Chapter 4 Roman
ROMAN
I keep the office cold. It suits my mood.
Vitaly is my only son. People keep offering that sentence like it solves anything. Family tradition would make him my heir because he exists and because his blood is mine. Fyodor likes tradition. He believes it has kept worse men from making worse choices.
I use it when it serves me. I set it aside when it doesn’t.
Vitaly takes after his mother. Quick hands, quicker temper. The urge to kill. Her cold green eyes, staring back at me when he raised his gun through the car window…
I keep replaying the night he tried to kill me. I fired first. He ran. The only part that surprises me is that he didn’t finish the job.
It wasn’t kindness that stayed his hand. It was calculation. He knows Fyodor has been pushing me to anoint him as my successor. If there was a cross fire that killed him, Vitaly wouldn’t have anyone in his corner anymore.
Fyodor loved Vitaly when he was a boy. He called him volchok, little wolf. He told me a wolf needs training, not taming. I told him a wolf in a house learns when not to bite. That was our first argument about my son.
It lasted years, and even now, I see it in his eyes when he tells me the boy should inherit my position.
Fyodor took Vitaly for his first trip to the range. He learned to strip a pistol with his eyes closed. He grinned when metal clicked right where it belonged. Fyodor clapped his shoulder like a coach with a champion.
I stood behind them and felt the ground tilt. The grin was not pride. It was appetite. Bridgette’s appetite. Fyodor thought it could be honed.
It should have been starved.
Fyodor told him a pakhan must be a father to his people and a knife to his enemies. He left out the part where a good father hides the knife until there is no other way. Vitaly took the wrong lesson from his speeches, choosing the knife over everything else.
This was the fight between us for years. Fyodor thought Bridgette left a dangerous spark in our son and a forge would make it useful. I told him that spark would burn our house down.
We did not stop loving each other while we argued. He is still my second father. He still believes my blood should inherit because that is how the family stories go. The old man is na?ve, and I fear that naivety will end badly for him.
Over the years, Vitaly’s taste for cruelty wore down Fyodor’s defense of him. My son hurts things that do not fight back. He lies even when the truth would cost less. He once pushed a disabled friend into a half-frozen river and called it a joke.
I saw Fyodor’s face change that day. He started telling Vitaly no. But it was too late. You can’t give absolute freedom, then expect rules to be followed.
I remember the day Fyodor came to me with his concerns. “You were right. I thought we could sharpen him. But he is not a blade. He is the hunger blades have for blood.”
I nodded once. “A knife you can sheath. Hunger eats the sheath.”
We still tried. But by the time I had Fyodor on my side, Vitaly was a fourteen-year-old with keen eyes and too much taste for pain. When Fyodor stopped teaching him, he learned on his own. Arguably, that was worse.
Vitaly should never have been left to his own devices.
He made friends by throwing my name or money around, then laying traps for his new friends. Sometimes, literally. To my knowledge, he didn’t have his first kill until he was seventeen, but there are a lot of ways to torment people without killing them.
Some of them are worse than death.
When we intervened, it was too late. Vitaly’s hobbies, as he liked to call them, were an expensive pastime, and I was left holding the bag. Either paying off their families, or relocating them, or both.
Fyodor tried to make a soldier out of Bridgette’s urge. I tried to make a man who could put the urge down. In the end, Fyodor came down on my side. But with his inclination to family tradition, sometimes I wonder if he’s still there.
The door opens without a knock. Only one man does that in my house. Fyodor steps in faster than his age should allow, hat in his hand, breath steady but not calm. He closes the door and stays standing.
“You should be asleep,” I say.
“So should you.” He looks at me to see how much of me is still here. “I bring a rumor.”
“Since when do you trade in rumors?”
“Since the world’s gone to hell in a handbasket.” He sits on my guest chair on the other side of the desk.
“Say it.”
“The attempt on your life. Vitaly.” He shrugs. “Evidently, it was revenge, according to the grapevine. One year to the day since you went to your club and chose a scarred woman from the floor.”
“Who says this?”
“Vitaly’s guy, Lorenzo. He likes to talk when he drinks, and he was at Fernando’s tonight, running his mouth.” He clears his throat like he doesn’t want to say it. “The scarred woman you hooked up with was Mina Harbor. Vitaly’s ex-girl.”
I sit back, hands flat. “Fuck.”
“You didn’t know,” Fyodor says.
“No. I never got her name, and he didn’t tell me.”
“He would not,” Fyodor says. “He would expect you to know without asking.” He swallows the rest. Then, “There is more. About her.”
“Go on.”
“She has children. Twin sons. Alexander and Yuri.” He pauses, before his voice drops. “About three months old.”
The math is quick. One year since the night at Rope. Three months since birth. I do not need a calendar.
