Razvan
“You’re not even Pakhan yet and grown men are already pissing themselves when they hear your name,” Mike says, grinning, leaning back in his chair like he owns it, vodka balanced on his knee with the casual confidence of a man who has never once spilled a drink in his life.
The fire in the east sitting room is going and the four of us are sprawled around it the way we’ve been sprawling around fires since we were twenty and stupid instead of thirty-something and marginally less stupid.
Lyosha laughs. It sounds like gravel in a metal drum.
They’re not wrong. I turn the glass in my hand and don’t say anything.
The Wrath of the Pakhan.
That’s what they call me in the rooms I walk into and the rooms I’ve already left.
My father’s enforcer.
The one who comes when the Pakhan has run out of patience, which in this organization means I am very, very busy.
I’ve broken fingers and burned warehouses and sat across tables from men who thought they could lie to my face and showed them, methodically, why that was the last interesting decision they ever made.
Papa calls it education.
I call it what it is.
“Zhukov actually cried,” Lyosha offers, delighted. He’s been dining out on this story for a week. “Big man. Neck like a tree trunk. One look at Razvan walking through the door and the man starts leaking from his eyes like a—”
“We were there,” Dmitri says.
“I’m savoring it.”
“You’re disturbing.”
Mike is watching me the way he does sometimes, that quiet assessment underneath all the easy warmth.
He’s the only one of the three who ever actually looks at me instead of just existing near me.
“You good?” he asks. Just that.
“Fine.”
“You’ve got the face.”
“What face?”
“The one where you’re thinking about something you don’t want to be thinking about.”
He’s too perceptive for someone who smiles that much. I take a drink. “I’m thinking that Zhukov has a very punchable face and Lyosha is not unique in noticing it.”
Lyosha points at me. “See, that’s a normal human observation. There’s hope for you.”
There isn’t, maybe.
That’s the thought I don’t say out loud, the one that sits in my chest on nights like this when it’s warm and easy and my father is somewhere across the city at a business meeting and everything is fine.
The thought that asks how much of me is going to be left when the education is complete.
Papa has been running me like this for three years—every punishment delivery, every enforcement job, every room that goes quiet when I walk in.
He says a Pakhan must be feared before he is followed. He says I need to understand power from the inside before I can wield it.
Like I would wield it tomorrow or the next.
I wouldn’t, my father’s not dying anytime soon. He has decades left.
Must my humanity be completely gone before I ever get to use what I’m learning?
I love my father. I would follow him into any room, any fight, any war this organization has ever started. I just wish his classroom wasn’t quite so—
The door opens.
Viktor walks in and the room changes register immediately. Not because Viktor is frightening, he isn’t, not overtly, not in the way I am.
He’s sixty-eight, silver-haired, and the kind of man who makes you feel, when he’s talking to you, like you are the most important person he’s encountered all week.
He’s charming the way expensive things are charming.
But his face is wrong right now.
Something is wrong.
I am on my feet before I know I’ve moved.
“Uncle.”
He looks at me and something in his expression does a thing I don’t have a word for and my stomach drops straight through the floor.
“Sit down, Razvan.”
“Tell me.”
“Sit—”
“Viktor.” My voice comes out flat and cold and final, the voice that makes Zhukov cry. “Tell me right now.”
Viktor doesn’t look away this time. He leans forward, his hands clasped so tight his knuckles are white. “It was the meeting at the docks. High-level, supposed to be secure. We had six men on the perimeter.”
He pauses, a muscle jumping in his cheek. “They didn’t use a hit squad, Razvan. They used a breach. Explosives under the floorboards. The ceiling came down before the first shot was even fired. It was a massacre.”
The words hit me like physical objects. Explosives. Breach. Massacre.
“He was in the center of the room,” Viktor continues, his voice cracking. “By the time the smoke cleared, by the time anyone could get to the rubble…”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t have to. I stop hearing him somewhere around the phrase he was in the center, and the room begins to recede. It’s like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.
