts. The wood creaks under him. He's a big man, broader than me through the shoulders, hands that have done ugly work without complaint for nine years. Those hands are curled now; knuckles pale against the dark armrests.

"Viktor approached me," he says. "Two months ago. He said he wanted to establish a contingency fund in case the transition was contested. That the family needed protection against instability."

"And you believed that."

"I believed he was your father's brother." His jaw works once. "I believed family was family."

"Family is family," I agree. "Which is why I find it interesting that you took seventy-five thousand from a holding company registered in my cousin's name and didn't mention it to the man you pledged yourself to at a graveside two weeks ago."

The shine at his hairline spreads. A bead of sweat breaks loose and tracks along his temple. He doesn't wipe it.

"It isn't what you think, Pakhan."

"Then tell me what it is."

"Insurance." He turns the word in his mouth like something rehearsed. "Viktor was persuasive. He made a case that the transition might not hold. That the captains might need to act independently if the leadership fractured. The money was for operational continuity."

"Operational continuity." I let the words sit in the air long enough that the silence does my work for me.

Dmitri shifts his weight behind the chair. Alexei hears it. His shoulders climb a fraction.

"Did Viktor outline the structure for you?

" I ask. "Because I've seen the holding company.

I've seen Bettina's name on the incorporation documents.

I've seen the trust restructure his lawyer was discussing at my father's funeral while his body was still warm.

So I'm curious. Did he show you the full picture, or just the corner he needed you to see? "

Alexei's mouth opens. Closes. Opens again.

"He showed me enough," he says quietly.

"Enough to take his money?"

"Yes."

"Enough to sit in my meetings, look me in the eye, call me Pakhan, and go home to an account that says otherwise."

He doesn't answer. The facts are on the desk between us in a folder Dmitri assembled with the precision of a man who has been doing this work since he was nineteen.

I unfold my arms and push off the desk. Walk to the window. The east lawn is bathed in late morning light, the tree line turning green against the spring sky. I look at it without seeing it because I'm thinking about Sadie.

I’m always thinking about Sadie. She has become my obsession. It’s plain to see, now. How she consumes my thoughts, how all of my actions are determined by how it will impact her and our future together.

I turn back to Alexei.

"My father told me Viktor was a snake," I say. "That snakes don't come at you directly. They come at the thing you love."

Alexei's eyes track me as I cross the room. Calculating distance, speed, chance. The narrowing set of outcomes available to a man who took money from the wrong side.

"I want to know what Viktor told you about me. About my personal life, the resources I've allocated, the woman in my house. Every word, Alexei. Every conversation, every meeting, every phone call. And I want it now, because whatever patience I had, I ran out of it watching you sweat."

My phone rings.

The vibration pattern is the one I've assigned to Dr. Mehta's clinic. I pull it out and answer.

"Mr. Zhirinovsky." Dr Mehta's voice is tight. Controlled the way medical staff are controlled when the situation demands it. "Sadie didn't arrive for her shift. She was due at eight, she's not here, and she hasn't called in."

The room shrinks.

The desk. The folder. Alexei in his chair. All of it pulls inward until there's only the phone against my ear and the sound of my own blood.

“Her bag was outside the staff entrance, it has her medication in. One of my staff members found it when she went outside for a break. She isn’t answering her phone.”

"Thank you, Dr. Mehta. I’ll handle it."

I hang up.

"Where is Lev?" My voice is level. I hear it from outside myself, the way I hear it in meetings and negotiations and the handful of moments in my life when the thing happening is too large to be inside of.

Dmitri is already pulling his phone from his pocket. He doesn't need to be told what this is. He's lived beside me long enough to recognize the particular frequency of silence that precedes violence.

He dials. Speaker. Two rings.

"Boss."

"Lev." Dmitri's voice is flat. "Sadie. This morning. Walk me through it."

"I dropped her at the clinic. Eight o'clock, give or take. Pulled up to the front, she got out, I left."

"Did you watch her go inside?"

A pause. One second too long. A man realizing he made an error he cannot undo.

"I saw her get out of the car," Lev says. "She was walking toward the entrance."

"Did you watch her go inside, Lev?" Same tone. Same volume. The repetition is the threat.

"No. I pulled away. She was ten steps from the door."

I take the phone from Dmitri's hand.

"Lev." I keep my voice low. The low is what does the work. "Did you see anything suspicious around the clinic?"

"Pakhan, I—"

"Anything at all?" I demand, louder this time.

"No." His voice has changed. "No, I didn't."

I hand the phone back to Dmitri.

Something moves through me that I don't have a word for in any language I speak. It starts in my stomach, cold, rises through my chest, settles behind my eyes. When it gets there, the world sharpens to a clarity that is almost beautiful in how dangerous it is.

I turn to Alexei.

He saw the call. He heard Dmitri's questions. His face has gone the color of wet concrete, because Alexei is not a stupid man. He's a man who made a stupid choice, and the distance between those two things is collapsing.

