Chapter 2 – Kirill
Rain hammered against the penthouse windows like a thousand tiny fists demanding entry, but I’d barely noticed. My world had shrunk to the glow of six monitors bleeding blue and green light across my face, casting shadows that made the room feel like the inside of a server farm.
“You need to let this go, Kirill.”
Vladimir’s voice crackled through the speaker, gravelly and uncompromising. Even through a phone line, the man commanded respect.
I leaned back in my chair, the leather creaking beneath me. My fingers drummed against the armrest, the rhythm matching my pulse. “Let it go?” The words tasted bitter. “He made a fool of me, Vladimir. Stole millions right under my nose. From our accounts. Bratva accounts.”
“I know what he took.”
“Then you know I can’t stop.” My jaw clenched hard enough to make my teeth ache. “I’ll rip every shadow apart until I find him. Search every corner of this godforsaken city, this country, this world if I have to. Till my last breath.”
A long pause. In that silence, I could almost see him sitting in his Moscow office, ice-blue eyes calculating every angle. Vladimir didn’t waste words. When he spoke, you listened, or you paid the price.
“Remember what happens when your blood runs too hot.”
My hand stilled on the armrest. The memory hit me like a sucker punch to the gut—two men, training room floor slick with sweat and something darker, my knuckles raw and screaming.
I’d been fifteen. Hadn’t meant to kill them.
Hadn’t meant for the rage to consume everything until there was nothing left but red and the sound of bones breaking.
“Keep your head this time, Kirill. Remember our deal.”
The line went dead.
I stared at the phone for a long moment before setting it down with deliberate care, as if it might detonate.
Outside, lightning split the sky, illuminating Chicago’s skyline in stark relief.
The city looked different from up here, innocent almost. But I knew better.
Darkness lived in every corner, and it didn’t discriminate.
If it hadn’t been for Vladimir, I wouldn’t be here at all.
When Douglas’s betrayal had blown my world to pieces, the Bratva nearly tore me apart.
They wanted blood. Mine. They didn’t care that I’d been played, that I’d trusted the wrong person.
In their eyes, I was responsible for every ruble that vanished, every account that got drained.
The old guard wanted my head on a pike as a warning.
But Vladimir knew the truth.
He’d raised me alongside his own son, Andrei.
Took me in when I was five years old and my parents wrapped their car around a tree on a Moscow highway, leaving me alone in a world that didn’t have room for orphans.
Vladimir stepped in that same day, not out of obligation, but because my father had been his best friend.
Because loyalty meant something to men like him.
He saw things in me that others didn’t. The fire.
The brutality simmering just beneath the surface, the kind that could destroy everything if left unchecked.
That’s why he didn’t let me stay on the enforcement path, despite my talent for it.
Despite the fact that violence came to me as naturally as breathing.
Fucker shoved me into tech instead.
Buried me in servers and code, till my hands learned to destroy with keystrokes instead of punches. Till I became the ghost in the machine, the one who saw everything and left no trace. It was safer that way. For everyone.
But especially for me.
I stood, pacing to the window. Rain slid down the glass, distorting the city lights below into watercolor smears of red and gold.
My reflection stared back at me, my jaw tight with tension I couldn’t release and a face that looked older than thirty-eight.
This life aged you in ways that had nothing to do with time.
Two years ago, I got my first real lead on Douglas. It wasn’t much—a shadow of a transaction, a ghost of a login from an IP address in Chicago. But it was enough. Vladimir let me move here, let me chase the bastard who’d made me look weak. Who’d stolen from us.
But there was a condition. Only one.
Don’t kill anyone.
I pressed my palm against the cool glass, fingers splayed. The promise sat in my chest like a stone. I’d agreed because I had no choice, because Vladimir’s protection was the only thing standing between me and a shallow grave in the Russian wilderness. But every day, that promise felt heavier.
Because when I found Douglas, I wanted to kill him.
Slowly. Methodically. I wanted to watch the life drain from his eyes the same way he’d drained those accounts, wanted to hear him scream apologies that would never be enough.
Wanted him to feel a fraction of the rage that lived in my bones like marrow.
I wasn’t sure I could keep that promise.
My phone pinged, dragging me back from the dark place my thoughts had wandered. Drew’s name flashed across the screen.
In town for two months. Bratva club tonight. Get your ass over here.
I stared at the message, thumb hovering over the screen. Drew was my best friend; we’d grown up in the same circles, spoke the same language of violence and code. Seeing him should’ve been cause for celebration.
But I wasn’t into liquor, thumping bass, or hookups. I’d outgrown clubs years ago, traded them for the quiet hum of machines. Still, Drew wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.
I typed back a single word: Where?
His response came immediately: The usual. Damir’s coming too.
My jaw tightened. Damir. Drew’s younger brother by two years, which made him thirty-six to my thirty-eight. We’d never gotten along. He was too brash, too quick to throw fists before thinking things through. Too much like the monster Vladimir had seen in me.
But I owed Drew. More than I could ever repay. So I grabbed my jacket, holstered my gun, and headed for the door.