Mina wanted very specific revenge on Vitaly. That being the case, I know I’m the only man she slept with that night. I’m the only one who would insult him enough to satisfy her vengeance quest. That was cold of her. I respect it.
But since I’m the only man she slept with that night, those twins are mine.
He waits, then offers the clean path. “We can make it certain without asking. Quietly. A lab. Something from the trash. A swab. It keeps you from being wrong in public.”
“No.”
“It is safer.”
“It is cowardice. I was there. I know what I did. I do not need paper to tell me those infants are my own. We will act as if they are mine because they are.”
He absorbs it and moves on. “The boy will do the same arithmetic. He is not a fool.”
“He is cruel and vain. But he is not stupid.” I drum my thumb on the desk, thinking. “He will try to turn them into leverage. Or into a headline. Or a pair of obituaries, because he will see them as a threat.”
“And the woman?”
“She is the one who has kept them fed for three months while he counted the days and planted a mine. We keep him away from her. Away from them. He does not get to use them against me.”
Fyodor nods once. “And Miss Harbor?”
“Thinking…”
He loves tradition more than I do, but he loves order more than both of us. “Whatever the case, there will be noise. Vitaly blew up a road. Our guys did what they could to patch things up with locals out there, but if he gets bolder, there’s only so much we can cover up.”
“I’ve spent that boy’s entire life covering for his mistakes. I’m done.”
“Worse men than him have turned around. You wanted him to come right by himself. There’s still a chance. Perhaps the title, the responsibility, would weigh down his darker urges.”
“That chance is spent.” I hate that it’s true. But that doesn’t make it less true. “I will not put my house in a boy’s hands because men before me did not know how to say no to their blood.”
He bows his head, the old, small nod. “Then there is another question.”
“Ask it.”
“Do you tell her about any of this? He will likely go after her.”
“She does not need my history. She needs my action.”
“She may not want your help.”
“I am not offering help,” I say with a shrug. “I am recognizing a fact. She bore my sons. That makes her my business.”
I think of the night a year ago. I remember a woman who did not ask for permission to exist in my world.
She was bold, fearless. I remember the way she said yes.
The way she craved me without knowing me.
I didn’t know why then, but it makes sense.
She came to Rope on a mission. I should have seen it that night, but I was entranced.
I was a horny fool.
I draw a long breath because I know he will not like what I have to say. “Vitaly will not inherit. Not because I am bored with family tradition. Because he will harm what I am obligated to keep whole.”
His jaw tightens. “This will be a fight.”
“It always is. But it will not be a fight my sons will have amongst themselves. It will remain between me and Vitaly.”
“Understood.” He thinks for a beat, then adds, “Do we tell anyone?”
“Marcus and Tanner. I want them close for now.”
“Do you make this public?” he asks at the door. “The boys. You could keep it quiet. Apartment on another street. Money. Visits on Sundays. Rumors fade.”
“I will not hide my sons. They are not some dirty secret.”
“Business in the morning?”
I nod once.
He leaves. I pour one drink and set it down. I do not touch it. I open my notes and write her name. Mina Harbor. The second line is two names. Alexander and Yuri. I stare at the line until it stops being a sentence and becomes a duty. Then I add a third.
Vitaly—officially disinherit.
I stand at the window. The glass shows my face and the room and the dark beyond. I tell the reflection the thing I tell men before they move. There is no perfect time. There is only the next hour and what you do in it.
I sit and make two lists. Control. No control. I put the boys on the first. I put the boy on both. That is the plan.
I don’t know where to put Mina. She’s an adult with agency and clearly a determined mind of her own.
There’s no wrangling a woman who seduces her ex’s father for revenge, then never tells him he has two new sons.
She’s used to doing things her own way, and while I respect that, she’s robbed me of three months of my children’s lives.
Though, from her point of view, it was probably a matter of survival. Staying as far as she could from me and Vitaly likely sounded like the smart play to her pregnant mind. I hate to admit it, but she was right to do so. She’s kept them safe through her caution.
But Vitaly has a weird thing about anniversaries, and now, they aren’t safe without my protection.
On the edge of the blotter is a photograph I never framed. Vitaly at nine, arms thin, eyes bright, chin tilted for approval. I slide it into the drawer and close it. I am not throwing him away. I am putting the past where it belongs so the present can stand.
Perturbed is the right word for what I feel about the woman’s history with my son. I did not know. I should have known sooner. Should have thought with more than just my cock that night. But I can’t change the past, and I won’t let it dictate my future.
It’s true of myself and Vitaly. He doesn’t get to call the shots here. He is not now, nor will he ever be, pakhan. Not even over my dead body.
Tomorrow is coming whether I plan for it or not. I prefer the first. The house is quiet. I sit with the lists until the clock tells me it’s late enough to stop pretending I will sleep. Then I turn out the light.
And stare at the dark, forming a plan. I know what I must do.