Burn the Bratva Throne

Pakhan Maksim Zakharov chose his throne over Elena Belyaeva, signing the annulment while she slept, marrying a rival boss's daughter at dawn, and watching her burn three of his warehouses before she vanished into the Moscow night.

After six years of searching, she returns as his enemy and a Pakhan in her own right, with her own empire, council, and throne, just as a thirty-day ultimatum from the Sun Yee On Triad forces them into the same room once a week until they unite the Bratva or burn it down.

Maksim has never stopped wanting her: he has touched no other woman, hunted men for looking at her wrong, kept her wedding ring in his desk, and slept every night with the band still on his right hand.

Elena hates that she wants him too; she has stayed celibate, wears his ring on a chain under her blouse, anonymously sent the antidote the night his political wife tried to kill him, and spent eighteen months three steps ahead of him while calling it strategy.

The only way out of the war is through each other, the merger holds only if one of them kneels, and by the morning of December eighteenth Maksim is the one who will.