Vadim
The dull sound of music penetrated through to the room. Bogdan stood outside with Tikhon further down the hallway, armed and ready. I closed the door behind me. Tomorrow I would be officially engaged, and tonight I needed to blow off some steam.
She stood up from the leather couch and opened her mouth.
I raised a hand, stopping her.
“You’re not here to speak,” I snapped, motioning to the floor.
She dropped to her knees, her dark eyes wide, her painted lips parted.
I circled around her before stopping in front of her.
When she didn’t move, I smiled.
“You may proceed.”
After a small shuddering breath, she unzipped my trousers. She was a well-trained whore who had my cock out in seconds. Her lips and hands worked in unison. I sighed when she cupped my balls and dragged her lips down my hardening length, smearing red lipstick as she sucked.
She didn’t manage to go down very far once I was fully erect.
“Let me help you with that,” I murmured, gripping her head and tilting it up as she braced herself.
I felt her open wider.
That’s when I pushed deeper, feeling her tongue beneath my cock. She blinked as I gripped her dark hair and forged a path past her throat. Her lips sealed around me as she swallowed, her eyes tearing up, but I didn’t stop.
I pulled her head down, thrusting deeper until she gagged. A rhythm I kept up until no more rouge remained on her lips. Her hot wet mouth was the perfect tight hole I needed tonight.
I gathered her hair behind her head and began to pump my hips.
Slow, then fast.
Watching them struggle was half the pleasure.
Her hands moved to my thighs as she held on.
I rocked my hips faster, pumping in and out of her throat while holding her in place. I growled when my trousers smacked her face.
“Yeah, hold my cock in your throat,” I snarled, pressing myself against her face until her throat constricted around me.
I closed my eyes, thinking of the blonde-haired woman who was about to become my fiancée.
Iskra Kozlova.
I pulled back, allowing the woman to take a breath before I guided my cock back into her waiting mouth. There was no holding back.
I fucked her throat, long and hard, until black mascara ran down her cheeks, pulling her back onto me while she drooled down my balls.
Anger and lust made me use her harder than usual.
Garbled sounds escaped her as I swung my hips with vicious precision. My fist tightened in her hair as I felt my balls tighten. The dull slaps of her face against my trousers increased until I groaned and thrust hard enough for my balls to hit her chin.
“Swallow, whore,” I growled, just as the first jet of come spurted down her throat.
My fingers closed around her skull as I held her against me, ensuring she took every drop. Her muffled grunts and moans only extended my pleasure as my cock jerked one final time.
With a sigh, I pulled back, ignoring the mess between us.
I reached for my wallet and tossed her some notes before zipping myself up.
“Get out,” I said, walking to the cabinet to pour a drink.
By the time I’d poured it, she was gone.
Just the way I liked it.
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I had been working through the documents for the better part of an hour. Ruslan and Valentin had sent through their respective reports—operational intelligence layered against the financial ledgers, cross-referenced with the upcoming movements scheduled along the White Sea routes.
I worked through them methodically, pulling threads where the numbers didn’t sit flush against the intelligence picture. There were discrepancies. There always were in a transition period. Men tested new leadership in small ways before they tested it in larger ones.
The spy report sat separately. No names on the document itself—that was protocol. Only Ruslan and I knew who they were, and it would stay that way. Knowledge distributed too widely had a habit of getting people killed.
I heard laughter in the corridor before the knock came.
Konstantin didn’t wait for an answer.
He pushed the door open with Ruslan and Valentin close behind him, bringing cold air and the smell of a Chernograd night in with them.
Ruslan wore his usual dark suit, precise as ever.
Valentin beside him in a lighter grey—both of them a few years my senior, both of them men I had learned from in ways I would never say aloud.
My brother, by contrast, had come straight from work. Dark leather jacket, and beneath it when he shrugged it off and tossed it over the nearest chair—a white T-shirt with a fine spray of blood across the front, rust-dark at the edges and still damp at the centre.
He caught me looking.
“What?” Konstantin said, already moving to the cabinet and reaching for the bottle. “I just came off a job. Apparently some men need convincing that debts are not optional.” He pulled the stopper and poured without measuring. “I made my point.”
“You made a mess,” I said. “Internal bleeding keeps the dry cleaning bill down.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” He handed glasses to Ruslan and Valentin before bringing one to me. “Besides. It’s not my only shirt. I didn't get a chance to change.”
Ruslan turned the glass in his hand and said nothing, which was how I knew he was amused.
I glanced at him.
Her brother had the same name. Leonid Kozlov’s boy. Seventeen years old with his voice still finding its register. The coincidence was not lost on me.
“What have I done?” Ruslan asked, reading my expression with the ease of a man who had been doing it for years.
“Nothing yet.” I took a sip. “You share a name with the Kozlov boy. My future wife’s brother.”
“Ah.” Konstantin dropped into the chair across from me, one ankle resting on his knee, glass balanced on the armrest. “The Pakhan’s new family. Congratulations, Ruslan. You’re practically nobility.”
