Chapter 4
ROLAN
The car is waiting, ready to leave the warehouse and Viktor behind.
I remove my jacket, fold it, and place it in the garment bag hanging from the door hook.
The shirt is clean — I don’t get close enough for mess, and Alexei’s work is precise — but I change anyway.
There’s a fresh shirt in the bag, pressed this morning.
I button it in the rearview mirror. My hands are steady. My father’s hands used to shake in the car after these… unpleasant necessities. He tried to hide it, but I saw.
Children of dangerous men learn to read hands the way other children learn to read books.
The car glides through the city with Dmitri at the wheel. The route from the warehouse district to my estate usually takes forty minutes. That is, if traffic cooperates. It rarely does. But Dmitri has a way of bending time and space to his will.
Red lights seem to change as we approach. Lanes open. It’s not supernatural. It’s just that the city has learned to get out of Dmitri’s way.
My phone buzzes. Mikhail.
MIKHAIL
The final candidates are prepared. Three dossiers on your desk. Interview schedule for tomorrow confirmed.
I type back.
I’ll review them tonight.
Then I open the security feed on my phone.
Camera six, the sunroom. Anya is there. She’s sitting on the window seat with her sketchbook and Mr. Whiskers, the stuffed rabbit she’s had since she was two.
Her legs are tucked under her. Her hair, even darker than mine, falls across her face as she draws.
She’s alone. Since Marina left to marry her fiancé in Moscow, everything has fallen apart. She was the one person who had cracked the code. She was patient, creative, and stubborn in the right ways.
Marina gave us five years. When she came to my office in tears and told me she’d fallen in love and wanted to go home to Moscow, I considered how much she had done for my daughter and decided to repay her. “Go,” I said. “Quickly. Before I change my mind.”
Not a day has passed without questioning my decision.
I close the feed and put the phone away.
There’s a smear on my cuff. I look closer. It turns out to be nothing, only a shadow, a crease in the fabric. But for a moment, in the gray light of the car, it resembled blood.
That world is not allowed to follow me home.
To be Pakhan, I’m forced to carry two people in the same body. One of them orders executions. The other watches his six-year-old on a camera feed and worries that she’s lonely.
Both are real. Neither is enough.
The estate gradually appears through the trees, then all at once.
The gates open as the car approaches, cleared by the biometric scan on the vehicle, license plate recognition, and visual confirmation from the guard station. Three layers of security before the tires touch the gravel drive.
I built this.
Not the house, that was my father’s, and his father’s before him. But the security, the systems, the protocols that turn a home into a fortress.
I built it after Anya was born. When I held her for the first time, I understood with a deep, unflinching clarity that I would burn civilizations to keep her safe.
A sneer curls my lips as I think of her mother.
Katarina.
My dead wife. The woman who made her way into my bed and my bloodline, who got pregnant deliberately to secure her position in the Bratva.
She smiled at me every morning while building a cage I didn’t notice until the door was already locked.
She died in childbirth. A sudden complication, the doctors said. Unavoidable, a cruel lottery of biology. I’ve never been fully convinced. Cruelty, in my experience, is rarely random.
Karma, perhaps.
She left me two things: a daughter I would die for and a conviction that anyone who gets close to me is running an angle. Every smile is a strategy. Every kindness is a transaction. Every woman who crosses my path sees the crown first.
I’ve been right every time. In seven years, not a single person has given me reason to believe otherwise.
The car stops. Dimitri stays put while I go inside.
The foyer is quiet, as usual. I take the stairs to the residential floor.
Anya’s door is open — she never closes it. When a child her age keeps the door closed, it means she fears what’s outside. But my daughter has learned from me that she has nothing to fear. Protection is not her job. It’s mine.
I stop in the doorway before she can see that I’m home, and I watch her.
These moments are too precious to pass up.
She’s built a fortress.
I can make out an elaborate construction of pillows, bed cushions, two small chairs dragged from the reading corner, and what appears to be the good tablecloth from the formal dining room, which Angelina is going to have feelings about.
Mr. Whiskers stands in front, guarding the entrance.
Anya is inside, cross-legged, her sketchbook open on her lap, colored pencils arranged beside her.
I lean against the doorframe and watch this small, extraordinary creature who rearranges the world to suit her.
