Roman
I arrive last on purpose.
In my world, lateness is sometimes arrogance, sometimes strategy. Tonight, it’s both.
The venue sits on the edge of the river, all glass, black stone, and soft gold light, the kind of place built to look legitimate from the street and untouchable from the inside.
Officially, tonight is a private foundation dinner.
Unofficially, it’s a council gathering dressed in silk and good whiskey.
Men will drink, smile, discuss shipping routes and import licenses and family obligations, and underneath all of it they will be measuring territory, loyalty, and weakness.
I organized it because someone had to.
For five years, I have stayed quieter than people expected.
Not soft. Never soft. Just quieter. I expanded in the States, built money that did not need a surname to stand upright, let the Russians think I had lost interest in Moscow while I kept one eye on every man who mattered there.
Some called it caution. Some called it exile. Some called it fear.
They were wrong.
I was waiting.
After Oleg betrayed me, waiting became necessary.
That old bastard came to me in Moscow with ledgers, names, and just enough truth to make himself useful.
Then he sold part of the same information somewhere else, thinking he could balance both sides and live long enough to retire on it.
Men like Oleg always believe they are smarter than the war they are feeding. Most of them die surprised.
I have not found him yet, but I will soon.
I step out of the car and the doors open before I reach them. Inside, the room shifts in exactly the way I expected. Heads turn. Voices lower. Men who were pretending not to watch the entrance stop pretending.
Good. Let them look.
A woman in diamonds touches the arm of the governor’s fixer and murmurs something.
Two old Armenians near the bar straighten.
A captain from Brighton Beach abandons his drink halfway to his mouth.
Across the room, one of the Volkov brothers actually pales before rearranging his face into something polite.
My men peel away from me in practiced silence, taking up their positions near the exits, the stairs, the service corridor, the private rooms above. The orchestra in the corner keeps playing because they have been paid too well to notice danger unless someone bleeds on the cello.
“Roman.”
I turn.
Pavel Kurylenko approaches with his wife on his arm and the smile of a man who spent the afternoon deciding whether shaking my hand made him brave or stupid. He chooses brave.
“Pavel.”
“It’s been too long.”
“No,” I say. “It hasn’t.”
His wife coughs into her champagne to hide the laugh.
I let him suffer for a second before nodding to her. “You look well.”
“Thank you,” she says smoothly. “You look expensive.”
My mouth almost moves. “That’s because I am.”
Pavel laughs too loudly, relieved by the hint of humor. That’s the thing about these people. They all want to believe they understand me. The dangerous ones know they do not. The weak ones mistake my restraint for an invitation.
I move on before he can ask for anything.
That’s when they really begin to gather.
They come one by one and in pairs, smiling, nodding, touching my arm, lowering their voices, offering compliments shaped like questions.
Roman, wonderful to see you.
Roman, I hear New York is treating you well.
Roman, your foundation has done such interesting work in port security.
Roman, perhaps later we should talk privately.
I answer just enough.
A man like me survives rooms like this by becoming exactly what everyone needs and nothing they can hold.
But even as I move through them, some part of me keeps counting the absences.
Andrei Morozov is not here.
Neither is his wife. Neither are the old loyalists who used to arrive with him like a second coat of skin. Half the men who once stood at his shoulder are dead, missing, retired, in prison, or suddenly devoted to healthier lives in countries without extradition treaties.
That’s my work.
Lev is dead.
That part still sits differently than the rest.
Not because I mourn him. I did not know him well enough to mourn what he was. But blood is blood even when you hate the vein it came through.
There are five different versions of what happened that night, all of them half true and not useful.
He’s gone.
Andrei disappeared underground after that.
Not vanished completely. A man like my father does not vanish. He shrinks his visible shape. He changes houses, changes routes, stops appearing in rooms that once rose for him, sends younger men in his place, tests the ground for mines using other people’s feet.
That should satisfy me.
Instead, it unsettles me.
