Chapter 2
Rovin
The house is quiet at this hour. Early morning, and my brothers are already here.
Akyl is at the window, coffee in hand, watching the skyline the way a predator watches open ground. He is the second eldest, thirty-two, leaner than me, sharper in the face, and more volatile in temperament. He smiles more than I do, but his smiles have edges.
Volody is on the sofa, scrolling his phone with one hand, a protein bar half-eaten in the other. Twenty-eight. The youngest. Built heavier than either of us, with our mother's softer mouth and our father's refusal to take anything seriously until the moment it becomes lethal.
"There’s the Koralev girl," Akyl says without turning from the window. "She's been mentioned twice."
"Mentioned by whom?" I pour my own coffee. Black, no sugar. The machine cost four thousand dollars and produces something that tastes like it was brewed by the gods.
"The broker. Mikhailov's people. They're positioning her for the next dinner." Akyl turns. "She's twenty-three. Family runs shipping out of Odesa. Father wants an alliance with someone in London."
"She's a child," I say.
"She's twenty-three."
"I said what I said."
Volody laughs from the sofa, low and entertained. "Rovin wants a woman, not a project."
"Rovin wants an heir," Akyl corrects. "Which requires a wife. Which requires attending one of these dinners and actually choosing someone instead of finding reasons to dismiss every candidate for the third year running."
He isn't wrong. I have attended two auction dinners.
At the first, I sat for three hours, listened to four proposals, and left without speaking to any of the women directly.
At the second, I spoke to one. She was beautiful, polished, and so terrified of me that her hand shook when she reached for her wine glass.
I don't want a wife who is afraid of me. I want one who understands exactly what I am and chooses to sit beside me anyway.
"The business requires stability," I say. "A wife. Children. The families we work with respect legacy. Without it, we are just five men with money and guns."
"We're five men with money and guns regardless," Volody says.
"And with a family, we become a dynasty." I set down my cup. "I will attend the next dinner and I will choose."
Our other brothers, Dayan and Serik arrive, grumbling about traffic.
Akyl watches me for a moment, calculating.
"And what are you looking for, specifically?"
I consider the question. What I want is difficult to articulate because it exists in the space between strategy and instinct.
I want a woman who is intelligent enough to understand the world she's entering and brave enough to enter it without flinching.
I want someone who will carry my name and my children and do so with the awareness that both of those things are permanent.
I want a partner in the oldest sense of the word, someone who stands beside me because she has chosen that position and will defend it.
I want someone I can keep.
"I'll know when I see her," I say.
Volody catches Akyl's eye, and something passes between them.
"All of you need be thinking about this," I add. "The family needs heirs. All of us, not just me."
Dayan's expression closes like a door. "One crisis at a time."
Volody raises his protein bar in a mock toast. "I'll marry when someone survives dinner with Rovin and lives to tell about it."
"That isn't funny," I say.
"It's a little funny," Serik says with a grin.
I let it pass. We have work. A shipment coming through that needs oversight. A meeting with a property developer who owes us a favor he's been slow to repay. The ordinary machinery of an empire that runs on discipline and the careful application of pressure.
But underneath the work, underneath the routine, something has been building for months. A restlessness I don't entirely understand. I have money. I have power. I have the respect, or at least the fear, of every significant player in the Bratva.
And I have an empty house, save for my annoying brothers coming and going as they please. I have three guest bedrooms that have never been slept in. I have a dining table that seats twelve and is used by one.
I am thirty-five years old, and the legacy I have spent my entire adult life building has no one to inherit it.
My mother died in a house that should have felt like home but never did.
She died without ever hearing the words she needed from my father, and she left behind five sons who learned, from her absence, that love is not a feeling.
It is a structure. It is a decision made daily, reinforced by action, built from the accumulated weight of showing up and staying.
I will not repeat my father's failures. The woman I choose will not endure. She will thrive. She will stand in the rooms I've built and fill them with the kind of life that I can hear, and see, and protect.
I finish my coffee and set the cup in the sink.
"Nine days," I say to Akyl. "Confirm our attendance."
My brothers groan.