Chapter 35 The Tsar
The Tsar
Kirill
Roman and I went way back. I’d met him in Moscow about fifteen years ago, when we were both barely twenty and he was establishing himself on this side of the globe, just like I was doing back home.
We had a lot in common, age being one of them. And even though we grew up in vastly different circumstances, we had similar painful childhoods.
Roman was smart and hardworking; he stayed loyal, and we hit it off. His influence grew, and so did mine, and I knew he was the one to watch and keep close.
Every time he’d visit the Motherland, I always made time for him. We partied, we did coke, we fucked girls together, we went to the sauna, and as we got older, we became partners in a few businesses. We became long-distance friends.
Ruthless and calculating, he decimated his competition and was the mastermind behind the booming business. His leadership was sharp, and his men were loyal and disciplined.
Except one.
I had long-standing, deeply rooted suspicions about the one man he trusted most—his childhood friend and closest partner: Sergei.
My contacts in the Russian Armed Forces confirmed my suspicions—Sergei was rotten to the core. His appetite for the dirtiest and most depraved behavior lost him all respect in Russia, amongst my men, at the very least.
Nevertheless, Roman trusted him, and their business kept growing even though it was obvious that Roman was the one carrying the weight. As for Denis, he was harmless and a bit of an idiot.
I met with Roman a day or two after his arrival in New York, and I was shocked—shocked—to see him in such a state.
Shocked was an understatement! I did my best not to show it, but I couldn’t look away from his mangled appearance.
Even when Natasha tragically lost her life, even then, he looked more composed, and that was saying a lot.
He sported a deep cut on his cheekbone and a broken nose, the bruises around his eyes in full bloom. But worse than the physical damage was the look in his eyes. He was in emotional agony. Something awful must have happened.
We sat down at our usual table for lunch, and he ordered a glass of vodka. Not a shot—a glass. We could all drink, but no one drank straight-up vodka in the middle of the day. So, he was trying to forget something.
"Who fucked you up like this?" I launched right into it.
One thing I’d noticed about communicating with North Americans was that they all wanted to do small chit-chat before getting down to business. We didn't do that in Russia. First, you take care of business, and then you do small talk about the weather and shit.
Distraught, he stared down at the table before giving me a quiet, dejected answer. “Devchonka."
A girl.
Fuck. Were we really doing this? We were both in our mid-thirties, way past the age of letting a woman break us apart like that.
Although, I had my own angel I was pursuing.
One I hadn’t yet found the courage to approach.
One I’d thought about every damn minute for the last decade, counting down the days until it was time.
So maybe we were doing this. Maybe I understood him more than I wanted to admit.
He finally looked up at me with those puppy dog eyes, head over heels in love, desperate and heartbroken. He was completely gone. I didn’t press him and gave him a minute to collect himself. His voice strained and holding back literal tears, he gave me the succinct version of the story.
"She left me.” He forced the words out. “She's back here in New York, and.
..she's in danger. Because of me, obviously.
" Then he looked up at me, the severity of his next words spelled out in his eyes.
"Sergei threatened her. He has his eye on her.
..and I believe he..." Roman broke off and knocked back a heavy gulp of vodka.
"I think he betrayed me. I can't prove it yet, but he may have been involved in Natasha's death. "
Wow, what a fucking light lunch. So, Sergei had been a fucking snake all this time. I fucking knew it. If what Roman suspected was true, Sergei wasn’t only dangerous for Roman; he was a threat to all of us.
"Start from the beginning." I encouraged him and asked a few open-ended questions.
Rodriguez set him on the right path; finally, someone in his circle had the balls to fucking bring it up.
It seemed that all the events of the past few months were somehow linked to each other.
This girl came into his life by pure chance, but only because of his revenge on Natasha's killer.
Had there been no killer, there would be no Isla.
Had there been no Sergei, there would—potentially—be no killer.
Life played cruel jokes on us.
"I need your promise. That you’ll look after her here...while I deal with Sergei and try to get her back." Roman laid out his request. "I can't take him out without cause, and I can't figure out how to get him to confess to her death."
God, he looked so beaten up by life. A shadow of the man he usually was.
"Why do you think he had something to do with it?" I asked, though I was already trying to piece it together myself from the little details I knew.
"Isla…” he said her name like a prayer. "She said that when he threatened her.
..he said he will find her alone...just like his other one.
" Roman was slightly shaking at his own words.
"I never had any other one. The only other woman in my life who was with me was Natasha.
And she was alone when she was...when she was killed. I was out of the country."
He fell silent, eyes drifting down to the untouched plate in front of him. Neither one of us had any appetite anymore.
I had to think it over. I had a ton of my own shit to deal with; I didn't want to make any promises I couldn't keep.
"When are you going back to L.A.?" I asked him, but he just lightly shrugged.
“I don’t know.”
Great start. A real focused plan. He had to pull himself together.
"Where is she staying?" I pressed for more details.
"Currently, with a friend."
I leaned back in my chair, thinking over his words.
"Stay here for a few weeks. Try to repair whatever happened, and in the meantime, we can figure out her circumstances. I’ll see what I can do.
” Roman nodded like a bobblehead, disconnected.
“What’d you do, cheat on her?” I eyed his disheveled state.
“Although...it definitely doesn't look like it.
" I concluded just as he shook his head, vehemently denying the proposition.
"No. No. I would never cheat on her. I can't even stand to look at any other women."
