Volkov
The man’s been crying for ten minutes, and it’s starting to piss me off.
Not the crying itself. I’ve seen grown men weep, beg, piss themselves in this room, and none of it does anything to me.
What pisses me off is the noise. The grating noise of a man who thought he was smarter than me finding out he wasn’t, and falling apart about it instead of just taking what’s coming.
“Tri million,” he says, three million, like saying it in Russian makes it smaller. His wrists are zip-tied behind his back, and his nose is still leaking from where Marka put it into the table twenty minutes ago. “I was going to put it back. I just needed more time.”
I crouch down in front of him. Not because I need to get closer, I can hear him fine, but because I want him to look at my face from down there. I want him to feel what it is to kneel in front of the man he thought he was stealing from.
“Eight months,” I say. “You’ve had eight months, Pavel. That’s not a time problem. That’s a you problem.”
His mouth opens. I stand up before he can use it.
“Break both hands,” I tell Marka. “He keeps the fingers. He’s got a kid in school, and I’m not here to blow up the whole family over three million dollars that’s already back in reserves.
” I pick my jacket up off the chair. “But if the accounts aren’t clean by Friday, we come back, and we finish it. ”
Pavel starts crying harder. I walk out.
The waterfront hits me the second I push through the door, cold and salty off the water, diesel underneath it.
Brooklyn at ten in the morning is the same grey it always is, ugly in a way that stopped bothering me a long time ago because I’m already used to it.
I light a cigarette and stand with my back to the building and smoke half of it while the sounds on the other side of the wall do what they need to do.
Lavro used to hate this part. Not the decisions, not even the mess of it, just the noise.
He’d come out here with me after, and we’d stand exactly like this, both smoking, water in front of us, and he’d say something that cut right through whatever shit the morning had been.
One sentence. That was all he ever needed.
He’s been dead for six weeks, and I have to start the day over from that point, which is not a great way to start a day.
I haven’t worked out how to get through the mornings without that one sentence and I’ve stopped pretending I’m going to.
I grind the cigarette out when Marka comes through the door.
“He’ll have it by Thursday,” Marka says. “His wife runs the books. He’s more scared of her than of us.”
“Should’ve thought about that before he put his hand in my pocket.” I turn back toward the building. “What else?”
Marka pulls out his phone and holds it out. “This message came through the Yegorov channel an hour ago.”
I take it.
Request for audience from Berezin’s daughter. Says she has a proposal. Something about the stability of Nazarov’s seat on the Crown. Wants a meeting.
I read it again.
Berezin’s daughter.
Berezin, who found the venue for the meeting where my brother died. Berezin, who I put in the ground three weeks ago because his name was at the end of every thread I pulled. And now his daughter is sending messages through my channels asking for a meeting like she’s got something to offer me.
I should say no. Every clean instinct I have says no.
“No,” says Marka, already reading my face. “Don’t even think about it.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You don’t have to.” He takes the phone back. “She’s Berezin’s daughter. We put a bullet in her father three weeks ago. Whatever she’s calling a proposal, it’s not a fucking proposal.”
I start walking. Marka falls into step, already going at it without waiting to see what mood I’m in.
“She could be wired,” he says. “Could be working with feds, trying to get you on record about Berezin, using the meeting to build a case.”
“She’s not federal. Feds don’t know Yegorov exists.”
“Then she’s just stupid.”
“She’s not stupid either.” I push through the main door, nod at the two men inside.
The inner room is already set for the morning briefing, six men around the long table, maps on the walls, nothing on the walls that doesn’t need to be there.
I sit at the head and the room shuts up.
“She said stability. Not justice, not answers, not what you did to my father. Stability of my seat on the Crown.” I look at Marka. “She’s talking my language.”
Marka sits at the far end, jaw tight, letting it go for now. He pulls up the briefing notes.
We go through it. Queens territory dispute that needs handling before it gets loud.
A shipment stuck at the port needs a call to a guy who owes me.
Two names flagged as possible informants in the Smekhov operation on our eastern border.
I listen, I ask what needs asking, I make the decisions that need making.
This is most of what this life is, if I’m honest. Not Pavel.
Not the rest of it. Just decisions, one after another, each one carrying the last one on its back.
Lavro used to sit in the chair to my left.
He’d say almost nothing through the whole thing, just drink his coffee, and then at the end he’d lean over and say the one thing I’d missed.
Always finding that exact one thing. The chair’s been empty for six weeks.
I’ve had three different men try to sit in it at various points and each time something in my face made them move without saying a word.
It stays empty. I don’t care if that’s irrational.
I keep the chair empty. I don’t know anymore if that’s for him or for me.
Three men leave when it’s done. Marka stays.
“Evelina Berezin. Twenty-six,” he says when the door closes.
“Columbia Law. No record, no contacts, nothing tying her to anything her father was into.” He drops a folder on the table.
“She’s been digging online. Knows what Bratva means now, knows about the Crown.
Three weeks ago, she knew none of it. And she went back to Berezin’s apartment twice after we swept it.
Both times, she didn’t leave for hours.”
I open the folder. “We missed something.”
“Yeah.”
Her photograph is from her law school profile.
Dark hair, pale skin, a mouth that looks like it hasn’t smiled since before she knew how to use it as a weapon.
She’s beautiful in a way that’s got nothing soft about it, the kind of face that makes a man’s brain go quiet if he lets it. I’ve fucked women who looked like her.