“I’m well known and revered throughout Chernograd,” Ruslan said, without missing a beat. “No doubt Leonid had me in mind when he named the boy.”
“Yes, I’m certain that’s exactly what he was thinking,” I said.
Valentin had been quiet, turning his glass slowly, his dark eyes moving between us with the measured attention he brought to everything—ledgers, loyalty, risk. He rubbed his jaw.
“Perhaps I should consider marriage myself,” he said. “Before someone decides the man who knows where the money is buried is a liability.”
It wasn’t entirely a joke. Valentin held the full picture of the obshchak—the operational reserves cycling through the shipping front on the port road, the property holdings across Chernograd, and the deeper vault that only the four of us in this room could account for.
That knowledge made him invaluable. It also made him a target, and he was precise enough to know it.
We all kept our byki close. Two bodyguards at a time, more when the situation required. It was not paranoia. It was arithmetic.
“Why would you want a headache?” Ruslan said, setting his glass down.
“Why indeed,” Konstantin said, his gaze sliding to me with the ease of a man who knew he was being pointed. “Why would any man in his right mind want that?”
I said nothing.
I let it sit.
The night would vanish and the cold reality of tomorrow loomed.
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The cavalcade of cars descended on the quiet street like a deliberate occupation.
An average neighbourhood by Chernograd standards—modest detached houses, salted pavements, net curtains that had already begun to twitch.
The kind of street where nothing of consequence was supposed to happen.
The kind of street that would be talking about today for years.
My father travelled with my uncle. Ruslan and Konstantin followed in a separate car. Tikhon parked in front of the house with the precision of a man who understood that even parking was a statement.
The front door opened before we had fully stopped. People spilled out onto the step as though they had been waiting behind it—which they had. The Kozlovs, arranged like a tableau. Presenting themselves.
I watched Konstantin tug at the collar of his formal shirt through the window and felt a grim satisfaction. He was as uncomfortable as I was.
Tikhon opened my door.
“Pakhan.” Bogdan’s voice was low. He held out the red velvet box.
I took it, turned it once in my hand, and slipped it into my breast pocket.
The ring. Five carats of pristine yellow diamond, another carat of smaller white stones encircling the setting.
An old piece—Valentin had sourced it from a private collection, the kind of ring that had a history attached to it that no one would be sharing today.
I had left my mark on it regardless. The girl would understand what she was the moment it touched her finger.
Property. Protected, provided for, and accounted for. Mine.
I stepped out of the car. Polished black shoes on grey pavement.
The winter sun was sharp and pale, the kind of brightness that gave no warmth, and the last of the seasonal ice was still dissolving in the gutters and along the garden walls.
The street smelled of cold air and wood smoke and somewhere, something being cooked for guests who hadn’t been invited so much as summoned.
Ruslan and Konstantin fell into step beside me. My eyes dropped briefly to the file Ruslan carried at his side.
“Airtight,” he said, without being asked.
I nodded.
We followed my father and uncle down the garden path.
I took them in as we approached. Leonid Kozlov, squared up and proud in a way that didn’t quite conceal the relief underneath it.
The mother beside him—soft, warm, her smile genuine in the way that only people who had learned not to fight tended to be.
The older sister and her husband standing slightly apart, a gap between them that suggested the marriage was exactly what rumour suggested.
And then her.
Her blue eyes found me before I had finished scanning the group and they didn’t let go.
Not the eyes of a woman pleased to see me.
She was smiling—lips curved in something that passed for welcome—but her eyes were flat and cold and entirely without performance.
She wasn’t afraid, or she was afraid and had decided not to show it, which amounted to the same thing from where I was standing.
I held her gaze for a moment longer than necessary.
I wondered what she would be. Her mother’s softness or something harder underneath. Cold and unyielding or worn down to compliance in time.
It didn’t matter in the end.
Her function was already decided.
“The sister looks like she wants to sit on you,” Konstantin murmured at my shoulder.
“Have you seen what she’s married to?” Ruslan returned, just as quietly.
I said nothing and stepped into the warmth of the house.
The younger siblings were nowhere to be seen.
Leonid moved forward and took my hand, bowing to press his forehead against it.
“Thank you for choosing my daughter, Pakhan. This is a great honour you have bestowed upon my house,” he said, his grip tightening.
I glanced past him to my father.
Watched the slow smile appear.
The old man was enjoying this. Every second of it—the bowing, the gratitude, the theatre of a man surrendering his daughter with both hands and calling it an honour.
This was what he had wanted. Not just the heir.
The performance of legacy. Proof that the Dragunov name still commanded rooms without raising its voice.
I let Leonid hold my hand a moment longer than I wanted to.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
He released me and stepped back, and I moved into the house without waiting to be led. My eyes swept the hallway once—coats on hooks, icons on the wall, the smell of a meal prepared too carefully for the occasion. Everything modest, deliberate and common.
I had work waiting.
I intended to make this quick.