Chapter 21 - Yakov
The delivery happens at a marina forty miles north, just past midnight—a stretch of abandoned slips that nobody has any real business coming near. Sergei’s waiting on the dock when Matvei, Simon, and I arrive, a duffel bag slung over one shoulder, his breath fogging in the cold.
“That’s Mikhail now,” Matvei says, looking down at his phone. “Nikolais people will be here in ten to take possession.”
I turn back to Sergei. “You didn’t have to come out here for this.”
“I know.” He looks at the crates, then back at me. “Ten years, and I think this is the first time any of it’s actually mattered to something bigger than either of us. Wanted to see it through.”
I clap him on the shoulder, and neither of us says anything else about it.
Mikhail’s men arrive on schedule, and the crates quickly change hands in under fifteen minutes.
“Get some sleep,” I tell Sergei. “I’ll call you tomorrow; we need to hurry the next shipment along. Talk to that boy of yours.”
“Wouldn’t dream of anything else, boss.”
Mikhail’s men finish loading, and we head back to the estate.
The next morning, we’re eating breakfast when the crack of a single gunshot outside splits through the quiet conversation at the table.
Every man in the room moves at once. Matvei’s up, weapon drawn, headed for the window. “Stay here.” his eyes are on Raya and Sofie. “Don’t move from this room until we say so.”
I’m two steps behind him, Glock in hand, as we make our way out to the front to see what’s going on.
The guardroom’s already crowded—three of the security men hunched over the monitors, muttering and swearing between themselves.
“What the fuck happened?” Matvei barks.
One of them points at the screen to the crumpled form against the base of the gate. A body.
It takes me all of five seconds to place the shape of him—the width of the shoulders, the hands—before the recognition hits like a punch to the gut.
Sergei.
“Open the fucking gate,” I growl, striding straight over to it. Three men come with me to give me cover. Not that I’ll need it. Whoever dumped him here hasn’t hung around. The shot was to get our attention, not start a gunfight.
There’s a single shot to the back of the head, close range, execution-style. No struggle. No defensive wounds. Only hours ago he was telling me this was the first time he’d felt what he was doing for me mattered. Now he’s a declaration of war delivered to the Volkovs’ door.
I close his eyes with two fingers, making a silent promise of brutal retribution to him, and stand back up.
“Get him inside,” I tell Matvei’s men. “Treat him with respect.”
We gather in the dining room, while Sofie and Raya go to the kitchen to make drinks. There’s enough space for everyone to arrange themselves into a loose circle of weapons and muscle. Every single man is staring directly at me, waiting to see what happens next.
I pull my phone from my pocket and call Illia. Sergei’s son, he’s twenty-six, and has been running our Odesa port operations since his father came over here to work directly with me.
He picks up on the second ring. “Boss. Everything alright?”
There’s no good way to do this, no way that is anything other than shit. “It’s your father. I’m sorry, Illia. My father had him killed early this morning.”
The silence that follows is worse than anything he could have said.
“Illia—”
“The motherfucking fuck.”
“Listen to me, Illia. You have my blessing to go and do whatever the fuck you want. You know what Alek’s running out of that port, who he’s doing business with over there—it’s yours. I’ll handle whatever needs handling on this end.”
“It’ll be my fucking pleasure,” he says, voice raw.
He hangs up.
“Well, that was shit,” I say to nobody in particular.
The air in the room is thick with the electric charge of a held breath.
Adrian is pacing the length of the window frame, his hand twitching against the grip of his holstered weapon.
Egor is slouched in a chair beside me, his eyes drilling holes into the side of my face.
They want blood. They didn’t know Sergei—he was my man, a piece of my world, not theirs—but my father had a body thrown at a Volkov gate.
It is an insulting infraction on their space, and they want to mobilize every soldier on the payroll and storm my father’s compound right this second.
I breathe through the dark rage clawing at my ribs, forcing my pulse to remain perfectly level. It will only take a few texts, and by the end of the day they will understand exactly what it looks like when I’m upset.
The first report comes from one of Illia’s men in Odesa at eleven am.
My phone buzzes: East dock facility. Fire crews on scene. Incendiary through the loading bay. Went up too fast for anyone to save the cargo.
I read it out loud to the room. Matvei’s eyebrows go up, but he doesn’t say anything yet.
Forty-five minutes later, the second report comes in—and this one isn’t from Odesa at all.
A counting house in Red Hook, where his people count and launder the week’s cash before it moves into the legitimate accounts—two of my men in, safe cracked, cash and ledgers both taken before the fire started.
