Chapter 1 - Yakov #2
I wait. A drunk Bogdan is an honest Bogdan, and honest Bogdan is the only version of my brother I’ve been able to access in months.
“Yaroslav’s there,” he says, and the loose grin drops, his mouth tightening into a sneer.
“Up his arse as usual. The golden boy.” He says it with enough venom that I look at him properly.
“Father’s new golden boy. Meanwhile, Vasya and I have been here, haven’t we?
Doing what we’re told. Cleaning up his shit.
And who does he want for this?” He waves a hand. “Yaroslav. It’s always Yaroslav now.”
“For what?” I ask impassively. The thing with Bogdan is you have to make it look like you couldn’t give a shit about what he’s about to say; he can’t help himself then.
Sure enough, his jaw tightens. “For the Volkov girl. He’s going to take her again.
Yaroslav is.” He leans forward, and I can smell the vodka on him from here.
“Should be me, I told him. I fucking hate those fuckers. Give her to me; I’d put her in her place—but no.
No, it’s Yaroslav. Fucking Yaroslav, like the rest of us, don’t exist.”
I have never in my life wanted to put a nine-millimeter in my own brother as badly as I do in this moment, and given the family I grew up in, that is saying something. “And the girl?” I wave my hand, barely interested. “What’s the plan for her?” Bogdan groans, tips his head back, and tells me.
It is not a long story because my father’s plan is not a complicated one, and that is the most frightening thing about it.
Alek Mykros built his reputation on calculation, on patience, on a methodical coldness that made other men sweat.
That man would never have moved like this.
What’s left when you strip the calculation away is pure rage, and pure rage has no interest in consequences.
Consequences require thinking ahead. Thinking ahead requires a coolness of mind that left my father the moment the Volkovs threatened to out him and pulled out of his drive with Selene in their possession.
The plan is for Yaroslav to take Raya Volkov.
Again. This time, forcing her to sign a marriage contract before the Volkovs have time to respond, thus becoming leverage and an insult all at once.
An eye for an eye. You took Selene. We take Raya.
My father in a sentence. Bogdan is still spewing his vitriol, but I’ve long stopped listening.
There is a particular kind of anger I have felt only a handful of times.
Not hot and impulsive, I am a Mykros; the hot kind is pedestrian.
This is cold, hard rage. The kind that doesn’t make you loud or imprecise but rather very, very certain.
It moves through me now like ice water finding its level.
What the fuck is going on with Yaroslav?
Out of all of them? Yaroslav and I have never been favorites, but he is suddenly my father’s most reliable instrument and golden boy?
My father may well be sending him because he’s being the most obedient, yes, but I’ve no doubt there’s a message for me underneath all of that.
Look what your brother will do that you won’t.
Look how much further from you he is than you thought.
I know something is wrong with me. I have known it longer than I’ve been willing to say.
A reasonable man would hear this and feel a proportionate anger at the injustice, concern for an innocent woman, a principled objection to his father’s methods.
What I feel is none of that. What I feel is something crystal clear and entirely proprietary, wrapping around my ribs and squeezing until I cannot breathe correctly.
She is mine. She has been mine since the first night I sat in the dark watching her on that screen and made a decision I never put into words.
I kept her safe from a distance, and she never knew it.
I got her out and felt the loss of it for weeks.
She is not going to be taken again. Not by Yaroslav.
Not by anyone. If Raya Volkov is going to belong to any Mykros at all, it is going to be me. That is not even a fucking discussion.
Bogdan has passed out in my chair with his mouth open, snoring like a pig.
He’ll be sorry in the morning, and we’ll never speak of this.
I step over his outstretched legs and move to the window.
The surveillance man outside is on his phone.
Bored. Not expecting anything from the benched Mykros son who has done nothing but brood for weeks.
I study the gap between the streetlight and the shadow of the east wall, the place where, if someone knew this property as well as I do, a car could sit out of sight from either checkpoint.
I know this property better than anyone alive, including my father.
That is one of many things he doesn’t know about me.
I run through my contacts. Mine, not my father’s—the ones I have spent the better part of ten years building with precisely this kind of moment in mind.
I calculate how long it will take to find out when Yaroslav is moving and how quickly I can shake the surveillance.
Underneath the logistics, there is a current I cannot shut off.
She is finally going to see me. Raya Volkov is going to look at me, and she is going to lose her ever-loving shit about it, and I am going to have to explain myself in a way that sounds sane when nothing about what I’m about to do is remotely sane.
I don’t care. She can hate me all she wants once we’re somewhere my father’s people can’t reach.
She can take her time hating me once she’s safe. Once she’s mine.
Outside, the surveillance man yawns and checks his watch. Lazy motherfucker.