Chapter 25 - Yakov
The air inside Simon’s office is thick with the scent of stale espresso and the cold, metallic tang of firearms. Simon, Matvei, Adrian, and I are huddled around the iron-rimmed blueprint table, tracing the shifting grid of my father’s movements and mapping the next phase of our various interests, calculating logistics and the next batch of arms deliveries from Odesa.
Making sure all sectors know what they’re supposed to be doing.
Normally I thrive with tactical planning like this, but my mind is elsewhere.
Today I couldn’t give a shit about my father.
I’m more worried about Raya, who is currently sitting in a private clinic across town.
It has been two hours since I watched Raya and Sofie climb into the armored SUV with their security detail.
I had practically begged to cancel this meeting so I could drive her into the city myself, but Raya had insisted on a quiet, girls-only trip to ease her stress.
I only relented because Sofie promised to keep a close eye on her.
Still, the silence from her is a heavy weight in my chest. I am counting the minutes until she gets back, hoping like hell that whatever secret she is keeping close to her chest is finally going to be answered today.
My phone begins to vibrate against the steel surface of the table. The harsh buzz breaks the rhythm of Matvei’s voice. I glance down, momentarily confused. I expect to see my wife’s name; instead, the name flashing across the screen makes my thumb freeze.
Sofie.
I stare at the screen for half a second, a million thoughts firing through my brain at once.
Primarily, why the fuck would Sofie call me?
What’s wrong with Raya? Did Raya take a turn for the worse at the clinic?
I swipe the screen and press the phone to my ear, my voice tight. “Sofie? What’s going on? Is she okay?”
All the brothers look up at the mention of their sister’s name.
I don’t get a rational answer. Instead, the speaker explodes with a sound that freezes the blood directly in my veins.
It is a car horn. A deafening, continuous wail that cuts through the line, and beneath the blaring mechanical scream, there is a wet, choking gasp.
“Ya... Yakov...”
It is Sofie’s voice, but it doesn’t sound like her. It is fractured, wet, and thick with hysterical terror. She is hyperventilating, her breaths coming in shallow gasps.
“Sofie,” I bark, my voice dropping into a cold, flat register that makes Matvei instantly stand up from his chair. “Where is Raya? Talk to me.”
“They... they took her,” she wails, a high-pitched, broken sob that tears through the blaring horn. “Yakov... oh God, there’s blood everywhere... Lev is dead. They shot Lev. They punched me... they had a van... they took her, Yakov! They took her!”
I am already on my feet, the chair shrieking against the concrete floor, gesturing to the brothers.
“Sofie,” I say, and my voice doesn’t sound like mine anymore. “Sofie. Listen to my voice. Where are you?”
“The clinic,” she sobs. “We never made it out of the parking lot.” Then, Sofie says the words that make the entire world stop rotating on its axis.
“She’s pregnant, Yakov,” she wails, a broken, hysterical sob ripping through the line.
“She found out this morning... that’s why we’re here at the clinic.
She’s pregnant, and there’s blood all over the tarmac, and I don’t know whose it is... please... Yakov, please hurry...”
The line goes dead, but the sound in my brain is a hollow roar.
Pregnant. I fucking knew it. Well, hoped as much. A living piece of Raya and me, carried inside her while she is in the hands of fucking monsters. Every remaining molecule of humanity inside me is instantaneously obliterated, replaced by a cold, pressurized rage so absolute it petrifies my muscles.
The brothers are all staring at me, their postures freezing as they read the sudden transformation on my face. Matvei’s hand is already hovering over his holster.
I lower the phone. “Lev’s dead,” I tell them, the words dropping like blocks of ice. “They have Raya. Sofie is hurt.”
And then, I am moving. We throw ourselves through the heavy steel doors of the office in a synchronized blur of lethal intent.
There is no hesitation, no debate. Matvei is already barking commands into his phone, his voice roaring as he assembles the cleanup crews to clear our path, and whatever mess we’re about to walk into.
Weapons are drawn, checked, and chambered in a series of harsh, mechanical metallic clicks as we race down the concrete stairs.
Two armored SUVs screech out of the warehouse bay, tearing into the winter gray of the city streets. We hit the clinic parking lot in exactly eight minutes.
