Epilogue
GAVAN
Three weeks later:
On a moonless, cloudy night, the five of us stand stoically in a semicircle around the condemned. Yuri takes a deep breath, sweeping his eyes over the rest of us.
“We’ll now take the final vote, yea or nay, concerning the execution of the condemned for high crimes against the other members of this Council, in direct violation of its guidelines.”
I’m first. My lips curl into a sneer as my gaze stabs through the darkness of the construction site to where a gagged Abram Diduch is tied to a chair at the edge of a foundation pit.
He struggles with his bonds and his eyes bulge, his face white, like the piece of shit is actually trying to plead with me for mercy.
Fuck that. He’ll find none with me. And the fact that he’s shaking like a coward now that his plot to burn the High Council to the ground has been uncovered makes it even worse.
I fucking hate fake toughness and bravado that crumbles under pressure.
“Yea,” I growl effortlessly.
Beside me, Viktor has a similarly merciless look on his face. And I don’t blame him. The firebomb Abram set in his hotel room, trying to frame Drazen, could have very well killed Viktor’s wife Fiona and their young son, Sasha.
“ Yea ,” Viktor snarls. “A thousand yeas.”
Yuri nods. “Also a yea from me.”
All of us turn to Marko as he leans heavily on his new cane, his face permanently scarred and shiny in places from the explosion that almost killed him.
“ Yea ,” he says in such an even tone that it’s spooky.
Anastasia is last. Her answer comes just as easily as the rest of ours.
“ Yea ,” she mutters, spitting on the ground for good measure.
I know now why she voted with Abram at the table before. That piece of shit had the young daughter of a friend of Anastasia’s—her own goddaughter—held hostage. That’s why.
This vote has ended, and it’s unanimous.
There are only five families left on the High Council now.
The Diduch family will cease to have a chair in the next two minutes, once Abram is dead.
Demyan Ozerov has been granted mercy—after all, you can’t really blame someone for voting alongside family, even if that family member is a piece of garbage.
It was proven that the Ozerov family wasn’t personally involved with any of the violence perpetrated by Abram, using Drazen’s name and reputation as a cover, so Demyan himself is spared the same fate as his cousin. All the same, the Ozerov family has been stripped of its seat at the table.
Yuri clears his throat. “The council has spoken. Abram Diduch, you have been found guilty of crimes against your fellow Council members. The punishment is banishment from the table…” He draws himself up to his full height. “And death.”
Abram squeals and sobs beneath his gag. But as Yuri just said, the council has spoken. Yuri turns and hands a Beretta fitted with a silencer to Marko—whom we unanimously agreed earlier should be the one who pulled the trigger if it came to that.
There’s no pomp and circumstance, no fanfare.
He simply raises the gun, glares at Abram, and squeezes the trigger.
The silencer muffles the shot—necessary, given that we’re in the middle of Soho.
Abram’s head snaps back, and his body and the chair it’s tied to fall back heavily into the construction pit.
It’s Dimitra Drakos who’s so graciously donated this grave for us tonight. In a few hours, just before daybreak, the foreman of a Drakos-owned construction firm who’s building this development will arrive and pour fresh cement without looking too hard into the pit first.
An inglorious grave for a disgraced and despicable man.
Good. He deserves it.
When it’s done, we all shake hands. There’ll be another High Council meeting in a few weeks to discuss the latest topic of the hour: Drazen Krylov and his bid for a seat at the table.
Honestly, he has a good shot at it.
He’s got my vote, and everyone understands why: I’ve been very open about it. Curiously, though, he also has Yuri’s and Viktor’s vote—and those are just the ones I know about privately.
Since coming into his birthright—namely the Romanov crown jewels in the base of the Imperial Shield egg—Drazen has done exactly what he said he’d do. The Krylov Bratva is not quite a powerhouse yet, but it is going to be a force to be reckoned with.
It might even be a force that sits across the High Council table from me.
It was the contents of the dossier on Abram on Drazen’s hard drive that convinced, and allowed, the council to take this action today. I’ve got to hand it to Drazen; he was thorough in his collection of information.
The hard drive had clear proof of everything: Abram’s payoffs, the mercenaries he hired, the crimes he committed against the rest of us.
He was bankrolling Svetlana’s legal attack against me, which was his way of trying to take me out of the picture.
