Chapter 17 The Brother #2
Dmitri staggered. Hit the reception desk.
His hand going to his face. Blood pouring between his fingers.
The navy Tom Ford suit catching it. Red on navy.
The color of a man who had just been hit by his older brother in front of eight witnesses and hadn't seen it coming because men like Dmitri never see it coming. They're too busy smiling.
The receptionist gasped. The security guards stepped forward. Then stopped. Because the man who had thrown the punch was the man who signed their paychecks and the man on the floor was bleeding and the math of loyalty in a Bratva building is simple: you protect the man who owns the marble.
Nobody moved.
Dmitri looked up at me. Blood running down his chin. Into his mouth. Staining his teeth red. And the son of a bitch smiled.
That smile. The smile that doesn't belong on a face that's bleeding. The smile of a man who wanted to be hit because the hitting proves something. The hitting means the brother with the corner office and the big desk and the new translator is rattled. Is compromised. Is soft.
"Ну вот," Dmitri said. Blood bubbling at his lips. "Вот и он. Настоящий Виктор Котов." There he is. The real Viktor Kotov. He spat blood on my marble floor. "Бьёт собственного брата из-за бабы." Hitting his own brother over a woman.
I stepped closer. My shoe an inch from the blood puddle spreading across the white floor. I crouched. Brought my face level with his. Close enough to smell him. Bergamot. Credit cards. The desperation of a man who knows he's second-best and has stopped trying to pretend otherwise.
"Ты не смотришь на неё," I said. Quiet. The voice that lowers.
Each word laid down with the precision of a brick in a wall I was building between my brother and the woman standing ten feet behind me.
"Ты не произносишь её имя. Ты не помнишь, что она дышит.
" You don't look at her. You don't say her name. You don't remember she breathes.
Dmitri laughed. The laugh of a man with a broken nose and blood in his teeth who has just found the one thing in the room he can still use as a weapon.
"Или что? Ты убьёшь меня? Собственного брата?" Or what? You'll kill me? Your own brother?
"I won't kill you, Dmitri. Killing you would be a kindness I haven't earned.
I'll take everything you have. The accounts.
The galleries. The shell companies in Liechtenstein you think I don't know about.
I'll strip your name from every ledger in the Bratva until the word Kotov means me and only me.
You'll still be alive. You'll just be nothing.
And nothing is worse than dead for a man like you.
Men like you need to matter. Men like you would rather bleed on a lobby floor than be ignored.
" I stood up. Looked down at him. "I'm going to ignore you, Dmitri. After today, you don't exist."
Dmitri pushed himself up. Using the reception desk.
Leaving blood on the white surface. The receptionist was frozen.
The security guards were statues. The four employees had stopped walking and were standing at the elevator bank, watching the way people watch car accidents. Unable to look away. Unable to help.
Dmitri straightened his jacket. Wiped his nose with the back of his hand. Looked at the blood on his skin. Then looked at Maeve. One more time. The look of a man who knows he's lost the room but wants the last word the way dying men want water.
"Совет не одобрит этого, Виктор," he said.
The Council won't like this. "Ты ведёшь себя точно так, как Михаил говорил.
Мягкий. Ослеплённый. Управляемый бабой, которая даже не знает, во что она ввязалась.
" You're acting exactly the way Mikhail said.
Soft. Blinded. Controlled by a woman who doesn't even know what she's involved in.
"Mikhail can say whatever he likes. Mikhail is an old man with shaking hands who has survived three kings by whispering behind their backs.
You want to align yourself with that? Go ahead.
Stand behind a man whose power comes from gossip and patience.
See how far it carries you when the patience runs out. "
Dmitri's smile faltered. A crack in the performance. He assumed the brother with the desk was too busy running the empire to notice the termites in the wood. He was wrong. He was always wrong.
"Уходи," I said. Leave. "Walk out the same door you walked in.
Get in whatever car brought you here. Drive to whatever gallery or shell company or lawyer's office you're pretending is a career.
Don't come back. Don't call. Don't text.
Don't send photographs to my phone at two in the afternoon like a man who can't find a better use for his time than harassing sleeping women. "
Dmitri's eyes flickered. The photographs.
