Vadim
She still sat outside my gates like a sad little stray begging for scraps.
I glanced at the corner of my screen. Thirteen hours. She had moved away from the camera twice—to relieve herself, presumably. It was too late for her to learn her place. And yet I watched the footage anyway, frame by frame, with the attention of a man who told himself he was monitoring a threat.
I wanted her to suffer.
Runa had a restless night. Eventually she ended up in bed with me, and that settled her for a few hours—the warmth of another body, the steadiness of breathing, the things she had always had and was now trying to locate in a strange room with strange smells and none of the sounds she knew. She would adjust.
Children this young could adjust.
I told myself that too.
A car slowed at the gate. She climbed into the back seat.
My jaw tightened.
Thirteen hours and she couldn’t hold her nerve.
Treacherous bitch.
I slapped the laptop shut.
I sat with it for a moment. Then took a breath. Then another. Then went in search of my daughter.
She was in the kitchen. Olya had soft children’s songs playing low in the background, moving around the kitchen with the brisk certainty of a woman who had decided that routine and warmth were the solution and was not open to discussion on the matter.
Runa lay in her electronic rocking chair beneath a small arc of hanging stars, her expression watchful.
Her big blue eyes widened when she saw me.
Then her face crumpled.
She batted at the stars above her and began to cry—not the screaming of Istanbul, something quieter and more lost than that. The cry of a child who didn’t understand where she was or why the person she was looking for wasn’t there.
I didn’t feel angry.
Only dismay.
I unbuckled her and held her against my chest and took her to the windows, moving her gently up and down, talking low—about the garden, about the cold coming in off the water, about nothing in particular. Slowly, incrementally, she began to calm.
The same way she always did.
Iskra was lucky to be alive.
That might change.
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The nanny had arrived. She was an older woman with a no-nonsense attitude that I appreciated immediately.
Olya’s eyes narrowed on her with undisguised disdain—a territorial response I noted and chose not to address.
She nodded when I showed her around and said little, which I took as a reasonable sign.
“She is a Dragunov,” I said, stopping in the doorway. “You will ensure no harm befalls her. The consequences of failure will not be pleasant.”
I said it stiffly because no matter how many checks Valentin had run on her, there was no guarantee. There never was. That was simply the reality of trusting anyone with something irreplaceable.
Her brown eyes widened and she began assuring me of her competence at some length.
When she carried a crying Runa away to change her nappy I was tempted to follow. I stopped myself. Snapped my fingers. Tikhon moved forward immediately.
“Keep a close eye on my daughter,” I said, then reached into my pocket for the keys to the new basement.
It was time to visit my uncle.
I hadn’t reached the basement door when my phone rang. I answered without checking who it was.
“Pakhan. Mrs Dragunov is at the cemetery.”
I stopped walking.
“What is she doing?”
“She brought flowers. Cleaned the grave and—” He cleared his throat.
“What?” I said, my voice flat.
“Sir, she’s been lying on top of it crying for the past twenty minutes.”
The image arrived before I could stop it.
“Was that so hard to say?” I snapped. “Keep watching her. I wouldn’t put it past her to rob the gravesite.”
I slipped my phone into my pocket and unlocked the basement door.
I didn’t have time for her dramatics.
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I sat in the chair, observing the haggard old man.
He had lost considerable weight. His pallor had taken on a grey tinge—the colour of a man whose body had decided to begin the work of dying before the mind had fully committed to it.
The room offered him a thick blanket and a squat toilet and nothing else.
He had tried to kill himself and remove himself from the equation once already.
Like everything else in his life, it had been a failure.
“Come on, old man,” I said, drawing on my cigarette. “Let me put you out of your misery. All you need to do is give me a name.”
His head moved. Slowly. The eyes that found mine had sunk deep into their sockets, the skull beginning to assert itself beneath the skin.
“He is all that’s left of me,” he whispered, his voice barely there. “He needs to live.”
“Now, now, uncle.” I exhaled slowly, watching the smoke drift toward him. “That’s rather double standards, isn’t it? You tried to eliminate my father’s entire lineage. You murdered my son.”
“That was Tolam,” he rasped.
“How convenient.” I tapped the ash. “It’s always easy to blame the dead man. He knew too much, uncle. You fed him the information to cause maximum damage. That’s why he’s dead and you live beneath the ground.”
He grunted. Said nothing.
I studied him—the bones that had healed badly, some not set at all. The wounds reduced to a landscape of scar tissue. The wild overgrown hair that had once been trimmed and maintained with the vanity of a man who considered his appearance a form of authority.
Gone was the polished man in designer suits.
What remained was this.
It was almost pointless—he would die in this basement regardless, and when he did his son would emerge from wherever he was hiding to claim whatever inheritance he imagined was owed to him.
The strategically useful move was to kill Sergei now and deposit the body somewhere it would be found, sending a message to the son before he had time to consolidate.
But I enjoyed watching the life drain from him. Day by day. The excruciatingly slow variety of death—the kind that left the mind intact long enough to understand exactly what was happening.
I leaned forward and blew smoke slowly over his head.
“I have a child now,” I said, my voice conversational.
“There is nothing you or your son can do to stop Konstantin or me. You had your window, uncle, and you wasted it on greed and the Chechens.” I drew on the cigarette again, letting it sit.
“We will find him. Eventually the Bratva closes ranks and he will be presented to me. That’s simply how this works. ”
He said nothing.
“Your bloodline ends in this basement,” I continued, the smoke billowing out with each word. “And your son’s body will be scattered across Chernograd in pieces too small to identify.”
The quiet whimper was exquisite.