The club was exactly what I expected: too loud, too crowded, too full of people pretending they were more dangerous than they actually were. I moved through the crowd with practiced ease, ignoring the looks. People knew who I was. What I represented.
They knew better than to get in my way.
Drew and Damir were already in a private booth, bottles of vodka lined up like soldiers. Drew raised his glass when he saw me, that familiar grin splitting his face. “Thought you’d forgotten how to have fun.”
“Fun’s overrated.” I slid into the booth. Drew pushed a drink toward me, vodka cranberry, my usual poison when I was forced to socialize. I took it, ignoring his smirk. He’d never let me live down this choice.
“Can’t a man see his best friend without an agenda?” Drew’s grin widened, but there was something in his eyes—concern, maybe. Or curiosity.
Damir slouched beside him with that comfortable silence that only came from knowing someone your entire life. He was wearing a tie that looked like someone had strangled a peacock and called it fashion.
“That tie,” I said, jabbing a finger at his chest, “is a fucking crime against fashion. It looks like a dead fish threw up on your neck.”
Damir didn’t even glance down. “Your opinion means nothing to me when you’re wearing something that looks like it was designed in a Russian basement by someone who hates color.”
Drew smirked into his drink. This was normal. Easy. Just three men talking shit about clothes and life and the general incompetence of everyone around us.
I was on my third vodka cranberry—a disgusting choice that Drew would never let me live down—when Damir’s entire demeanor shifted. His jaw tightened, spine straightened. He set his drink down with deliberate care.
“I’ll be back.”
“Where the fuck are you going?” Drew called after him, but Damir was already crossing the floor toward the bar.
I followed his trajectory and saw her—a bartender with dark hair and a smile that said she’d fought her way up from nothing. Hailey, her nametag read. They talked like old friends, easy and familiar. Drew and I exchanged glances, both of us surprised by their frankness.
I turned my attention away, scanning the crowd out of habit. Looking for threats, exits, anything that didn’t belong. That’s when my eyes snagged on someone sitting with Cassandra—Drew’s wife—in a nearby booth.
My heart started pounding, hard and fast, drowning out even the bass.
She was small, maybe five-six, with honey-brown eyes and chestnut hair that caught the club lights like silk. She wore designer everything—blouse, skirt, heeled boots—the kind of expensive taste that screamed old money and privilege. Everything about her was polished, perfect, untouchable.
But it was her face that stopped me cold.
Soft. Delicate. Beautiful in a way that made my chest ache. She was laughing at something Cassandra said, her whole face lighting up, unguarded in a way that felt dangerous. People like her didn’t survive in this world. They got chewed up and spit out, broken beyond repair.
“Barbara Davis,” Drew said, still smirking. I didn’t even know he’d noticed me staring at her. “She’s out of your league.”
“I didn’t ask for your opinion.”
But I couldn’t look away. She shifted in her seat, crossing one leg over the other, and I felt something primal stir in my chest. Something I hadn’t felt in years, maybe ever.
She looked up suddenly, as if she could feel my gaze. Our eyes met across the club, through smoke and bodies and the pulsing lights. The world narrowed to just that, her honey-brown eyes meeting my blue ones, some invisible thread pulling taut between us.
Then she looked away, and I could breathe again.
“Kirill.” Drew’s voice cut through the fog. “You good?”
I forced myself to look at him, to change my expression into something resembling normalcy. “Fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
Across the room, Damir glanced over and caught my attention. He made a subtle gesture toward the booth where Barbara sat. The universal sign: Come here.
Before I could answer Drew—before I could even process what I was about to do—my body made the decision my brain was still arguing against. I stood, straightening my shirt, checking the gun holstered beneath my jacket out of habit.
“Where are you going?” Drew called after me, but I was already moving.
Through the crowd. Past the bodies grinding to the bass that shook the floor. Past the bar where Damir stood with Hailey. I moved with purpose, the way I always did, cutting through obstacles like they didn’t exist.
Because they didn’t. Not when it came to this.
Not when it came to her.
I told myself I was being reckless. Told myself this violated every rule I’d spent years building. Told myself Vladimir would call this a distraction I couldn’t afford, that Douglas was still out there, that I had promises to keep and vengeance to deliver.
But my body didn’t care about any of that.
My body only cared about the way her honey-brown eyes had met mine. The way something had shifted in my chest, something I thought I’d killed years ago. The way she made me feel like maybe—just maybe—there was more to life than code and cold revenge.
She looked up as I approached, and our eyes met again. This time, neither of us looked away.
The club noise faded. The crowd disappeared. There was only her, only this moment, only the electricity crackling in the air between us like a live wire.
I didn’t know what I was going to say. Didn’t have a plan beyond getting closer, beyond seeing if this insane connection was real or just my imagination playing tricks.
But as I closed the distance between us, as I watched her breath catch and her lips part slightly, as I felt my own pulse spike in a way that had nothing to do with danger and everything to do with want—
I knew I was about to make either the best or worst decision of my life.
And for once, I didn’t give a damn which one it was.