Chapter 2
ILYA
My penthouse is silent when I return.
Thirty-nine floors above the city, insulated by steel and glass, the noise of Boston reduced to nothing more than a distant hum. I prefer it this way. Silence means I can think. There is very little peace in my life, even inside my own head, and the quiet of this one space is mine.
I don’t allow anyone to change that. More often than not, if I find someone I want to spend the evening with, I go to their apartment. I’ve seen the inside of plenty of the apartments in this city, from cheap studios to fancy high-rises. Or I get a hotel. It’s not as if I don’t have enough money.
This is my haven. My home.
But today, the silence feels different. Oppressive. Like it's enabling me to think about things that I shouldn’t have given a second thought.
Like a woman with dark hair and a body that made me want things I thought I’d long since become desensitized to.
I cross to the windows that span the entire western wall, floor to ceiling, offering a view of the city that costs more than most people make in a lifetime.
The river cuts through the landscape below, and beyond it, the city sprawls in the afternoon light.
From up here, everything looks orderly. Well-managed.
A kingdom I've built on blood and a willingness to do what is necessary to keep it within my grasp.
Power is something that has always come naturally to me—how to take it, how to keep it, how to wield it.
I've inherited an empire that gave me power, but the keeping of it has always been something else. It’s always meant being willing to do what others won’t, to carve out territory where it can be taken, and force men who think themselves to be untouchable to offer fealty.
I understand violence. I understand fear. What I don't understand is why I can't stop thinking about a woman I saw for thirty seconds on a sidewalk.
My hand drops to my pocket and I pull out my phone, opening it to the picture of her that I snapped in a moment of impulse I still can't fully explain. She’d answered her phone, her attention no longer on me, and as I’d walked to my car I’d already been refocusing on the business I’d been there to do with Elio Cattaneo this morning.
There were shipments coming in from Russia, endless calculations to make, risk to assess and weigh.
But something made me turn back. Something made me lift my phone and capture her image before she put down the phone and noticed me again.
The photo is slightly blurred, her face partially obscured by the phone against her cheek, a pastry box and coffee cup balanced on her other side. It’s not a good photo, but I can’t stop looking at it.
Even in the shitty picture, her straight dark hair looks like a raven’s wing, like it would feel like silk if I touched it.
I can’t shake the way I felt when my eyes locked with hers, an instant feeling of magnetic arousal, as if my body recognized hers even though I’ve never seen her before in my life.
It’s not as if I’ve never had a woman look at me before—there have been plenty. Thousands of them. They’ve looked at me with desire, fear, calculation, with the hunger that comes from wanting access to power. I know those looks. I understand them. I can predict them, manipulate them, use them.
The way she looked at me was different, but I can’t explain it. I can’t quantify it, and that unsettles me more than I can put into words.
I pull up my second in command, Kazimir's contact, and hit call. He answers on the second ring, his voice rough with the remnants of his Russian accent.
"Da?"
"I'm sending you a photo," I say sharply. "I need to know who she is."
There's a brief pause. Kazimir has worked for me for twenty years. He knows better than to ask questions, but I can hear the curiosity in his silence.
"How quickly?" he asks.
"Now."
He lets out an amused grunt. "Understood."
I end the call and send the photo. Then I turn back to the window, my reflection a ghost in the glass.
Tall, broad-shouldered, the suit I'm wearing cut to perfection by a tailor in Milan who makes clothes for oligarchs and princes.
A hard face, all sharp angles and cold eyes. A face meant to inspire fear.
My father used to say I had my mother's eyes. That didn’t mean much, considering he killed her. I always wondered if he loved or hated that feature.
I don't think about either of them often. The dead are dead, and sentiment is a luxury I can't afford.
My phone buzzes. A text from Kazimir: Working on it. Will have something soon.
Soon, from Kazimir, means hours at most. He's efficient and thorough, and he never makes me wait unnecessarily. He’s the only person in the world that I trust completely.
I turn away from the window and head to my office, passing through the penthouse that someone else decorated to look as if a person who cares lives here.
