Chapter 6 Andrei
ANDREI
An entire week passes without any sighting of Nina.
No word from her double-crossing father, Melor, either.
I can’t stay in Baltimore waiting for news that clearly isn’t coming. Rafail summons me back to Brooklyn.
“You seem anxious,” he says when I meet him at a café on Brighton Beach. The noise from the patrons and the rolling waves make it virtually impossible to record a conversation here. The Russian restaurant is a popular spot for bratva to conduct business.
“I am.”
“Why?” Rafail leans forward. Fatherhood hasn’t softened him in the slightest. He is like a younger brother to me, in some ways.
Now, he is technically my true pakhan, but his father is the one who owns my loyalty.
Dmitri may be in prison, but he is the one who pulled me off the streets as an orphan and gave me a home.
I worked my way up from a low-level patsani.
Earned Dmitri’s trust. Watched him marry a woman he did not love to advance himself in the brotherhood and was jealous when she gave him the son he adored.
I always understood I would never be the heir. But now I have a path to the kind of authority and success I have always coveted. “I haven’t seen or heard from Nina in days. I’m worried.”
“Hard to see her when you’re here in New York and she is in Baltimore.”
“I have spies.”
“You mean, I have spies and you’re using them to keep watch on the Kotov faction,” Rafail clarifies. I shrug.
“It’s what you would do in my position.”
“That’s right,” Rafail admits easily, and changes the subject. “Good news. Hailey is expecting another baby.” He beams. Hardly a surprising result considering the way those two carry on together.
I shift in my seat, unable to meet his gaze. Envy gnaws at my insides. I never had a family of my own. Dmitri was the closest thing I had to a father. “Boy or girl?”
“Boy,” he grins, but his joy fades as quickly as it appeared. “How long have you been chasing the Kotov princess?”
“Five days, officially. Before then, I had never even spoken to her.”
“Allow me to rephrase, Andrei. How long have you been stalking our rival’s daughter?”
I stare out over Brighton Beach. This time of year the water is still too cold to swim, but that doesn’t stop some hardy souls from braving the chill.
“Three years,” I confess.
“Years,” Rafail echoes in disbelief.
“Again. You’re one to talk.” I can’t keep the sullen note out of my voice. “You went after Hailey.”
“I had to. She had that encryption key.” He avoids my eye. The friendly drink we were having at a boardwalk café overlooking the beach suddenly turns frosty. I feel that raw sting on my flesh as if I had dived into the waves headfirst.
Perhaps I have. I know he’s pissed that I didn’t clear any of this with him in advance.
I had Dmitri’s permission and I ran with it, but even before then, I was breaking into Nina’s car and leaving gifts like a lovesick Romeo.
I never told anyone about my obsession. Always couched it in terms of the mission.
We need to keep an eye on the Kotovs. All bullshit, but Rafail doesn’t call me on it.
“You wanted to pursue your former stepsister, pakhan,” I say. Using his title is a conciliatory gesture.
“I did.” Rafail turns to me suddenly. “Either you have launched a grenade into what had been a manageable skirmish with a weaker faction and turned it into outright war, or you’ve found an ingenious way to win the leadership role you always wanted.
Marry the Kotov printsesa and take control of the group through her. Brilliant—if it works.”
“I intend to make it work.” My throat tightens.
I still don’t know when or where Nina’s damned auction is supposed to take place.
With spies watching Melor’s strip club, I know it hasn’t yet happened, but I’m four hours away.
He could spring it any time. Or move the location to somewhere I don’t have spies.
“Good. The reckless way Melor Kotov has been acting lately, he’s been attracting too much of the wrong kind of attention.
Take care of him, and I trust we can act as partners of one extended family.
We did grow up as brothers,” says Rafail.
Relief courses through me. If Rafail ordered me to stop pursing this plan I’d be forced to comply.
Instead, he’s giving me his approval. “I have a wedding gift for you. Come.”
We finish our drinks and get into a black SUV.
His driver takes us to a warehouse in Red Hook.
I’ve been here countless times before. The front of the building is a converted factory that now sells overpriced designer furniture.
In the back is a nondescript metal door leading into a dark room with woodworking equipment—or at least, that’s what it appears to be at first glance.
In truth, these machines make exquisite torture devices.
Rafail passes through a closet door and into a windowless room with a single lightbulb suspended from the ceiling. Like that room at the auto shop in Baltimore, there is a chair bolted to the floor. In it, a man slumps. He jerks upright when we enter the claustrophobic space.
“I told you, I don’t know anything,” he says in Russian, his eyes flaring wide with terror.
“Yerunda,” Rafail snaps. Bullshit. “Tell him everything you know about the Kotov girl. Perhaps we’ll let you live.” To me he mutters, “Caught him trying to spy on Hailey’s real estate deals.”
I understand his implicit order. This man came close enough to his wife and family to be a potential threat. He is a dead man. Whether I do the deed or Rafail does, this man’s life is forfeit.
“How would I know anything about her?” this pathetic baklany—punk—whines. I slam my fist into my palm. He flinches.
Rafail sees himself out before the violence really gets going. “I’ll leave you to what you do best, Andrei,” he says.
“When is the auction?” I say to my prisoner.
He shakes his head. “What auction?”
“Nina’s auction. Where is it taking place?”
It takes a fair amount of convincing—a few lost teeth, a broken nose, and a busted kneecap—before Kotov’s man gives me the information I want. In return, I put him out of his misery with a bullet to the temple.
Tonight. A club in Baltimore where Kotov runs a strip club as cover for his sex trafficking operation.
Fucking Melor. That’s gratitude for you.
Guess I’ll just have to crash the party.