Andrei Morozov is too proud to hide for long unless he’s building something in the dark.
He does not retreat because he’s beaten.
He retreats because he wants the board reset.
He always preferred pawns at a distance.
Lawyers, cousins, godsons, captains with dead eyes and living ambitions.
Men who can approach where he cannot. Men who can smile and offer peace while carrying instructions that smell like a grave.
So yes, I’m relieved he’s not here.
That’s why tonight matters.
A council gathering is never just dinner. It’s a census. A display. A chance to see who enters with confidence and who scans the room first. Who brings too many men. Who brings too few. Who drinks. Who does not. Who smiles at my face and who looks at the exits over my shoulder.
I take a glass of whiskey from a passing tray and turn slowly, letting the room come to me.
There.
Victor Anisimov near the back wall, pretending to admire the flowers while watching the private stairs.
There.
Malenko’s youngest son whispering to one of Andrei’s old customs brokers.
There.
A woman I do not know at all, seated near the second pillar, looking at no one and seeing everything.
Interesting.
Mikhail steps close enough to speak without being seen speaking.
“No sign of Morozov people at the door,” he says.
“There will be.”
“You think tonight?”
“I think every night until my father is dead.”
Mikhail nods once. He has learned not to comfort me with optimism. That’s why he’s still alive.
“Any word on Oleg?” I ask.
His mouth tightens. “Nothing solid. Prague rumor was false. One of the Warsaw leads might have been planted.”
“By him?”
“Or by someone who wants us looking the wrong way.”
I drink the whiskey and let it burn.
“Oleg won’t run forever,” Mikhail says.
“No,” I agree. “But he will die tired.”
Across the room, the music shifts. The orchestra eases into something slower. More guests arrive, all fur, diamonds, and dark coats. The hostess glides by with a smile polished enough to cut glass and murmurs that the council room upstairs is ready whenever I wish.
Not yet.
Let them gather first.
Let them look at me in the open light and decide what story they want to believe. The bastard son who made himself rich in America. The patient one. The violent one. The one who has already taken too much from the Morozovs to ever be allowed to stop.
All the stories are useful.
I set down my empty glass and turn toward the doors just as another family arrives.
For one split second, my body reacts before my mind does.
A woman in black enters first, dark hair pinned back, posture controlled, one hand resting lightly on the shoulder of a little boy in a formal jacket.
A little girl in white tights clings to her other side, already trying to look everywhere at once.
Behind them, an older man follows with the expression of someone accustomed to people moving aside.
Sergei Markov.
The room narrows.
Then I see her.
One second I’m watching the doors, counting absences, measuring who came without my father and who came because of him. The next, the entire room disappears behind one dark-haired woman stepping into the light with a child at each side and Sergei Markov half a pace behind her.
Katerina.
My hand tightens around the glass hard enough that the cut crystal bites into my palm.
For four years, she has existed in fragments.
A photograph in the snow. A voice in the dark.
A mouth against mine in an airplane seat, in a warehouse of memory, in every stupid hour I let myself think of her when I should have been thinking of war.
I have imagined seeing her again a hundred different ways.
At an airport. In a street market. At the door of my office with fury in her eyes and my name in her mouth like a wound.
Not like this.
For one raw, disorienting second, I think I have made her up again.
That this is another trick of wanting her too long. Another punishment for all the nights I have gone back to that one photograph and called it enough.
Then the boy looks up.
And the world stops.
He cannot be more than four and half. Maybe a little older if he’s quiet by nature.
Dark hair. Small shoulders in a formal jacket.
Stillness in the middle of all this light and noise, as if he already understands what kind of room he has been brought into and dislikes it without having words for why.
But it’s not the stillness that hits me.
It’s… It’s his eyes.
My blood goes cold.
I have seen that face before.
The girl beside Katerina shifts impatiently, all movement and bright curiosity, but the boy does not. His hand stays against Katerina’s side with a quiet claim that nearly drops me to one knee.
