11. Ronan
RONAN
She left.
I keep turning it over while I stand at the window, watching the street below swallow her up. A dark head in a sea of dark heads, then nothing, gone, vanished into the lunch crowd like she was never here at all.
She left, and she took both untouched whiskeys' worth of my pride with her.
I am not a man who hears the word no very often. It isn't because I am charming, though I can be when it serves me.
It isn't because I am rich, though I am that, too, in ways the IRS will never know the true depths of.
It's because of what I am underneath the suit and the civilized veneer. People say yes to me because some animal part of their brain understands what happens to the ones who don't.
But Cali Bradshaw doesn't know what I am. To her, I'm just another version of Todd in a better-fitting jacket. Smooth, rich, charming, and utterly full of shit.
I wasn't lying about what I told her the night we crossed paths at the lounge, though.
I'm not a good man.
And she has no idea just how not good I am.
I pick up her glass off the cabinet. Two fingers of a thirty-year-old single malt I've been saving for an occasion just like this. And yet she didn't so much as wet her lips with it. If I were less patient, I'd be insulted.
But I know better than most that all the games worth playing take a long, long time to come to fruition.
I down her drink in one swallow, if only because someone should. It'd be a sin to pour out something this delicious. The liquid does nothing to cool the thing she's lit in me.
I've wanted plenty of women in my life, and gotten most of them, and forgotten nearly all of them by the time the sun came up.
This feels different.
She thinks she said no.
What she actually said was not yet. She just doesn't know it.
The thing about me, the thing my father beat into me before I learned to be the one doing the beating, is that I am very, very good at waiting. Todd thought he was playing chess. Cali handed him his own king carved out of his ribs.
I respect that. God, I respect that.
I will respect her boundary, too. I am not Todd. I won't show up at her door, or have my people follow her. I won't manufacture some chance encounter at her favorite coffee shop dressed up as fate.
But respecting the boundary and doing nothing are two very different things.
I have work to do.
My phone buzzes against the marble desk. Not the firm phone. Not my personal one, either. The one that rings is the third one. I look at the screen.
NAVI AKOV
I answer. "Tell me you're wrong."
"I love you, too, cousin," Navi says. "How was your morning? Mine's been just a delight. I found out the world's least loyal accountant has been keeping a go-bag in his car like he's auditioning for a Jason Bourne movie."
My grip tightens on the phone. "So you were right about Pyotr," I say with a grimace.
"Unfortunately." Navi exhales. "For what it's worth, I didn't want to be right about this."
Three weeks ago—the day Todd came into my office, funnily enough—Navi called me with a suspicion: that our best money launderer, Pyotr Vasiliev, was getting itchy feet and preparing to make a run out of the country, with a fuck-ton of the Bratva's money stuffed into his suitcases.
I'd hoped he was being paranoid, but paranoia is what keeps us alive in this business.
And as with most things, his gut turned out to guide us right.
"Where?" I ask, knowing already that Navi will have nailed Pyotr to the fucking floor until I get a chance to speak to him.
"Warehouse three, off the BQE." He clears his throat and spits. "He's asking for you. Won't talk to anyone else."
"Of course he won't." I shrug on my coat and refasten the clasp of my watch as I stride to the door. "He's been with us longer than you've been alive. He started washing money for my father when you were still eating crayons."
"Who, me?" Navi asks. "Nah, I was a marker sniffer. They made you all woozy. Felt nice."
"Explains a lot," I mutter. "Tell Pyotr I'm coming. And tell him I'm fucking pissed."
I think about the past as I drive across the bridge.
For years, the firm was enough. The Akov Firm bills hours that were never worked to clients who don't exist and takes payment in cash.
Through a hundred sneaky channels, we rinse dirty money into crisp, clean bills.
The government is welcome to examine our books anytime they please.
They can audit until they're blue in the face and they won't find anything wrong.
Because I'm very fucking good at what I do.
Then I got greedy. Or ambitious, if that's a more fitting word. Take your pick.
And nothing suits an ambitious man better than firepower.
Moving guns is the best business on planet Earth. It prints money, almost literally. But the trouble with making money that fast is that the river runs higher than the channel can carry.
The firm can't wash it all. I've known this for months.
So, ever since I saw the writing on the wall, I've been quietly building the next thing—a web of shells and front businesses and a new structure that can absorb the flood without relying on one geriatric Russian man with an abacus and a heart condition.
But I guess I didn't move fast enough.
Because that geriatric Russian just tried to leave me high and dry.
I find them in the back office, a glassed-in box that overlooks the warehouse floor.
The floor is empty tonight, which is how I want it.
It's better if there are no witnesses. Two of my men stand by the door, faces blank, hands folded.
Navi leans against a filing cabinet with his arms crossed. For once, he isn't smiling.
And in the chair—not one of my torture chairs, just an ordinary office chair on squeaking wheels—sits Pyotr Vasiliev.
He looks smaller than he did the last time I saw him. They always do, in these rooms. His coat is buttoned wrong. There's a tremor in his liver-spotted hands that he can't quite hide, and his eyes, when they find mine, are wet and rimmed red, so frightened that I almost feel pity.
