28. Twenty-Eight
“What the hell am I supposed to do with you three?” Nikita tapped his pen against his desk and eyed the three of us sitting across from him.
I was sitting in the middle in my new suit, which fit like a fucking glove. Fin was right. The old tailor had been ripping me off. The suit had arrived the morning after Fin put a bullet in Kastelani, along with a summons from Nikita.
Apparently, Niko and EJ had received a similar summons because Niko was currently seated on the windowsill, lipping an unlit cigarette, and EJ was sitting stiffly in the seat next to me. The poor kid looked like he’d swallowed a toad and expected to be beaten for it.
Nikita scanned our faces. He didn’t look much happier to be here than EJ, which I didn’t understand. Sure, the operation had gone tits up, but it all worked out in the end.
"You’re sitting there feeling proud of yourself," Nikita said.
I shrugged. "K's dead. The stones are ours. The Greeks are square. Sure, sounds like a win to me."
"Except for all the bodies you left in your wake.”
I lowered my head. “Dev. Tomas. Leonid. Dmitri.” I'd been saying the names all morning so I wouldn't flinch on them now. “I'll notify the families myself. And Dmitri goes into the ground with full honors. You have my word on all of it.”
“And you.” Nikita’s attention moved to EJ, whose spine went straight so suddenly I heard it crack. EJ swallowed.
"Evander Renko," Nikita said. "You walked onto my operation as a cleaner and now you’re claiming a name that means something to me. To this organization. Do you understand the weight of the name Laskin? The blood you’re claiming flows in your veins?"
"It's mine," EJ said.
I closed my eyes. Here we fucking go.
"Sir," he added.
Nikita looked over at Yuri.
My uncle hadn't said a word since I walked in. He sat in the chair by the wall with his hands folded, and let the room come to him. If the blood was real, it was his to claim or deny, and everybody in the room knew it but the kid.
"Evander," Yuri said softly. "Where was your mother working when she knew Sacha?"
"The Foxhole, sir." EJ's jaw was tight. "She was one of Bowen's girls.
She said he came around for a while, back before I was born, and then he stopped coming, and then there was me.
She said he was Russian. Big in the organization.
Name of Laskin." He lifted his chin. "That's all she left me. The name. I'm not giving it back."
Yuri studied him for a long moment. “How old are you, son?”
“Twenty. And a half.”
Nikita sighed and cursed under his breath.
Yuri thought for a long moment while watching my face. “My brother, bless him, was always chasing women. That’s no secret. We all know how he was.”
Niko hummed and nodded. “Casanova, my mum called him.”
I rolled my eyes. “Pop was a fucking manwhore. Just say it.”
"He was," Yuri agreed, mild as ever. "And a man who lives like that leaves pieces of himself all over the world.
Some of them grow up." He looked back at EJ.
"You have his trouble in you. I watched you walk in here ready to fight a room you couldn't win.
" A pause. "That's a Laskin, whether the blood is or not. "
Nikita turned to me, because he and I both knew where this went next.
Niko couldn't vouch for the kid; he'd run another man's organization in another country, and that bought him nothing here.
Yuri wasn't vory and never had been. That left one man in the room with the standing to put his name on a Laskin.
"He's untested," Nikita said. "If he's yours, he's yours all the way. His mistakes are your mistakes. You understand what I'm asking."
I looked at the kid. Half my age and twice as stupid, and he'd taken a pair of pliers to the hand rather than give me up to a man who'd have killed us both anyway. "I'll stand for him."
"Then he's yours," Nikita said. "But he doesn't wear anything he hasn't earned, and he doesn't earn it at twenty.
He works. Under you. You watch him, you answer for him, and when he's old enough, and he's proven, we talk about the rest." He picked the pen back up, which meant we were nearly done.
"Until then he's a Laskin in name. The ink waits. "
"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir." EJ was nodding too much. "I won't let you down. Either of you. I swear it. I'll be the best Laskin you ever—"
"You're the newest Laskin," I said. "Bar's on the floor. Stop talking."
"Right. Yes. Sorry." He shut his mouth, then opened it again. "It's an honor, though. Really."
Nikita gave me a look that said Good luck with this one.
"The stones," Nikita said. "Tell me about the stones."
"Four hundred, give or take. Sewn into the product the way Niko called it." I nodded at my brother on the sill. "K flew in himself to collect. Burned a dozen men doing it, his and mine both. Nobody crosses an ocean and bleeds like that for stones he could have written off."