I run a small but tight group out of my yard, and Sergei was like a father figure to a few of us.
They couldn’t wait to fuck my father up after I texted them the news earlier.
Simon’s phone is ringing while I’m reading the text to them. He answers, is silent for a second, then puts it on speaker. “You might want to hear this,” he says. “Tell them what you told me, Lev. You’re on speaker. “
“Our guy on Van Brunt Street called in. Says the building we’ve been watching just went up in smoke. Says it went up fast. Arson.”
Matvei’s eyes cut to me. “You knew we had a man on that address?”
“I didn’t. Small world.” I don’t smile, but it’s close. “Either way, the papers and the money are ours now, or ash; the old man won’t know which, will he?”
“Fuck me. You don’t waste any time, do you?” Egor speaks from beside me.
“Oh, that’s not even the good stuff. Though I think that’ll need another hour or two.”
“I ain’t got no other place to be. I think I’ll just sit here and enjoy the ride. There’s nothing sweeter than watching that fucker get taken down a peg or two,” he replies.
Sofie and Raya ferry back and forth between the kitchen and the room, bringing drinks and snacks, while we’re sat around talking. They both know what’s happened; there’s no hiding it. It’s the life they’re part of, but even so they don’t move to join us, preferring their own company.
Just after one, Illia calls again. I put him on speaker.
“I got the fucker,” he says, before I can even say hello. “The storage facility he thinks we don’t know he has his shit in. Two hundred kilos of uncut cocaine, gone. In and out before anyone on shift even knew what was happening.”
“Bodies?”
“Nobody worth killing. It’s eight in the evening, Yakov. I know how to pick my hours.”
“Good work, Illia.”
“I want to see that pig burn for what he’s done. This is the next best thing.”
Simon whistles through his teeth, “Christ, Mykros. If he didn’t want you dead before, he sure as shit will now. He’s going to know it’s revenge, and the man’s son. No?”
“I’ve not finished yet.”
Almost immediately, the family’s most senior guard, Lev, is on the phone again. “The depot Mykros uses—it just went up. Flashing lights everywhere. I don’t know what the fucks going on, but someone’s got it in for him.”
“Now, they’re the ones that are really going to hurt him.
He always has two hundred on the way, and two hundred ready to move.
So four hundred kilos or thereabouts between the two of them,” I say, doing the math out loud.
“Call it five million dollars, wholesale. Multiply that by three or four once it’s cut and hits the street, and you’re looking at what he actually lost today. ”
Matvei lets out a short, disbelieving laugh. “He may not give a shit about his kids, but he really loves his product.”
“He loves the money,” I say.
“A five-million-dollar hit in an afternoon,” Matvei says, shaking his head. “We may just kill him with a heart attack before either of us gets the chance to do it properly. Remind me never to get on your bad side, Mykros.”
He isn’t looking at a rogue Mykros boy who knows how to hack a network anymore. He’s looking across this room and realizing he’s invited a new kind of monster into his family fold.
“Nobody touches what is mine,” I tell him, my voice a dark promise. “That is a law with zero exceptions.”
My thoughts turn to Sergei. It could be ten of my father’s assets gone in one day, and it still wouldn’t be a debt paid.
This is a down payment on a slaughter that’s going to take a lot longer to settle.
His family will be taken care of—Illia most of all, though I already know he won’t want charity, only the chance to finish what’s started.
It doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t bring Sergei back.
Nothing will satisfy the need for revenge except finishing the old bastard for good, and that is going to take time.
I finish the last of my coffee, set the empty mug onto the wood with a sharp click, and stand up to my full height.
“Right, if we’re done here,” I say, “I think I’ll go spend some time with my wife.”
Matvei gives a single, slow nod, his posture shifting as he pulls his phone back out. “Mikhail needs to know about this immediately.”
“Agreed.”
“I’ll make the call to the Nikolais now.” He’s already dialing. “Security on the estate goes to absolute maximum tonight. Nobody steps foot inside the compound without my personal sign-off.”
“Good.”
I turn and cross toward the kitchen. Behind my shoulder, I can hear Matvei filling Mikhail Nikolai in on what’s gone down today, although there’s no doubt he’s already heard about it from his own men dotted around the city. Simon is burning through a second line to mobilize our street crews.
The entire machinery of the Volkov-Nikolai alliance is aggressively clicking into a higher gear in direct response to the fires I lit.
My father was probably hoping to force a reckless reaction with the stunt he pulled this morning.
What the old bastard didn’t realize is that he hasn’t weakened my hand; he has, in fact, lined the full, crushing weight of two empires up right behind my back.