Everything is tiny and far away.
Papa.
I am standing completely still. I know I am because I can feel the agonizing effort it takes to keep my hand from crushing the glass I’m still holding.
The amber liquid inside is perfectly still, a mocking little mirror.
The fire in the hearth pops, a sharp sound like a bone snapping, and I flinch internally.
Mike has stood up from his chair.
I can feel the heat of him close to my left side, but I cannot look at him.
If I look at him, the reality will lock into place.
He went to a meeting. He went to a meeting this morning and kissed my mother’s photograph on his desk the way he does every morning and told me not to break anything expensive today and now he is—
“Who?” The word comes out of me and I know who I sound like. The man my father trained me to be, the enforcer.
I can’t think straight, I can feel a stinging ring in my head that’s somehow linked to my eyes and threatens to blur my vision, but I hold myself.
Now is not the time for petty emotions, who the fuck killed my father?
Viktor’s face arranges itself. Grief and fury in careful proportion. “Pyotr Sokolova.”
The name lands like a stone in still water.
Sokolova. The Kaznachy.
The man who has managed this organization’s finances for twenty years, who I have sat across from at a dozen council tables, who has a careful handshake and clean shoes and the energy of a man who has never once considered violence as a solution to anything.
“That’s not possible.”
“I know what it sounds like.”
“Sokolova is an accountant. He moves numbers. He does not—” I stop. Breathe. “He does not have the capability for this.”
“He didn’t pull the trigger himself.” Viktor’s voice is patient.
“He’s been feeding information to the Zolotov family for years, Razvan.
I’ve suspected it for a long time. I never had evidence I could put in front of your father.
I didn’t want to bring him an accusation I couldn’t prove.
” A pause. “The Zolotovs paid very well. And Sokolova told them exactly where your father would be tonight.”
The fire pops. Nobody moves.
He sold him.
The man my father trusted with every number, every account, every financial nerve of this organization. He sold him to the Zolotovs for money.
He sat at our tables and smiled his careful smile and counted our money and sold my father’s location to the people who wanted him dead.
I put the glass down because if I hold it any longer it’s going to stop being a glass.
“I’m going to kill him.”
I am already moving toward the door.
“Razvan—”
“Right now. Tonight. I’m going to—”
“I’ve already handled it.”
I stop.
Turn.
The room is very quiet.
“What did you just say to me?”
Viktor has the grace to look like he understands what he’s walked into. “He couldn’t be allowed to run. The moment I had confirmation, I had to move. If he’d gotten out of Moscow with what he knew—”
“You killed him.” I can hear my own voice from very far away. “You killed the man who murdered my father and you did it without me.”
“I did what needed to—”
“That was mine,” I scream, more like a roar, it comes out enormous and I watch Viktor take a step back and I do not care, I do not care about anything except the fact that someone has reached into my chest and taken the one thing I had left tonight, the one thing that was going to make any of this survivable, the thing that was supposed to be mine.
“He killed my father. My father. And you took that from me—you stood there and you made that decision and you—”
“I left you something.”
The words cut through the roaring in my skull.
I look at him.
Viktor’s expression settles. Not quite grief anymore.
Something else underneath it, something watchful, but I’m too far gone to read it clearly.
“The daughter escaped. Sokolova’s girl. She ran before my men could finish it and she took something with her—files.
Documents Sokolova compiled. Everything he knew about this organization, accounts, names, operations.
If those files surface, Razvan, the damage to this family will be catastrophic. ”
Silence.
“Find her,” Viktor says. “Take back what she stole. And when you have the files—” He lets the rest sit there without finishing it. He doesn’t need to finish it. We both know Bratva law. When a man commits treason against this organization, his debt doesn’t die with him. It passes.
One person’s sin can bury a whole family.
Viktor leaves and the door closes. For exactly four seconds I stand in the middle of the room and breathe.