"No," Nikita agreed. "They weren't his."
"That's what I figured. He as good as said it before he died. He was holding them for somebody bigger." I shrugged. "Whoever that is, they're short four hundred stones now, and the man who was supposed to hand them over is in a field outside Winchester. That's not a loose end that stays quiet."
“Kostya swept the plane and the garage this morning,” Nikita said. “Whatever K brought into my city stays in my city. The inventory lands on your desk tomorrow.”
Nikita turned the pen over once on the blotter. He didn't like loose ends, and this was a bad one, the kind that came back wearing a different face a year down the road.
"Nikolai," he said.
Niko looked up from the windowsill like a cat who’d been sunning himself.
"You found them," Nikita said. "You knew the cut on sight.
You knew what it meant before anyone in this room.
That makes them yours." He set the pen down.
"Find out who K was holding for. Quietly.
You don't move on anyone, you don't spend a stone, you don't so much as breathe near it without coming to me first. You build me a name and a face, and a reason. Understood?"
For once, Niko didn't have anything charming to say. He looked at the cigarette in his hand, then at me, then back at Nikita, and something passed over him that I recognized because I'd worn it myself — a man being handed back a piece of the thing he used to be.
"Understood," he said.
And just like that, my brother had a job, a real one, the first since he'd turned up on my doorstep with his accounts frozen and his tail between his legs. I didn't know whether to be glad for him or worried. With Niko, it was usually both.
"Niko. Take the kid," Nikita waved two fingers toward the door. "Get him fed. He looks like he hasn't eaten since the road, and he's mine to keep alive now, which means he's yours to feed until Aleksi says otherwise."
"I'm always the babysitter," Niko sighed, but he came off the windowsill and clapped EJ on the shoulder.
"Come, mon gars. There is a man named Gregori downstairs who has been waiting in a hallway for an hour, and I have promised him my company.
You'll like him. He's very large and says almost nothing, which, between us, is the best kind of man. "
EJ went pink and got up too fast. He thanked Nikita again on the way out, then thanked me, then thanked Yuri, who hadn't done anything but ask him a question, and then the door shut behind the two of them.
Which left me, my boss, and my uncle, and the one piece of business I'd actually come here to do.
Nikita knew it too. He got up without a word, went to the cabinet on the side wall, and took out the good vodka with the Cyrillic label.
He poured two and carried one to me, then a third, smaller, and set it on the arm of Yuri's chair without being asked. Yuri inclined his head a fraction.
I drank mine because it gave my hands something to do.
"Say it, Aleksi," Nikita said, settling back behind the desk. "You've been carrying it since you walked in. It's making the room feel heavy."
"It's about Fin."
"I know it's about Fin." He almost smiled. "It's been about Fin since the morning you sat in my law office and defended your father to me like a boy. I told you then. I know a selfish bastard in love when I see one."
I turned the empty glass in my hand. Across the room Yuri had gone still and attentive in his quiet way, and I knew whatever I said next I was saying in front of the one man whose opinion I'd never been able to throw off.
"He's not an asset anymore," I said. "I want him off the books. Not a prisoner, not a worker, not a thing the organization gets to pull when it's convenient. He walks free. He's mine, and I want it sanctioned, so no one ever again gets to do to him what Pavel did."
Nikita didn't answer right away. He turned his own glass on the blotter, and I made myself sit in it, waiting, because I'd learned a long time ago that pushing Nikita got you the opposite of what you wanted.
"You think I'd take him from you," he said finally. "After all this."
"I think the organization owns what it owns. I've seen what happens to men who forget that."
"Mm." He drank. "And what do you think the boy gave us, Aleksi, on the desk in this room?
When Warrick took his finger?" He set the glass down.
"That was the price. The organization took its flesh.
I watched it come off, and I'll carry that the rest of my life, same as you will.
The books are square. He paid in full, and he paid more than the debt was worth, and I won't be collecting on it twice. "
The thing in my chest that had been clenched since the elevator let go all at once.
I'd come in here braced for a fight, for a price, for Nikita to name some condition I'd have to swallow.
Instead, he was telling me it was already done.
Had been done for weeks. Fin had bought his own freedom with a finger on this desk, and I'd been too busy keeping him alive to understand it.