4. Anton
ANTON
Business brings me to Prague a few hours before trouble does.
Prague is good for this kind of business.
Rich tourists come to spend, local politicians come to be seen, and men with dirty money come because the city knows how to dress vice up as luxury.
A nightclub can sell champagne, private rooms, event packages, and security on paper, then move cash, favors, and quiet meetings underneath it. That makes it useful.
I’m not here for the city.
I’m here for a club tucked behind a polished frontage on one of the expensive streets where nobody needs to shout for attention.
The owner is Pavel Hruby, and for the last few months he’s been stealing from a Reznikov operation running through his business.
Small cuts at first. Cash shaved from bottle service.
Money siphoned through fake event costs.
Security payments padded and redirected. Enough to look like accounting noise unless someone knows the channel.
We know the channel.
He keeps me waiting six minutes in his upstairs office, which tells me everything his books didn’t.
Men who think they’re safe start playing games with time. Men who remember who made them rich don’t.
Pavel forgot whose money he was touching.
He comes in all smiles, arms spread wide. “Anton,” he says. “To what do I owe this pleasure?” He smells of cologne, a woman, and whiskey he left downstairs too fast. He kicks the door shut behind him.
I stay where I am, one shoulder against the sideboard, and let him hear how quiet the room gets around me. “Sit down.”
The smile slips a little.
“Has there been a misunderstanding?” Pavel asks as he flops into the chair.
“You know fucking well what the misunderstanding is. I’m going to give you one shot at clearing it up.” I say, looming over him.
He glances at my arm, at the tattoo stretched across my shoulder and upper arm, and swallows.
“It’s old-style Russian criminal iconography,” I say smoothly. “It marks loyalty. It also marks a life sentence in the underworld.”
Pavel lets out a laugh that tries for embarrassment. “The quarter was messy. A few entries lagged. My accountant’s an idiot.”
“Kill him if he’s stealing from you,” I reply shortly. “But that won’t explain why you’re stealing from us.”
His face blanches as I push a thin file across the desk. Pavel looks down, then back up. “This can be fixed.”
“It already is,” I say. “The question is whether it gets fixed cleanly.”
He swallows once. “How much?”
I snort. Correction is a number. It’s also a reputation.
I push off the sideboard and take a chair across from him. Sitting lowers the temperature and frightens men more.
“You skimmed from a Brotherhood channel,” I say. “You delayed tribute, then you let a woman at the bar tell one of my people you were tired of provincial debt collectors reaching into Prague.”
His eyes lift to mine, bloodshot and already calculating. “That was drunk talk.”
I don’t even blink. “I don’t care.”
He wets his lips, glances once at the door, then back at me like he’s still trying to find a version of this room where I’m negotiable. “I can pay back double.”
A laugh leaves me, short and dry. I straighten from the desk and smooth one cuff with my thumb. “You’ll pay back triple.”
He stares. “Triple?”
“You heard me.”
“That’s absurd.”
I move before the last word fully leaves his mouth. My hand closes around his left wrist—not the one he needs to write—and I twist hard. The crack that follows is satisfyingly audible. Pavel howls and half rises from the chair, but I yank him forward and keep hold of the broken hand.
“No,” I say quietly. “What’s absurd is thinking Prague puts distance between you and our money.”
He’s panting now, face gone gray around the mouth. Sweat breaks along his upper lip. “Anton, listen, I only took a little, and I was going to settle it.”
“A little,” I repeat, like I’m testing the shape of the lie.
I shove him back down, then catch his shoulder and drive his arm flat across the desk.
Papers slide. A glass tips and spills amber across wood.
My other hand presses the back of his neck until his cheek grinds against the polished surface.
He curses, voice breaking.
“You skimmed bottle service, padded security invoices, and bled cash through fake event costs,” I say. “You stole in small amounts because you thought small meant invisible.”
His breathing turns ragged.
I lean closer, my mouth near his ear. “Three fingers, or triple payment. You choose.”
He goes very still.
That’s the thing men like Pavel never understand until it’s too late. A channel survives because the penalty arrives faster than the excuse. Once people learn that, you don’t have to explain the rules twice.
“Triple,” he chokes out.