"Pakhan." His voice cracks. "I had nothing to do with this. Whatever's happened. The money was just money. Viktor never said anything about the girl. I swear on my mother's grave. He talked about the business, succession, restructuring. He never mentioned her. I didn't know he'd go that far."

"But you knew he'd go somewhere."

His mouth opens and nothing comes out.

"You knew." I step toward him. "You took a hundred and fifteen thousand from a man building a shadow operation behind my back, and you didn't ask yourself where the shadow ended.

You sat in my library and said Pakhan to my face while the man paying you was planning something you chose not to look at.

You watched him challenge the right of succession, my place as Pakhan.

You heard him say it. And you took the money anyway. "

I'm standing over him now. Close enough that he has to tilt his head back to meet my eyes. Close enough that I can see sweat pooling in the hollow of his throat.

"And now the woman I love is missing."

I pull the Makarov from the desk drawer.

My father's gun. It's been in the top right drawer for as long as I've been alive, and I cleaned and loaded it the night he died because that's what you do when you inherit a chair. You make sure the tools are ready.

Alexei's body tries to stand before his mind catches up. Dmitri's hands land on his shoulders and push him down. The chair scrapes. His breath comes in short, wet bursts.

"Pakhan. Please. I'll help you find her. I'll tell you everything. Every conversation. I'll give you Viktor's entire operation. Please. I have children."

"You have children," I say. "And Sadie has diabetes. A condition that will kill her in twenty-four hours without medication, and her medication is in a bag on the floor of an alley because the men your benefactor sent didn't let her keep it."

My hand is steady. It was steady the first time I killed a man at fourteen and it has been steady every time since. The steadiness isn't courage. It's the absence of doubt.

"I can help," Alexei says. He's crying. The tears cut tracks through the sweat on his face. "I can call Viktor. I can find out where he's keeping her. Give me the chance, Pakhan. Give me the chance and I'll bring her back to you."

Dmitri is watching me. I feel his eyes on the side of my face. He's not going to stop me. He's not going to advise me. He's measuring whether the man in front of him is still the Pakhan he signed on with, or something else.

I look at Alexei. The tears. The shaking hands. I think about my father's voice. Hide her or bury her. Those are the only options he will leave you.

I think about Sadie in danger because I fell in love with her when she helped me in a car wreck.

“Your wife and children will be provided for,” I say, and shoot him in the head.

The sound fills the study. It bounces off the walnut paneling, the leather chairs and the old bookshelves and settles into the walls the way gunshots do. Permanent. Part of the building now.

His body slumps sideways. The chair tips. Dmitri steps back to avoid the blood. He doesn't look away.

I set the Makarov on the desk.

"Kol." Dmitri says it softly. The name he uses when he is worried, which is almost never.

I don't look at him. I'm looking at Alexei. At the cost of patience. The cost of giving a man time to come back on his own, of believing that forty thousand was an investment and not a down payment.

I was wrong. I was careful and strategic and measured, and I was wrong, and Sadie is gone.

"Get this cleaned up." I pick up my phone and dial.

"Lev. You're coming in. Now. Thirty minutes.

You're going to tell me every car parked on that street this morning, every face in that alley, every second between the moment she stepped out of your car and the moment you drove away without watching her walk through the door. "

I hang up.

Dmitri's face is a mask. Discipline and loyalty and the bond between two men who have stood in enough rooms like this one. But I can see it behind his eyes. The question. The calibration.

"Don't," I say.

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"Good. Call Gregor. Call Yevgeny. Wake every man we have. Viktor's properties, his warehouses, his daughter's apartment, his lawyer's office, every address on file. I want men at all of them within the hour."

"And Viktor himself?"

"Viktor I’ll handle personally."

He nods once. Steps over the body on his way to the door. Starts dialing before he's cleared the threshold.

I stand alone in the study.

The blood is spreading across the floor, finding the grain of the hardwood, following it the way water follows a path of least resistance. It will stain. My father would have had the boards replaced. I'll have them replaced too, after.

After I bring her home.

I check the Makarov. Check my phone. No calls. No messages. Nothing from the clinic, the townhouse, the cameras.

She's been gone over an hour.

If they took her from the alley between the clinic and the laundromat, the van had a head start. Sixty minutes, maybe more. Seventy-mile radius. Two hundred warehouses. A thousand basements. More empty buildings than I can search in a day.

I don't need a day.

I need Viktor to make a call. A man who takes something doesn't take it to keep it. He takes it to trade it. Viktor will call me because the whole point of taking her is to make me answer, and the whole point of making me answer is to negotiate terms that put him in the chair.

My phone will ring. When it does, I will listen. I will note every word, every pause, every sound in the background that tells me where she is. I will be calm. I will be everything my father trained me to be.

And then I will go and get her back, and kill every man who touched her.

I walk out of the study and close the door behind me.