She’s also Berezin’s daughter. The man who put Lavro in the ground, even if he didn’t pull the trigger himself.
Even if he was just the venue, just the logistics, just the link in the chain closest to hand when I needed someone to start with.
That’s her father. And she’s sitting in a law school photograph looking like she’s already three moves ahead of whoever’s across from her.
I don’t know what to do with that yet. So I put it down and look at the photograph again.
“She found something in that apartment,” I say.
“That’s my read.”
“And she’s coming here to use it.” I close the folder. “Not as a threat. She’s too smart for that. She’s going to put it on the table and see what I’ll give her for it.”
“Volkov.” Marka leans forward. “Her father stole from us. We dealt with it. If she’s got something from his apartment, it’s ours. She doesn’t get to walk in here and use our own shit against us.”
“She can use whatever she’s holding,” I say. “That’s how this works. Always has.” I push back and stand. “She’s not coming here with nothing. She found something, and she’s smart enough to know she can’t do shit with it on her own.”
“Or she’s coming here to put a bullet in you and die happy.”
That one lands differently than Marka intends it.
If Berezin’s daughter has half a brain and any information about what her father was involved in, she knows I’m the one who ordered his execution.
She knows what I did. And she’s walking in anyway.
Either she’s got no survival instinct at all, or she’s got something solid enough that she thinks it protects her.
Either way, I want to know what it is.
“She’s not.” I move to the door. “Get me everything before Thursday. Who she’s talked to, where she’s been, whether she’s made copies.”
“And if she’s been talking to the wrong people?”
“I want to know. But still bring her in. I want to meet her in person. She’s pretty, don’t you think?”
Marka rolls his eyes. “Your dick is going to get you killed one day.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Yeah,” he says. “She’s pretty.”
The rest of the day is what it always is.
Phone calls, a border problem that sorts itself when Marka gets on the line because his voice does things mine doesn’t, a meeting with the lawyer who keeps our books looking clean.
Normal shit. Dull shit. The kind of afternoon where there’s nothing loud enough to drown out the thing sitting underneath everything else, which is that Lavro has been dead for six weeks and I still haven’t found who gave the order.
Berezin organized the venue. He was the link.
But Berezin was taking instructions from someone, and I don’t have that name yet, and until I do, none of this is finished.
Underneath all of it, the same thing keeps coming up.
Berezin’s daughter.
I knew about her the way you know about a chair in a room you never go in.
She existed, she wasn’t my problem. Berezin kept her clean, which I’d noticed at the time, filed away as the one decent thing the man managed in an otherwise shit performance.
Kept his kid out of it. Smart. Too bad the rest of his choices were garbage.
Didn’t save him anyway.
The question I keep coming back to is what she found in that apartment.
Berezin was taking instructions from someone.
If he was smart enough to hide a drive from my sweep, he was smart enough to keep records.
And if his daughter found those records, she might know more about who gave the order than I do.
Which means she’s not just an interesting problem.
She might be the next thread in the chain.
I don’t think about this too much. I know what guilt does, how it slows everything down and makes you soft in places you can’t afford to be soft, so I push it down and get back to work. I’m good at ignoring things. I’ve had enough practice for three lifetimes.
Marka comes back at four. “Thursday at two. She took the time without pushing back.”
I look up. “Nothing? Didn’t try to change it at all?”
“Not a word.”
That’s interesting. Everyone tries to move something, even a little, just to feel like they got something before the meeting even starts. She took what she was given without a peep. Either she doesn’t know to push, which I don’t believe, or she’s saving her pushback for something that matters.
“Anything else on her?” I ask.
“Top of her class. Had two good job offers before all this went sideways. Walked away from both after her father died.” Marka crosses his arms. “She’s nearly broke. Whatever savings she had are almost gone. No job, nothing lined up, nothing to go back to.”
Nothing to lose. Fantastic.
A broke girl with a dead father and balls bigger than half my men, walking in here and calling it a proposal. I look at her photograph again. That face. Cold as hell and twice as pretty, the kind of woman who looks at you like you’re already boring her and you haven’t even opened your mouth yet.
Fuck.
She’s got more education than me, more polish than me, and she’s going to walk into my house and try to take me apart with that sharp brain of hers.
And she’s going to do it knowing I killed her father.
That’s the part I can’t stop coming back to.
She knows what I did, and she’s coming anyway.
That’s either the bravest thing I’ve heard in a long time or the most reckless, and I genuinely can’t tell which yet.
And the truly stupid thing is that I want to see it. I want to sit across from her and watch her try.
My dick has been on board with Thursday since the moment I saw her photograph.
The rest of me is catching up. And underneath both of those things, quieter than either of them, is the thought that she might know something about Lavro.
About who gave the order. About what her father was really part of.
That’s the thought I don’t say out loud. Not even to Marka.
“Don’t tell the room what we think she’s got,” I tell Marka. “I want to watch her work.”
He doesn’t like it. His jaw goes tight, and he eats the argument whole, but he nods and leaves.
I’m looking forward to Thursday. Not just because she’s interesting.
Not just because of the photograph. Because Berezin’s daughter walked into my channels three weeks after I killed her father and she’s hiding something, and whatever it is, it might be the next step toward finding who put Lavro on that floor.
That’s what Thursday is actually about.
The rest of it is just how she looks in that photograph.