The silence in the room snaps.
I don’t decide to move; my body simply rejects the air it’s breathing.
I reach down and my fingers dig into the grain of the oak side table.
I don’t feel the weight of it, only the desperate, pulsing need to make something else break the way I am breaking.
I heave it upward.
The wood groans, then there is a sickening, hollow crunch as the corner of the table buries itself three inches deep into the drywall.
Plaster dust explodes outward like a shroud.
I don’t stop.
I can’t.
I catch the edge of the bookshelf—the one Papa spent years filling—and rip.
The wood shrieks as the mounting brackets tear out of the studs. Books rain down like heavy, leather-bound birds, thudding against the floor in a chaotic pile.
I spin, my elbow catching a floor lamp.
The bulb shatters—a sharp, electric pop—and the room dims, shadows dancing wildly against the ruins. I find a chair and send it sideways.
It hits the hearth with a sound of splintering bone, its legs snapping like dry twigs.
Then, there is the glass.
I don’t even remember throwing it.
I just see the shards of the crystal glass I was holding embedded in the wall above the fireplace, the amber liquid weeping down the stone like blood.
I bring my fist down on the edge of the mantle. Hard. Again. And again.
The skin over my knuckles splits.
I see the red smears on the white marble before I feel the sting.
The pain is a tiny, distant thing, a pinprick compared to the roaring white noise in my head.
I want to hit something that won’t break. I want to hit the world until it gives him back.
I am not a man who performs rage for an audience, but there is no performance in this.
Just the genuine destruction of every breakable thing in arm’s reach, and I am moving through the room like a weather event and nothing in my path is surviving it.
I grab the heavy velvet curtains and pull with everything I have.
The rod screams, metal bending and screeching, until the whole thing collapses in a heap of brass and fabric, burying the wreckage.
I stand in the center of the ruin, my chest heaving, the air thick with the smell of dust and ozone.
My hands are shaking so hard they are almost a blur. I wait for the relief. I wait for the anger to leave me.
But the room is just broken. And he is still gone.
He’s gone. He went to a meeting and he’s gone and I didn’t…I didn’t get to—
At some point Lyosha grabs my arms from behind. He’s the only one strong enough to try it.
He doesn’t say anything, just holds on, and I let him because my legs have decided they’re done and I go down to one knee in the wreckage of the room and put my fist against the floor and breathe.
Mike crouches in front of me.
He doesn’t offer me words.
There are no words for this and Mike, for all his warmth, knows when language is useless.
He just puts his hand on my shoulder and stays there.
Dmitri is in the doorway.
Phone gone.
Face uncharacteristically still.
Nobody speaks for a long time.
I adored him.
That’s the thought that keeps circling, the one with teeth.
Not loved, adored.
The way you adore someone who is both your father and your north point, the fixed thing you orient yourself by.
And now the fixed thing is gone and there’s just—
Space.
“Tell me what you need,” Lyosha says finally. His version of empathy. Blunt and direct and entirely genuine.
I breathe in. Breathe out. Lift my head.
“The girl.” My voice is back to flat. Controlled.
The Wrath, back in the room where the man was.
“Sokolova’s daughter. She’s running with files that can destroy this family.
She’s somewhere in this city, or she will be outside it soon.
” I look at each of them in turn. Mike. Lyosha.
Dmitri. “I’m finding her. I’m taking back what she has.
And then I am finishing what Viktor started. ”
Mike’s jaw tightens once. He nods.
Lyosha cracks his knuckles with unmistakable anticipation.
Dmitri is already reaching for his phone. “I’ll start pulling her profile. Sokolova’s daughter—there’ll be a record.”
I stand up. My knuckles are bleeding and I don’t look at them.
The rage is still there, every bit of it, but it has a shape now.
A direction.
A name.
Sokolova’s daughter.
Wherever she’s running, it won’t be far enough.