He had plans for all of us, even Anastasia, despite her voting for him under duress. Even for his own cousin , Demyan.
Actually, it’s the scope of the information on all of us that was on Drazen’s hard drive that’s going to convince most of the Council to vote him onto it. He had information on some of us that nobody knows.
Hell, he even knew about Declan Kildare murdering my father, God knows how. He knew they met that night because Vadim wanted to confront Declan about the ongoing affair he’d been having with Svetlana for years.
Apparently, there was even a child of that affair. I have no idea what became of it, since Declan obviously didn’t raise it, and Svetlana sure as fuck didn’t either.
But that child’s identity or whereabouts is a mystery for another day.
After we all shake hands again and start to file away into the night, Marko Kalishnik stops me with a hand on my elbow.
“Gavan,” he rasps, his vocal cords still damaged by the car bombing. “A moment, if I could?”
I nod. “Of course.”
He shakes his head, smiling sadly to himself. “I owe you an apology.”
“For?”
He shakes his head again. “For not knowing about your involvement with Eilish Kildare when I made my…” he shakes his head.
“My suggestion concerning my daughter Milena.” He scowls.
“I was wrong to hold the idea of forming my own power bloc to counter Abram’s over your head with a proposal like that. I felt cornered, and desperate, and I—”
“Marko,” I smile warmly, clapping him on the shoulder. “I have nothing to forgive you for, because you have nothing to apologize for.”
He smiles wryly. “Perhaps we can think of it as a foolish act from a desperate man.”
“All I see is one tough son of a bitch who isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. I don’t see desperation at all.”
He dips his head appreciatively as he reaches out and shakes my hand. “Vadim would be very proud of the man you have become. I hope you’re aware of that.”
When I finally get back to my car, the energy is surging inside of me. With that all over and done with, it’s time for me to go home to Eilish.
And to our next chapter.
But one more thing first…
I smile darkly, my lips curling as I tap the contact in my phone and let it ring. Senator Harrison McKinnley is smart enough to answer quickly.
I’m going to enjoy this.
A lot .
“Mr. Tsarenko!” There’s a forced cheeriness in Harrison’s voice—the politician in him he can’t ever turn off.
“I assume you received my note,” I spit.
I feel no need to attempt any niceties with the man whose son I should kill for what he did to Eilish. The only reason I’m being so merciful is that blackmailing Brooks works better to influence his father than killing him.
Also, Eilish asked me to do it this way. Not because she feels mercy for him. But because she wants him to spend the rest of his life worrying about the day when I release what I have on him.
I swear, there’s a fucking darkness in my solnishka that makes me love her even more.
Senator McKinnley clears his throat. “I…uh, yes. Yes, I did.”
“Do we agree that the information I have on your son—his admission of a crime, and his disturbing, illegal tastes in pornography—would be catastrophic for both of you should it get out?”
He stammers. “Y-yes, of…of course, Mr. Tsarenko.”
“And we are furthermore in agreement that the information I have on you —specifically, the names of the two college-aged staffers whom you got pregnant—would be just as catastrophic for you and your career if it got out?”
“ Please , Mr. Tsarenko—”
“ Are we or are we fucking not in agreement, ” I snarl. “ Senator .”
“We are,” he blurts. “Complete, total agreement.”
“Then I will not mince words,” I spit. “As of this moment, I fucking own you . If you fuck with me, my organization, or any of the other Bratva organizations on the list I sent you—”
It’s a list of all the High Council families. And the Krylov Bratva too, because it’s always smart to plan for the future, right?
“— Or if you try to fuck with the Kildare family, or the Drakos family, then every scrap of information I have on both you and your disgusting son gets emailed to every newspaper editor on Earth. If you should ever quit your position as chair of the Organized Crime Senate Task Force, I will also release this information. Now, Senator, I will ask once and only once more: do we fully understand each other.”
He doesn’t hesitate.
“Of course , Mr. Tsarenko. We fully understand each other, and needless to say you have my total cooperation going forward—”
“Good.”
I hang up without another word, grinning widely as the car takes me closer to home.
* * *
She’s asleep and the penthouse is dark when I get in.
Excellent .
I shower quietly and slip into the bedroom.
Our bedroom. Eilish lives here now, as of a week ago when she moved out of the house she grew up in on the Upper East Side. I don’t think my place has ever felt more like home.