I kill that instinct quickly.
"Pyotr," I begin.
"Ronan!" He lurches toward me. "Ronan, please. Let me explain. Let me—"
"Navi tells me you've packed a bag."
He recoils. "It's not—it was not what it looks like. I was going to—"
I hold up a hand to stop him. "You've worked for my family for more than two decades. So you know I'm not stupid. You think I don't know what it looks like when someone tries to run?"
He gasps wordlessly and the tremors increase.
I pull a chair over and sit so we're level, so he doesn't have to look up at me. I don't want this to feel like the gallows even though we both know what it is.
That's not how my father would've played it. Igor would've had Pyotr on his knees by now, so the man knew exactly how high above him he stood.
"Why?" I ask.
Just that.
Without preamble, it pours out of him. He's got a struggling daughter in Brighton Beach, a second grandchild on the way, doctors, so many damn doctors, his heart has been skipping for a year, plus of course there's that dream he's nursed in secret of a small cottage somewhere warm where nobody knows his name or what he's done with his time on this earth.
But he's not stealing, he swears it! He swears he's not stealing, he would never, he was just taking enough to ease his way out of the door, because all he wants is out, all he wants is the quiet life, he just wants to die in a comfortable bed instead of a claustrophobic backroom in a warehouse off the BQE.
"I would never talk," he promises as he begins to cry.
"You know me, Ronan. You've known me since you were a boy.
I'd never breathe a word. I only wanted to leave.
I'm too old for this. My heart—" He presses a fist to his chest. "Please.
Let me go clean. I'll give you something for it.
A marker! Anything. I have a marker—Bocharov, the shipping man in Newark, he owes me, he owes me big and that debt is yours, take it, take it and let me go to my daughter. "
A marker.
For some reason, that gives me pause.
I sit with it for a moment.
There's a way this goes that my father would undoubtedly have chosen.
I'd give Navi a nod, and by nightfall, a bundled-up tarp would be sunk to the bottom of the East River, and that would be the end of Pyotr Vasiliev.
I'd be within my rights as the pakhan of the Akov Bratva to do that.
Every new recruit understands when they join: There is no leaving.
I'm not going to do that.
But…
"You'll have your exit," I tell him.
The relief that breaks across his face is so total that it almost embarrasses me. He grabs my hand in both of his shaking ones. "Thank you, thank you, spasibo, Ronan, I—"
"I'm not finished." I don't pull my hand away, but I don't return the grip, either. "You'll have your life. And I'll take the marker."
"Yes!" he cries. "Yes, of course, it's—"
"Shut up and listen to me, Pyotr." He clamps up and looks at me with damp eyes and tear-stained cheeks.
"The marker is only a symbol of the true collateral here.
What binds you to me is in Brighton Beach.
Your daughter, the grandchild that's coming, the one already here—they are what's at stake now.
Not because I'll touch them—I won't, not unless you make me—but because you'll always know that I could.
For the rest of your quiet little life in the sun, you'll know that the door you walked through has me standing on the other side of it.
Forever. Do you understand what I'm giving you and what I'm keeping? "
The relief drains out of him by degrees.
It's a devil's deal, what I'm offering. I'll let him out… but if he so much as breathes wrong, it won't be him that pays.
"I understand," he whispers.
"Say that again."
"I understand, pakhan."
What I hate most about this entire thing is that the voice coming out of my mouth isn't mine.
It's my father's. The same low menace, the guttural growl, the coldness, the hatred.
I spent my whole childhood watching that man bend the powerless until they broke, throwing glasses at women cowering against kitchen walls.
I swore I'd never be that. That a man needs a code, that there are lines.
Yet here I am. The most powerful man in the room, leaning over the weakest one, deciding how much of his life he's allowed to keep.
"Navi will see you home tonight," I say as I stand and clear my head. "You leave the country within the month. You'll be contacted about Bocharov. You'll never call this number again."
Pyotr nods and nods and nods, an old man's bobblehead nod, and lets Navi's men help him up by the elbows like he's already the sickly, feeble grandfather he wants to be.
I walk out onto the warehouse floor before I have to watch them lead him out.
Navi finds me by the loading bay, staring at nothing, jaw tight.
"That was kinder than your old man would've done," he says, lighting a cigarette he knows I hate. "By a mile."
I shake my head to shut him up. I don't have it in me to hear it. "It wasn't kind."
"No," Navi agrees easily, smoke curling up between us. "But it wasn't a shallow grave in the marshes, either. Take the win, Ro. You're allowed one occasionally." He studies me. "You're in a mood. And it's not just Pyotr. You've had this look since I called. What happened to you today?"
"Business," I say sharply, before my mind drifts to anything or anyone it shouldn't be drifting near.
But I'm not thinking about Pyotr anymore, not really. The problem he leaves behind is the same problem that's been keeping me up for months: I need a new way to make dirty money look clean.
To do that, I need something legitimate, something real. A business with real revenue and real customers, with books that audit clean because they are clean, a structure complex enough that money could disappear into it and come out the other side smiling.
Just like that, I have my answer.
And luckily for me… I still owe her one more drink.