It is a total shit show. The silver Volkov SUV is idling, the glass on the driver’s side shattered into a spiderweb of frosted crystals.
Behind the wheel, our driver is slumped lifelessly over the steering wheel, the horn blaring.
Down by the entrance gates, the windshield of our chase vehicle is peppered with precision bullet holes.
Two more of our men are dead inside, slumped over their consoles.
Four elite Volkov guards. Wiped out in seconds.
Simon and Matvei curse, the weighty grief of losing their hand-picked soldiers turning their faces into masks of pure rage.
Sofie is kneeling on the cold sidewalk, her hands pressed tightly to her face, dark crimson leaking through the gaps of her fingers.
She is shaking violently, huddled right beside Lev’s unmoving body.
Lev, the veteran who had guarded these girls since they were teenagers, whose hand I had shaken only hours earlier, is lying flat on his back, his vacant eyes staring up at the winter sky, his throat painted in a thick, cooling collar of red. Dead, trying to protect my wife.
Blood is everywhere, a wide, smeared river of it.
My eyes track the stains, calculating the volume, the trajectory, the spray patterns.
The blood on the tarmac is not all hers.
The volume belongs to Lev, to the driver, to the brutal punch that cracked Sofie’s face, and to the frantic, vicious struggle Raya undoubtedly put up before they overwhelmed her.
Raya is not bleeding out. She is alive. I hold that fact very deliberately in the front of my mind, locking it down so the rage doesn’t blind me.
Matvei’s cleanup crews arrive in a screech of tires, three black vans cutting off the street visibility.
A paid-off precinct captain has already rerouted the local police dispatch, buying us a fifteen-minute window before any authority dares to look at this block.
Simon instantly crouches next to Sofie, his hands gentle as he wraps an arm around her shaking shoulders, lifting her to get her out of the blood before the street is scrubbed clean.
I stand and walk over to where Matvei and Simon are deep in conversation, pulling my secondary piece from my waistband, fingers steady as I screw the long, heavy cylinder of the silencer onto the threads of the barrel.
It is a motion I have performed thousands of times in the dark, and I do it now with the absolute focus of a machine.
I holster it inside my jacket. I check my primary Glock.
I check the weight of the blade hidden against my forearm.
I pull out my phone and dial a number I haven’t used in three years. A shadow contact buried deep within my father’s old inner circle. The line connects. I don’t give him a chance to speak. “Where did he take her?” I ask.
The man on the other end hesitates for one second. He knows who I am, and what I’m capable of. He listens to the dead silence on my end of the line, and the sheer terror of what he knows I will do to his family if he lies to me breaks him instantly. He rattles off an address.
I know every single black-site property my father has ever purchased, leased, or stolen in this state.
The address is exactly what I expected. A rotting, industrial sector in the worst part of the city—a grid of lawless, forgotten streets where gunshots don’t even bring people to their windows because survival means pretending you are blind.
My father chose it because it is invisible to the world.
It will suit me perfectly for the same reason.
I turn to the Volkov brothers. Matvei looks at me, and for the first time since I met him, the hardened Bratva boss looks genuinely unsettled by what he sees staring back at him from beneath my brow. I have gone dark. The skin-stitcher has taken the wheel.
“You sort this out,” I tell them, my voice barely louder than the winter breeze. “I am going to get my wife.”
I turn to leave, but Matvei’s heavy hand slams down flat against my chest, blocking my exit. His brow is furrowed, his jaw locked in a hard, dangerous line.
“The fuck you are,” Matvei barks. “You think you’re walking in there alone? We take both cars, we pull fifty soldiers from the south sector, and we turn whatever block they’re on into a graveyard. We’ve got backup, Mykros. Use it.”
I look down at his hand on my chest, then back up into his eyes. I’m not angry; it’s his sister’s life on the line, but what I’m about to do needs to be a definite and unmistakable message to my father.
“If we roll up with fifty men, guns blazing, they’ll panic and put a bullet in her head before we even cross the perimeter,” I tell him, my voice devoid of inflection.
“This isn’t that type of operation, Matvei.
This requires a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
They’re expecting a frantic, loud retaliation. They aren’t expecting me, alone.”
Matvei stares at me, searching my face for any sign of hesitation or reckless panic. He’ll find none. He slowly lowers his hand, a grim, reluctant understanding settling over his features.