His Deadly Vow (London Bratva #4)

Chapter 1

Lev

Blood.

It’s everywhere.

None of it mine. All of it his.

I stab him in the side of the throat with my stiletto blade, done with this shit for tonight.

He gurgles. I don’t even know his name, nor do I want to. I don’t give a fuck.

All I know is he betrayed my pakhan, and he had to die.

“Messy,” my brother, Vadim, says. “Really messy, Lev.”

Smiling like a wolf, I yank the blade out. “And?”

“Who’s going to clean it up?”

“Goran.” I turn to the foot soldier who is staring blankly at the corpse. “You don’t mind, do you, Gor?”

“No, sir,” he says, dead eyes moving to mine briefly.

“See?” I say to Vad. “No problem.”

“Baron said no excessive force. The vultures are circling.”

“Stop being such a pain in my arse,” I say.

“Rather me than Baron,” he says.

The man kind of has a point. “Look, the pakhan said to remove him from breathing the same air as him. I did that. Very well, I might add,” I say, moving to the sink in the corner of this dingy underground bunker, which sits underneath a nightclub owned by Baron Voronov, and is run by some fucker whose name I also don’t know and don’t care about.

“Overkill. You didn’t have to carve him up first.”

“But that’s the fun part,” I say, rinsing off the blade and my hands efficiently. I wipe the cleaned-off stiletto on the side of my navy Tom Ford suit pants and then stash it in the holster at my back. “Drink?”

Vadim looks at the body, then at me, then at the bottle of vodka on the metal shelf by the sink. “After that? Fucking obviously.”

I grab it and twist the cap off. The fluorescent light above us buzzes like it’s about to die. Fits the room. Concrete walls. No windows. Blood on the floor. One dead prick cooling at our feet. Proper family business.

I take a swallow first and let the vodka burn down my throat. Then I hand it over.

Vadim drinks, slower than me because he enjoys pretending he has self-control. He passes it back and adjusts the cuffs of his dark grey suit as if we’re standing in a boardroom instead of a butcher’s pit under a club.

He is two years older than me, at thirty-seven, and infinitely more annoying for it.

“Baron’s upstairs,” he says. “If you stroll up there looking like Dexter’s Russian cousin, he’s going to be unimpressed.”

“I’m always immaculate.”

He glances pointedly at the splash of blood across my sleeve.

I look down. “That’s basically an accessory.”

“That’s basically evidence.”

I sigh like he’s exhausting me, because he is. “You know what your problem is?”

“I’m about to.”

“You don’t know how to enjoy yourself.”

Behind us, Goran finally moves. He grabs the corpse by the ankles and starts dragging him towards the drain in the centre of the floor. The dead weight leaves a thick red trail over the concrete.

I nod in approval. “See? Initiative.”

Vadim gives me a long-suffering look. “I’m surrounded by fucking artists.”

“Exactly.” I take another pull of the vodka and screw the cap back on. “You can’t rush talent.” I grin and head for the door. “Come on. Let’s go let Uncle Baron bask in my efficiency.”

“Your efficiency,” he mutters, falling into step beside me, “has a body count and a clean-up fee.”

“That sounds like success.”

We step into the corridor, and the bass from the club upstairs hits through the ceiling in a dull, constant thud.

The bunker always feels cut off from the rest of the building.

Concrete, steel, and old water stains on the walls.

Men come down here alive and go back up in bags, barrels, sometimes a suitcase.

The stairwell to the main level is narrow and badly lit, the sort of place that invites a mugging or a confession. I take it two steps at a time anyway, because if Baron is expecting you, keeping him waiting is a hobby best practised by men with a death wish.

Vadim follows at a more civilised pace, because he likes to pretend we weren’t just downstairs opening a man up like a zipped holdall.

By the time I push through the steel door at the top, the club swallows me whole.

Music pounds through the floor and into my bones.

Gold light. Dark booths. Bottles gleaming behind the bar.

Women in black silk and men in sharper black suits move through the crowd with the kind of caution rich people use when they know violence is close but not currently pointed at them.

My gaze skates over a Champagne-bearing hostess.

She is a petite brunette with an arse like a peach and tits that are straining against her white shirt.

Not uncommon in here, but not many women stop me dead.

Her face has caught my attention. Sharp features, full mouth, expressive eyes that are practically stabbing every man who comes near her.

Resting bitch face, they call it, but it works on her.

It’s like a fucking shot of pure Viagra.

