12. Alexei
Fyodor’s Rules #15 - Understand the importance of timing.
Whoever that woman was, she had completely wrecked our night. She had been all my brothers had talked about since they had seen her. Sure, she was pretty, all that pale skin just begging for the kiss of a knife, but I wasn’t convinced she was worth losing our focus.
Nikolai would say that he had abandoned nothing, that he had shaken off his shock at Lukas talking to someone, pulled himself together and done what he had gone there to do. But seeing as we left the ball with zero betrothals or him even having discussed it, I’m not so convinced. He made some business deals and finalized matters a year in the making, but after all his talk about how we needed to get married, here we were, just as single as we had begun.
If I knew who that woman was, I would send her something nice. An eyeball maybe.
Lukas had been intent on talking about her the entire drive home. “Who smells of nothing? She must be hiding something. And I didn’t see her come in or leave with anyone either. Did you see her talk to anyone?”
Everyone distractedly shook their head at him, clearly lost in their own thoughts. Pasha had a business card in his hand, which he flicked over repeatedly between his fingers, making the black rectangle appear and vanish. I looked at it curiously, wondering who he had gotten it from. As soon as he noticed my eyes on him, he tucked it back away in his jacket, out of my sight.
Huh, Pasha was hiding things from me. That was a fresh development.
Sitting behind Lukas, I could see the tension in his shoulders, the rigidity to his spine. He usually only looked this way before a hunt. When we had asked him what the mystery woman had said to him, he just growled. His Wild Hunt nature was clearly riding him hard, and I wasn’t sure exactly how we were going to help him move past it, but I wasn’t about to offer to let him chase me down. I had made that mistake once, and I still had a couple of scars from the experience.
What we needed was a lead as to exactly who in the Bratva was trying to fuck us over. It wouldn’t be all of them, they weren’t stupid enough to make a united decision to come against us. Especially when there had been no inciting incident.
It was looking more and more like I needed to pay my sisters a visit, and that was not something I was looking forward to at all. They may have been my blood, but the daughters of the Baba Yaga had made it clear just how little they thought of me. Of course, it was my fault, choosing to be born with a penis. But if anyone knew what was happening within the Bratva, of an attack being planned against us, it would be my sisters. Nothing happened they did not know about. In fact, it had been my sisters that had warned us about the price on all our heads. A price that Yana and Fyodor had paid.
“So, do we have much to discuss when we get home? Or are we all just going to talk about the mystery woman some more? I just want to know exactly what strength of drinks I should be pouring.”
Was I poking at the bears that were Lukas and Nikolai? Yes. But I didn’t feel guilty at all. It wasn’t often I got to tease them about a woman. Nikolai would say he was too busy for a relationship, even though he was trying to marry us off. Maybe that was the reason he was leaning into the idea of an arranged marriage so hard; it took a lot of the effort and guesswork out of things, as well as a lot of the risk. He didn’t have to worry about charming the girl or taking the time to date her, if she was from one of the families, she would know what was expected of her. It sounded terrible, to be honest.
“I wasn’t the one who spent the entire night standing on a staircase. What exactly do you have to share?” Nikolai’s sarcasm was on point, though he was clearly still feeling off balance by this whole thing.
I hoped he had let no one else see how much this woman bothered him, or we were going to have people trying to use her as a weakness against us when we didn’t even know her name.
Like we weren’t getting fucked enough already.
“I was on the staircase listening to conversations and watching movements. The Armenians and the Irish are organizing a few more marriages and some business dealings. Fiorenza still seems to pin most of her hopes of marrying her granddaughter to you, no matter what the girl has to say about it. She’s pretty though, if too slender and flighty for my tastes.”
I didn’t miss the curl of Nikolai’s lip as I spoke, and the hint of fang he flashed. It was good to know that the thought of a woman being forced into marriage with him didn’t sit well with him either, and hopefully not just because it would mean he couldn’t use her as a snack.
Any further conversation was going to have to wait a few minutes, as Lukas was pulling into the garage. It was probably for the best, cars weren’t the best place for a conversation. We couldn’t look at each other, and once things devolved into a fight, as they often did, the small space made for a death trap.
I was the first one out and held the lift for the others. Sure, I could have been petty and gone up on my own, but there had been enough strife between us tonight. We needed to work together, but it had been so long since we’d needed to actually collaborate. For the last few years, we had been working around each other. Each one of us stuck to our specialty, doing what was needed to benefit the whole family, but not truly interacting. Not the way we used to when we were younger.
The ride up in the elevator was silent but wrought with tension. Lukas was almost vibrating with anger, he needed an outlet, but I didn’t know how to give it to him. That was always Pasha’s thing, but he was distracted; his hand constantly in his pocket, moving around like he was playing with himself. And Nikolai was just standing still as a statue.
Nobody’s body language shifted as we all took up our places in the living room. Usually, we held discussions like this in Nikolai’s office, but he seemed to have realized, much as I had, that a confined space was probably not the best idea right now. Lukas took up a vigil by the window, and both of his hounds appeared at his side, as though summoned by his anger. Pasha and Nikolai both sprawled out in seats as though exhausted.
This was a conversation that was going to need alcohol—a lot of alcohol. I didn’t bother with glasses, I just picked up the bottles. Bourbon for myself, and a second for Lukas. Vodka for Nikolai, and a bottle of ?uic? for Pasha. I didn’t know how he drank the stuff—it was too sweet for my taste—but when he got all quiet and pensive, I knew he craved things that reminded him of home. Honestly, I was surprised he was even speaking English right now; okay, I was more surprised he was barely speaking.