I asked for black, grey, and white, and left it at that.
Cold colors, colors that don’t distract.
I wanted it to look modern, elegant, luxurious, but I didn’t actually want to have to pick any of that out.
The point of having money, I’ve often heard, is to be able to avoid doing the things you don’t want to do yourself. I’ve found that’s not always the case, but when it comes to interior decorating, it certainly is.
I head into my office, closing the door behind me and going to sit behind my desk, a long piece of expensive furniture made from a single slab of mahogany.
Sitting down, I try to focus on the reports waiting for me.
There are financial reports from shipments that have come in, updates on protection rackets that my Bratva runs, and some intelligence from my men on a lesser family that is attempting to encroach where they shouldn’t.
It’s all business as usual, the kind of thing I’ve been handling on my own for fifteen years.
It’s almost mindless at this point, though I never let my thoughts wander when I’m focused on business.
But today, I can't concentrate. My mind keeps drifting back to that woman, to the moment our eyes met, to the way the world seemed to narrow down to just the two of us.
It makes no fucking sense, and it’s starting to piss me off.
I shift in my chair, reaching down to adjust the uncomfortable half-erection that’s been burgeoning since I saw her this morning, and wonder why the hell I can’t get one woman out of my head.
I’ve fucked so many women I stopped being able to remember them all years ago.
I've ordered deaths with less thought than most people give to choosing breakfast. I've broken bones and burned buildings and done things that would make ordinary people sick.
I’m unmoveable and unshakeable, immune to fear and the impact of violence, immune to emotion and the vagaries of it.
So why can't I stop thinking about a woman I don't even know?
The question gnaws at me. I don't like questions I can't answer, and I loathe feeling off-balance, my thoughts reactive instead of proactive. Control is everything in my world. Lose control and you lose everything else.
My phone rings a little before five, and I look down to see that it’s Kazimir. I answer immediately.
“Her name is Mara Winslow,” he says without preamble.
“She’s twenty-seven. An art dealer. She owns a gallery in Manhattan, very high-end, in high demand.
She lives alone in Tribeca. No criminal record, not even a parking ticket.
Parents died in a car accident when she was nineteen.
No siblings. She graduated from Columbia with a degree in art history, then went to graduate school for a master’s in art history, and worked at Christie’s for three years before opening her own gallery. "
I listen carefully, committing every detail to memory. "What's she doing in Boston?"
"Visiting a friend. Annie O'Malley."
That explains where I saw her this morning, then, heading toward the same brownstone I was leaving, where I was meeting Annie O’Malley’s husband.
He’s been loath to take meetings away from home recently, since his wife started to struggle with her pregnancy.
Not my problem, but I agreed to make the trip anyway.
There have been… delicacies in territorial boundaries lately, and I know when it’s wise not to poke the bear.
It was clear that arguing with Elio Cattaneo over a meeting place was not going to be a fruitful argument.
Annie’s brother is Ronan O’Malley, the head of the Irish mafia here in Boston—and someone that I’ve recently been engaged in tense discussions with over territory.
I wonder, as I sit there listening to Kazimir run through the list of information about this woman, how much she really knows about her friend’s dealings and connections?
Does she know Annie is an Irish mafia princess?
That she uses her extensive financial knowledge to launder money for her family?
That Annie’s husband is the Italian don?
Or is Mara Winslow in the dark about her friend, the family she comes from, and her friend’s husband’s work?
"How close are they?" I ask. "Her and Annie O'Malley."
“Best friends from college, from what I dug up on social media.” Kazimir pauses.
“But there’s no sign of her ever attending any formal events associated with the family.
She wasn’t at Annie and Elio’s wedding, either, nor was she at Annie’s former sister-in-law’s funeral.
In fact, any time she visits Boston, any evidence of the trip appears to keep her well away from the family. ”
“Hmm.” I tap my fingers against the desk. It sounds very much to me as if Annie is keeping Mara out of the loop, as it were. Keeping an ordinary friendship separate from the drama and danger of the mafia world.