He hadn't expected me to say it out loud.
Hadn't expected the thing he did in the dark to be named in the light, in a lobby, in front of witnesses who were hearing for the first time that the younger Kotov brother had a hobby that involved cameras and unconscious women.
"Я отправил их, потому что ты должен был знать, что именно ты унаследовал," Dmitri said.
Lower now. The charm gone. The mask off.
The flat, cold man underneath, the one Maeve had lived with for two years, the one who grabbed throats and leaked photographs and called women leftovers.
I sent them because you deserved to know what you inherited.
"I didn't inherit her. I chose her. You threw her away. There's a difference. You'll spend the rest of your life learning it."
He looked at me. Blood drying on his chin.
The navy suit ruined. The Tom Ford stained with the evidence of his own stupidity.
He looked the way weak men look when they've lost and know it and can't stop performing long enough to leave with dignity.
They look like they're already planning the next move.
Already calculating the revenge. Already composing the text message or the phone call or the whispered conversation with Mikhail Kozlov that will turn today's defeat into tomorrow's strategy.
"Это ещё не конец," he said. This isn't over.
"For you it is."
He walked to the door. The revolving glass. The same door he'd walked through ten minutes ago with a smile and a Tom Ford suit and the belief that charm could get him into any building in the world.
He pushed through it. The door revolved. He disappeared into the November street. Gone.
I stood in the lobby. Eight witnesses. Blood on the marble. Blood on my knuckles. The receptionist looking at me with the wide eyes of a woman who had just watched her employer break his brother's nose in the lobby and was recalculating everything she thought she knew about corporate hierarchy.
I turned.
Maeve was still standing where she'd been.
Ten feet from the elevator. Her fists still clenched.
Her face still white. But the glassy stare was gone.
In its place, something I'd seen once before.
In the bakery. After the slap. After the kiss on her palm.
The look of a woman who has just watched a man do something violent on her behalf and is trying to decide whether the violence makes her safer or more afraid.
"Come upstairs," I said.
She didn't move.
"Maeve."
"You broke his nose."
"Yes."
"In front of everyone."
"Yes."
"He'll use it against you."
"He'll try."
She looked at the blood on the floor. The red on the white marble. The evidence of what Viktor Kotov was willing to do in a public lobby at ten in the morning over a word that meant my little fat one.
"You didn't have to do that," she said.
"Yes I did."
She looked at me. Green eyes on grey. The woman who had been frozen ten seconds ago, thawing. The ice cracking. The color returning to her face in stages.
She walked past me. Toward the elevator. Her shoulder brushing my arm the way it had brushed my hand the night I stood at her desk in the dark. A touch that could have been accidental. A touch that was everything.
She pressed the button. The doors opened. She stepped inside. Turned. Looked at me.
"Viktor," she said.
"Maeve."
"Thank you."
Two words. Quiet. Simple. The most dangerous thing she'd said to me since I don't hate you in the bakery. Because thank you means something shifted. Thank you means the woman who hated being protected just accepted the protection. Thank you means the cage is starting to look like something else.
The doors closed.
I stood in the lobby. Alone with the blood and the marble and the receptionist who would never look at me the same way.
I pulled out my phone. Called Pavel.
"Уберите кровь из вестибюля," I said. Clean up the blood in the lobby.
"Его или вашу?" His or yours?
"Обе." Both.
I hung up. Flexed my taped hand. The knuckles screaming. The pain exquisite. The kind of pain that reminds you what your body is for when your mind has forgotten.
Dmitri would go to Mikhail. Mikhail would bring it to the Council. The Council would demand answers. The machine was turning. The gears grinding. The empire moving toward a decision that would require me to choose between the throne and the woman.
Let it turn.
Let them demand.
Let the whole Bratva sit at their round table and vote on whether Viktor Kotov's translator is worth the blood on his lobby floor.
She was worth it.
She was worth all of it.
The marble would clean. The knuckles would heal. The suit would be replaced.
But the sound of Dmitri's nose breaking under my fist? The spray of blood on white stone? The look on his face when he realized that the brother with the corner office would burn the building down before he let anyone call her mon petit gros again?
That was forever.