Roman? Can't stand to look at women? Roman was the biggest womanizer I knew. Way worse than me in the past. I didn't think I'd ever seen him with the same woman more than once; at least I kept them around for a few weeks here and there.
"No. It's something...something terrible.
" He took a deep breath in, clearly having a hell of a time with it all.
"Dave Barrington. The owner of Anders C he was just like us.
If you didn't take him out, he would have done that to you. "
Oh, man, I felt bad for him. There was no coming back from this revelation.
Roman nodded again, defeated. "And stop drinking. You need to collect yourself. Don't repeat the same mistake as last time and let too much time go by. This time is crucial right now." His gaze shot up into mine, knowing exactly what I was referring to.
After Natasha died, he spiraled into the abyss—he completely fucking lost it. He stayed in bed, the bottle at his side—for months. I was pretty sure he was trying to drink himself to death.
Slowly, he pushed away the half-empty glass of vodka.
"You're right," he said, uncertain but honest. "I can't let this happen again.
I fucked up last time. I let it slip out of my hands, and five years later, I still don't know who was fucking responsible.
" Again, he was on the verge of tears. "I won't let anything slip out of my hands this time. I won't let her go."
We both fell silent, the weight of his words hanging between us. I was surprised at his reaction to my words. He didn’t try to defend himself, just admitted his fuckup and agreed with me. At the same time, he was so broken he would have agreed to anything I said.
But he followed through. He stayed in New York just like I told him to. He changed hotels, stopped drinking all day, and used my office to work. He was quiet, angry, and clearly still lost, but I knew he would figure it out.
Isla was outfitted with twenty-four-hour security monitoring her every move while we kept very strict and thorough vigilance over Sergei.
I fucking hated that guy. Fine, we were all involved in dark and awful shit.
We killed, we robbed, we deceived, but we weren’t the dirty fucks who tortured and played with their prey for fun, but Sergei was.
Thankfully, he left L.A. for the south of France, and the distance gave us some peace of mind that he wouldn't try to pull anything while away. There too, we kept an eye on him.
His wife and kids were in Russia for their summer holidays, but instead of joining them, Sergei decided to treat himself to a bit of debauchery on the French Riviera.
Denis tagged along with him for the first few days, and the reports I was getting from my guys watching him were disappointing at the very least but mostly just fucking gross.
Loud parties, orgies, gang bangs, so much fucking coke, Pablo Escobar would’ve been jealous.
Cops showing up to his villa every night—this was exactly the kind of behavior that made everyone think rich Russians were fucking pigs.
I guess that wasn’t totally wrong. He was a rich Russian, and he was downright fucking atrocious, amplifying every damn negative stereotype.
He wasn’t just spending money—he was pillaging it, burning through life.
I wondered what he was so intensely missing in his life that he engaged in this shit, a few years away from turning forty. We did all this when we were so young and stupid, but not now.
Roman’s suspicions about Sergei lived rent-free in my head for the next few days. I’d met Natasha a handful of times, and she was always a lovely, kind, and beautiful girl. Like Roman, she had raven-colored hair and fair skin and was always respectful and a bit shy.
Unlike Roman, though, she engaged in nothing illegal. Being abandoned by her father so early on and the loss of her mother had taken a toll on her. She seemed very cautious and risk averse.
Which was why her death raised so many questions.
As Roman later discovered, everything was off on the night of her tragic demise.
She was out with some new girlfriends, celebrating a birthday or something of the sort, but instead of taking the car and security that Roman had always provided for her, she jumped into a random Uber with some friends. None of us recognized those girls.
Roman managed to piece it all together from the security footage of the restaurant and nightclub, which he rewatched over and over again. He then ransacked absolutely every single fucking database to find that car and the owner…but it had vanished, never appearing on any records.
What was also incredibly suspicious, of course, was how laconic her texts were.
Wasn't she going out with friends? Girls send hundreds of texts, but her phone didn't contain much at all—a few phone calls and some photos.
The sad truth was that her phone had been in so many hands before it landed in Roman's that it was impossible to really take anything seriously.
Every single friend that Roman could locate from that evening was interrogated. He threatened the restaurant owner, who handed over all security footage and cooperated without question. There was a private investigator who followed whatever was left of the trail. But it all led to nothing.
After Natasha’s body was found, Roman worked backward to find the man who ended her life and who ordered the job. But it turned out he was searching in all the wrong places. The snake was cozied up right on his chest all these years.
I made the journey to Natasha’s funeral and witnessed, with my own eyes, that Sergei was destroyed.
He wailed at her coffin like he was burying the love of his life.
He held onto the casket, tears streaming down his face while he kissed the wooden top, not letting it go, afraid that she would be placed in the ground and ripped away from him forever.
The funeral had an aura of sinister darkness about it. Hundreds of people showed up with flowers, and a huge crowd gathered at the grave while the priest read the last prayer in Russian, barely audible over the noise of so many crying voices.
Roman stood planted to the ground, pale like a ghost and in a state of stupor, staring ahead and unable to fully understand what was happening. And then there was Sergei, pouring out his soul for Roman's sister.
I was aware that they had all been friends for a long time, but Sergei's reaction to her death didn't align. She was his friend's sister, not his. She wasn't his wife; she wasn't his girlfriend. Unless…she was the love of his life.
I could see how Sergei would want to claim her for himself. And I could also imagine how repulsed she would be by that. From there, it would be easy to extrapolate that Sergei could decide that if he couldn't have her...nobody could.