As if sensing my presence, she raises her head.
“Papa!” she says, mouth curling into a smile. “Come, look what I built!”
I mirror her smile, the only time I ever do it naturally, and cross the room to lower myself to the floor beside her fortress.
“Can I see?” I point to her drawing.
She angles the sketchbook toward me without hesitation. Today’s subject is a cat who appears to be wearing armor. And a cape.
“The cat has a cape,” I note.
“He’s a knight. He protects the kingdom.”
“What kingdom?”
She gestures broadly at the pillow fort. At Mr. Whiskers. At herself. The meaning is clear: This kingdom. Obviously.
“And what does the kingdom need protecting from?”
“Dragons.” She picks up the green pencil and adds what might be flames, or trees, emerging from the left side of the page. “And boring people. ”
The chuckle escapes before I can catch it. She glances up at the sound, a flash of satisfaction crossing her face.
“You used the good tablecloth,” I point out.
“It was the right size.”
“Angelina is going to be upset.”
“Angelina said I could.”
“Did she, now?”
A pause. The pencil stills. “She said I could use a tablecloth.”
“And you chose the most expensive one in the house.”
“It was the best for building.”
I hold her gaze. Neither of us blinks. This is a negotiation, and she knows it.
The fact that she is six years old and already understands business transactions is either the proudest or most concerning result of my parenting.
“I’ll handle Angelina,” I concede.
She nods. This was never in doubt, so she returns to her armored cat.
I watch her draw. The small, sure movements of her hands. The way she holds the pencil and slightly furrows her brows the way I supposedly do as well.
“Papa.”
“Mm.”
“You can come inside if you want.” She tilts her head toward the interior of the fort. “But you have to take your shoes off.”
I examine the entrance. It was not designed for a man of my dimensions. Getting in will require a level of physical compromise that will, frankly, cost some of my dignity. Getting out will be worse.
I take my shoes off.
With some struggle, I make it inside. She rearranges herself to make room, and I sit with my knees drawn up and my head brushing the tablecloth ceiling .
“The knight needs a sword,” she announces, returning to her drawing. “Can you draw a sword?”
“I can draw a sword.”
She hands me a black pencil and points to the space beside the knight’s gauntleted paw. I draw a sword. It is, objectively, not a good sword. It resembles less a weapon and more a slightly aggressive rectangle.
Anya studies it for a long moment.
“That’s okay,” she says. The kindness in her voice is devastating. “I’ll fix it later.”
“Thank you for your generosity.”
“You’re welcome.” She pats my arm once before returning to her work.
We stay like that for a few minutes. She seems happy, but I know she must be lonely. Which reminds me… I still have to choose a governess.
“I have work soon,” I eventually muster.
“I know. You always have work.”
The words carry no accusation or resentment. She understands that I have to leave. She also understands that I will come back.
“I’ll come say goodnight,” I tell her.
“Promise?”
“Yes.”
She seems satisfied by that.
After a quick kiss on the forehead, I extricate myself from the pillow fort with considerably less grace than I entered it, put my shoes back on, and stand in the middle of her bedroom, staring down at the tablecloth canopy and the small person inside it who is currently bestowing her knight with a far more competent sword than the one I provided.
The small smile on my lips lingers as I start for the hall that leads to my office.
“Papa. ”
I stop.
“Your sword was actually not that bad.”
I let my smile fill out for her. “Thank you, malyshka .”
Then I turn toward my office.
Mikhail is already there.
He’s standing by the window with his hands clasped behind his back, watching the grounds with a practiced, patient stillness.
He’s sixty-two. Silver hair, lean build, dark blue eyes that process information faster than most computers.
He was my father’s right hand. Before that, he was my grandfather’s.
He’s been in this family longer than I’ve been alive, and he’s the only person in this organization whose loyalty I don’t question.
“Do you have the candidates?” I ask, sitting behind my desk.
He crosses the room and sets three folders on the right and another bunch on the left. Each one is thick. Not an agency’s paperwork, but Mikhail’s.
Background checks, financial records, social media analyses, and psychological profiles compiled by a former FSB behavioral analyst we keep on retainer.
This is what my life does to everything it touches. It transforms the ordinary into an operation.