My dick goes hard as I picture, briefly, those lips wrapped around it, but then reality gut-punches me, and I turn away.

The club manager spots me and immediately looks away.

Sensible.

I adjust my jacket cuff over the blood on my sleeve and head for the private section at the back. Two of Baron’s men are on the velvet rope. Gregor gives me one look, sees the state of me, and grimaces.

“Problem?” I ask.

“You look like a murder.”

“I am a murder.”

He lifts the rope without another word.

Inside, the noise drops to a lower thud.

Still there. Just less irritating. The private lounge sits behind smoked glass and heavy doors, with dark wood and expensive contempt.

Baron likes comfort when he is out in public, which is rare these days.

Tonight is different. Something is different.

I push through the second set of doors and find my uncle seated in a corner, eyes on all exits, back to the wall, like a true former FSB agent.

One hand rests around a cut-crystal glass, the other resting on the arm of a chair that probably came from some dead aristocrat’s house.

Baron Voronov does not lounge. He occupies.

Same difference to lesser men. Fatal difference if you forget it.

He looks up.

That single look strips me to bone.

His pale eyes take in my suit, the blood at my cuff, the fact that Vadim is behind me, looking like the responsible sibling God forgot to assign to another family.

“Tell me,” Baron says.

I drop into the chair opposite him without invitation, because he is family and because he would have shot me years ago if he wanted formalities from me. “He’s dead.”

“I assumed as much. You took long enough.”

“I was being thorough.”

Vadim shuts the door behind us and stays standing, which tells me he wants distance from whatever comes next. Cowardly. Sensible. Boring.

Baron’s gaze shifts to my sleeve. “I said no spectacle.”

“It wasn’t a spectacle. It was emphasis.”

“It was indulgence.”

“Same thing if you do it well.”

I almost get something from him. Not a smile. Baron doesn’t waste those. A faint change around the eyes, maybe. Approval filtered through disappointment. The Voronov family speciality.

“He talked?” Baron asks.

“Enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“Enough for me to know he sold information to Orlov’s people and enough for me to know he wasn’t clever enough to realise how obvious it was.”

Baron swirls the clear liquid in the glass that I already know is Beluga Noble. “Orlov breeds idiots with ambition,” he says. “A tedious combination.”

“He cried at the end.”

Vadim makes a noise of disgust. “Nobody needed that detail.”

“I enjoyed it,” I say, taking a sip from the vodka that appears in front of me courtesy of one of Baron’s inner circle of guards. “It adds texture.”

Baron studies me for one silent beat too long. That usually means he is deciding whether to praise me, reprimand me, or put me through a wall for being myself. Could go either way on a good night.

“What exactly did he give Orlov?” he asks.

“Delivery windows. Two warehouse locations. Names of three runners on the south route.” I take another drink. “Nothing he survives knowing, obviously.”

Vadim speaks from near the door. “We’ve already moved the route and scrubbed the names.”

Baron nods once. “Good.”

I glance around the room. No extra men. No family packed into corners. No visible reason for him to be here in person instead of issuing orders from one of the houses. That prickles at me.

“You didn’t drag us down here just to check if I managed to kill a man,” I say. “What’s the actual problem?”

Baron puts his glass down with a level of care that tells me whatever comes next is not routine. “No problem except the authorities have suddenly decided to take an interest in Voronov holdings, and I need to make sure that they don’t get anywhere near the illegal doings.”

“Do you think someone tipped them off, or is it a routine shake-up because someone wasn’t meeting their quotas?”

“The latter. There is nothing to suggest this is anything other than a pencil-pusher with a superiority complex and too much time on his hands,” Baron finishes.

“HMRC, licensing, SCD9, whichever branch got bored enough to sniff around first. Doesn’t matter.

What matters is that they’ve started asking the right questions in the wrong places. ”

I sit back and tap the vodka glass against my knee. “So, bribe them.”

“We are bribing them,” Vadim says.

I cut him a look. “I was talking to the man with the actual authority.”

Baron ignores that. “One investigator in particular is proving inconvenient.”

“Inconvenient how?”

“He doesn’t drink. Doesn’t gamble. Doesn’t fuck the staff. Married, two children, mortgage in Surrey, and a reputation for being painfully honest.”

I grimace. “That sounds exhausting.”

“It is.”

“Name?”

“Detective Inspector Nathaniel Mercer.”

The name means nothing to me, which probably means he is exactly the kind of bastard Baron is describing. Clean men are either rare or very expensive. Usually both.