Bottles distributed, I sat on the couch that had one of my knitting bags resting on the end. Tugging it onto my lap as I opened the bottle of bourbon, I tossed the lid away, I wouldn’t be needing it again. The familiar feeling of the metal needles in my hand went a long way toward soothing the nervous energy thrumming in my veins. I could feel the tension in the air, like lightning about to strike, and we were all holding our breath, waiting for it and afraid to do anything until it hit.
“So, do we want to talk about the woman, or about business?” I let the question hang in the air when it became clear no one else was going to speak. Each of my brothers were just concentrating on their bottle.
“That fucking woman, what the fuck is she hiding? No one fucking smells like nothing.” Count on Lukas to start his ranting immediately. She had gotten under his skin good.
“What did she say to you before she walked away?” Now that question was a good one. You could always count on Nikolai to ask the hard-hitting questions. And that was why he was our family’s public face.
We all focused on Lukas again, and his eyes glinted gold back at us, the two demons curled up at his feet added to his general sense of menace.
“That if she wanted to be chased, she’d be running. But instead, I’d just have to watch her walk away.” I could hear the strain in his voice as he spat the words out through clenched teeth, chasing it down with an unhealthy amount of bourbon to be drunk in only two swallows.
Well fuck, that explained that. Pasha’s loud groan echoed the one I was giving internally. Telling Lukas he couldn’t chase her was like waving a red flag at a bull, and now it was bound to be the only thing he could think about. I had gone on a couple of Lukas’ hunts over the years, mostly to satiate my curiosity, and while I might be considered a monster, Lukas was a pure predator. He would hunt someone, no matter where they went or where they tried to hide.
A Scion of Hermes had stolen something from one of our early shipments, and Lukas had spent four days running them down across realm after realm. Sure, humans were persistent predators, but Lukas took it to a whole new level. Not to mention the time I had let him hunt me for fun. It was the closest I had ever come to fearing for my life.
This woman had painted a target on her back, and I was sure it wouldn’t be long until she was rewarded for that effort.
Looking over at Nikolai, I could see the concern on his face as he watched Lukas. There was nothing to be done now, though. We wouldn’t be able to talk him out of this hunt. Scooting down in my chair slightly, I kicked out one of my legs, tapping Nikolai’s foot with mine to get his attention.
Could I have just called his name? Sure. But these brief moments of minor violence soothed me.
“So, what did you actually get done tonight? Other than a bunch of stalking and staring.” If Nikolai didn’t think I had seen the way he had been following the woman with his eyes, he was sadly mistaken. It was why I took that spot on the stairs, you could see everything from there. Observe who was talking, who disappeared off into darkened corners and bathrooms to fuck, and who went into the private rooms to talk business. I hadn’t just seen him following her, I had also seen him conduct a bunch of business, but it was always better to hear it from him.
“All the new shipments have been cleared to enter the port, and for not too bad a price. I’ve got the building secured for the nightclub that we’ve been talking about opening, it’s two blocks from here.”
Real estate was always useful, and nightclubs were good for laundering money and selling drugs. The music also made them a good place to torture people, so I was looking forward to having a place to work that wasn’t in the basement of a luxury hotel. Nikolai wasn’t done, though.
“Fiorenza’s granddaughter is going to visit for a couple of dates, before we announce our engagement.” Here it was, I thought we had escaped it. I’d have assumed it would have been the first thing he’d mention when we got in the car, but no, he had waited.
Fucking vampires and their fucking flare for the dramatic.
“And what about the rest of us?” I would have thought one of the others would have interrupted, but with my brothers playing mute, the job fell to me. Lukas was still barely holding himself together, using bourbon to fill the cracks. And Pasha was drinking like there were answers at the bottom of his bottle; something we all knew was not true, but I would not ’stop him from trying.
“I put out some feelers. Lukas and Pash have three options each, you only have two. And one of them is Darya.”
“My fucking cousin!” I was gripping the knitting needle in my hand so tightly now that my knuckles were white, the knitting it was holding long forgotten.
My story was a little different from my brothers. They didn’t remember their families, or didn’t interact with them anymore. Why would they? We had all been sold to Fyodor at various points in our childhood. But not me, I knew my family and still saw them from time to time. They just didn’t want me as I was an abomination in their eyes, there were to be no sons of the Baba Yaga. They acted like I had stolen the soul of one of their sisters and had made it their mission to take it back from me. Darya was one of the worst. The reason I had come to Fyodor in the first place was that I had to run away when she had almost killed me. When I turned up bleeding on his doorstep, he had taken me in and paid them to leave me alone. They didn’t want me, so Fyodor took me and cared for me. The indifference they displayed now was preferable to the alternative.
“If you try to marry me off to Darya, I will kill her and then you.”
Nikolai must have realized just how serious I was, because all I got in return was a nod.
Pasha looked between us over the rim of his bottle. “You don’t think it’s them, do you? They are Bratva.”
My cousins and sisters were Bratva, although in name only. They were less hardened criminals, more insane psychopaths that the Bratva set on their enemies. Any excuse to let monsters be monsters.
“If the Grandmother’s Children wanted us dead, they would do it themselves. They wouldn’t be attacking our businesses, they would be attacking us. It would be personal, brutal, and a fucking nightmare.” My sisters were not creatures of subtlety, nor did they let others do their dirty work for them.
“We need to work out who this is. War is the last thing we want right now. We have the nightclub to plan, and I want us focused.” Nikolai looked like he was trying to give us a stirring speech, but his heart wasn’t quite in it.
This fucking woman had him in knots. I needed to find her and cut her heart out. That way I could give it to him, he could eat it, and move the fuck past her.
And Pasha was the one that was going to help me find her.