No. The word does not leave my mouth, rather it detonates inside my skull.
Katerina turns slightly to say something to him, and I see the shape of her profile, the line of her throat, the controlled grace she’s wearing like armor. She looks older, yes. Softer in some places, sharper in others. More woman than girl now, more mother than anything else.
And still, I know her instantly.
My body knows her.
My lungs forget how to work. The room recedes. The orchestra becomes distant and useless. Every polished face around me, every handshake waiting, every calculation I was making about my father’s men and the council upstairs, all of it falls away.
There is only Katerina.
I take a step without meaning to.
Mikhail reaches me before I take a second step.
He does not touch me. He knows better than that when I’m looking at something too hard. He only comes close enough to speak without anyone else hearing.
“You know who they are?” he asks.
I keep my eyes on Katerina.
On the boy beside her.
On the little girl half-hidden by her skirt.
I say nothing.
Mikhail follows my silence instead of pushing against it. “There’s a rumor.”
Now I turn.
His face is careful, which means he already understands this matters more than whatever he planned to say tonight.
“What rumor?”
He glances toward the Markovs, then back to me. “That those are your half-brother’s children.”
For a second, the words do not make sense.
I look back at the children. The boy’s eyes. The shape of his stillness. The girl’s mouth, too soft to be mistaken for Lev’s blood, too alive for any dead man’s claim.
Then I turn to Mikhail again.
“Why,” I ask very quietly, “am I only hearing this now?”
Mikhail does not look away. “Because it’s a scandal. Sergei Markov has been keeping a lid on it from the start. No one in that circle talks openly unless they want to disappear from the guest list. And she denies it too.”
Sergei Markov.
“Who is she?” I ask, though I already know.
Mikhail’s mouth tightens. “Katerina Markov. She’s the girl Lev was supposed to marry.”
I stare at him. “No,” I say.
He waits.
I hear myself continue before I decide to. “I thought it was the girl in Moscow. The Markov girl. I saw them at the airport together.”
Mikhail shakes his head once.
“No. That was the stepdaughter. Vika—Victoria Markov.”
The room tilts in a small, dangerous way.
“Vika?” I say, more to myself than to him.
“Yes,” Mikhail says. “The one with Irina. Not Sergei’s blood. The woman over there, with the children, she’s his actual daughter.”
My gaze cuts back to Katerina.
She has not moved.
From across the room, she looks composed enough to pass for calm. Only someone watching closely would notice the tension in her shoulders, the way her hand rests too firmly on the boy’s back, the fact that she has not looked away from me once since our eyes met.
Sergei’s daughter.
The bride my half-brother threw aside.
The woman I met on a plane, fucked in Moscow, lost in blood and smoke, then spent four years thinking about like a weakness I would eventually bury.
Mikhail studies my face carefully. “Boss?”
I force myself to breathe.
Then I ask the only question left that matters in this moment.
“Does Andrei know?”
Mikhail’s answer is immediate. “No. Or if he suspects, he’s had nothing solid. The rumor stayed buried because Markov buried it. And because nobody wanted to be the man spreading gossip about Lev’s bastard children after the Moscow fallout.”
“Who the fuck invited children?” I say.
Even Mikhail frowns. “I’m not sure but I can get them to leave.”
“The children stay exactly where they are,” I say. “No one goes near them unless I do.”
Mikhail follows my line of sight.
Then, in a lower voice, “You’re sure?”
That almost earns him a look.
Almost.
Instead, I say, “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”
He nods and slips away into the crowd.
The room is loud again when I let myself hear it. Glasses clinking. Women laughing. Men lying through their teeth in low voices. Music from the quartet near the far wall.
All of it feels thin now. Pointless.
Across the floor, Sergei Markov sees me watching his grandson.
The old man’s expression does not change, but I see the calculation settle deeper behind his eyes. The bastard is planning something. I don’t know what, but I intend to find out.
I start walking again.
This time, there is no hesitation in me at all.