I let him up. He clutches his hand to his chest and stares at me with hate, fear, and sudden understanding all fighting for room in his face.
“You’ll have it by noon,” he says.
I hold his gaze. “I’ll have it now.”
He hesitates for one doomed second, then nods. Pulling out a checkbook from his drawer, he scribbles on it with his good hand and pushes it toward me.
I check it, and when I’m satisfied, I move to the door. At the threshold, I turn. “And Pavel?”
He’d been busy groaning over his injury, but he straightens and looks up.
“If I hear you used the word ‘absurd’ again in connection with Brotherhood money, we don’t stop at the fingers.”
He says nothing. I leave him there with his broken hand, his damaged pride, and a clear understanding of the cost of disrespect.
The club floor is fuller now. Some of the people here are probably here to take it easy. The others have come on different forms of business. I take a place at the bar where I can see the room in the mirrored back shelves without turning my head too much.
Prague is useful for another reason. Leonidov movement shows up here before it shows up on paper.
Too many shared routes and old channels. Lately, there have been whispers about increased Leonidov pressure around certain freight lines. Baltic-adjacent movement. Money’s being shifted sideways. I’m here to see whether any of that reaches the city in person.
The bartender pours my drink without asking for payment. I let the first sip sit on my tongue and think about my brother. Prague has that effect on me tonight, maybe because freight is involved, maybe because Leonidov pressure always circles back to the same old wound if you let it.
He died when the feud stopped being distant and became something that could reach us.
It was a freight ambush on a late route, built on bad intelligence. A convoy that should have made it through didn’t. I carry the date on my forearm because some things shouldn’t fade just because time moves on.
The Leonidovs call themselves civilized now. That’s fine. Civilized men still hide money under cleaner names.
I set the glass down and scan the room again.
That’s when I notice the line of a woman sitting alone at the bar with a vodka she isn’t enjoying enough.
Dark top. Hair partly pinned back. Tension running through her body as clean as wire.
The angle of her jaw catches my attention.
Then she shifts, and the mirror gives me her face properly.
Sofiya Leonidova.
For one second, I think the city is playing games with me.
Then I look again. I’d know her anywhere.
She’s strikingly beautiful. I remember the heat in her face when I looked at her in Moscow and the way she looked back anyway.
I remember her manners, the way she held her head, the way her face tipped when she chose to smile.
She also watched the room like she expected something in it to break.
She’s in Prague alone. Why?
Her presence here gives shape to all the Leonidov whispers. I watch her again, the tight line of her shoulders clear even from here. Women like her don’t drift into clubs like this on impulse, not carrying that kind of tension. She’s either running from something or walking into it. Maybe both.
She holds my gaze, her face half hidden by the glass now. She’s deciding whether to stay or leave. She stood in silk and diamonds with her shoulders straight and her mouth set like a woman who knew exactly how the family worked and had no intention of being mistaken for decoration.
I’m in the mood for danger. I’d like to see what it takes to break open that cool confidence.
I pick up my drink, say something quietly to the bartender, and cross to her in two strides.
“Well,” I say, stopping close enough to feel the heat coming off her, “either Prague is smaller than I remembered, or it’s luck.”
She turns toward me in stages, which tells me she’s controlling the movement. Good. If she were too calm, I’d trust her less.
I take a sip and look at her over the rim of the glass.
“You assume I’m pleased to see you?” she asks.
“You looked colder in Moscow,” I say.
“You looked farther away.”
That almost gets a smile out of me.
She’s beautiful. Razor-sharp cheekbones. Pale skin. Dark hair pinned back to show off her mouth, and her mouth is a problem all by itself. So are her eyes, grey-blue one second, silver the next, and giving away far less than the rest of her.
“Who are you waiting for?” I ask.
She takes another drink. “You ask too much for a man who walked over uninvited.”
Her comment pulls an easy laugh from me, which is rare. “And you dodge too much for a woman who hit that vodka like she needed the burn.”
I take the stool beside her and watch her fingers tighten on the glass. As I track that movement, I realize something.
She has enough beauty, but there’s… another quality about her. She looks like someone who’s lived close enough to wolves to know what teeth mean. The second our eyes locked across the room, I knew she was either trouble or temptation.
Tonight, I want both.