22. Artem
Artem
The Bratva is restless.
I feel it the way you feel a change in weather before it arrives, pressure dropping, something in the air that makes the body alert before the mind catches up.
Three raids in two weeks. All by feds, and while I was prepared for this, the uptick makes me nervous. The FBI doesn't move that cleanly unless someone is feeding them information. I know that better than anyone, which means there is a mole, or worse, a leak.
Either way, the FBI is getting information I don't want them to know.
I think about this on the drive to the meeting. I think about this instead of thinking about the way my apartment smelled this morning, and how it has smelled every morning since Katya moved back in. It's something floral and warm that makes me think of soft skin and arched backs.
It's distracting. Everything about her is, and I can't afford another distraction. It's why I allowed her so much space after we consummated the marriage. Because I needed to get my head clear.
Unfortunately, the longer she was away from me, the more I itched for her, which was messing with the business. So instead, I forced her back home, so that I could focus on Viktor and the Bratva.
Bratva business is why I am walking into a meeting with Adrian Nero and Saint Marini, the two heads of the largest Italian families in the city.
I don't care for either man, but from what Pyotr has told me, Adrian is under investigation and Saint has lost three shipments to the FBI. I suspect the only reason none of us are in jail is because we've been smart enough not to have our names attached to anything illegal.
But they are closing in, and I can't have that. Not because I particularly care about the Bratva, but because it would be detrimental to my plan. And I'm too close to allow that to happen.
"There are two snipers on the roof," Pyotr tells me in Russian as we arrive at the Marini warehouse.
"They are trying to scare us."
Pyotr snorts. "They'll have to try harder."
I nod at the guards. One steps in our path. "Your man needs to stay out here."
Pyotr nods and takes a step back. We both know that I do not need his protection. He's here for show more than anything, though I always appreciate having him at my back.
"And you need to give up your weapons."
I consider shooting the man, just for the sake of starting this meeting quicker, but I know I cannot. Adrian and Saint are not Russian. They do not do business the same way. And I can't afford a war right now.
I'm already fighting with my wife. No need to add enemies to my roster.
So instead, I pull my gun and hand it over.
It's alright. I have another, one they won't find.
I walk into the warehouse alone, not surprised to see Adrian and Saint already at the table. I knew they would be here before me. Like most things, I planned it that way.
"Orlov." Adrian greets.
"Nice of you to join us," Saint snaps. He glances at his watch. "Thirty minutes late."
"I had business to attend to." I take a seat, not taking the bait. "And as you both know, I didn't call this meeting."
Adrian had.
"The FBI is on our ass," Saint mutters. "Several raids on all of us. That's not standard."
Adrian's jaw tightens. He's younger than me, not by much, but he looks it. Though fatherhood and having to take over the family has added a bit of gray to his hair. "The FBI has been building something for months. The raids are theater. They're sending a message."
"The message is that they have someone inside," I say, leaning back in my chair. "Perhaps multiple people, since they have gotten to all three of us."
Silence.
Saint's eyes move to mine. Something shifts in them, not surprise, but confirmation. He's been thinking the same thing. "None of our businesses overlap."
"Agreed."
He nods, and I continue. "Three raids. Clean entry points each time. No mistakes, no collateral sweeps. They knew exactly where to look." I fold my hands. "That's not surveillance. That's intelligence."
"Could be technical," Adrian says. "Phones, wire?—"
"I sweep my operations every other day." I look at him, brow raised in challenge. "Do you?"
He doesn't answer, which is its own answer.
Saint drums his fingers once against the table and stops. "If there's a mole," he says carefully, "it's someone with access across operations. Not just one family. Three separate people wouldn't be able to triangulate like this."
"Agreed."
"That narrows it."
"Considerably."
The word sits between us. We all understand what it means and none of us say it out loud, because saying it out loud means committing to a course of action that will cost someone their life, and in a room with three men who all have reason to distrust the others, nobody wants to be first.
"There's no one that operates across all the families," Saint says.
This makes me laugh. "Please do not waste my time, Marini."
His eyes narrow. "Excuse me?"
"Your wife?—"
He slams his hands on the table, jumping to his feet. "How fucking?—"
Adrian puts a hand on his chest. "Relax," he orders.
I'm surprised to see Saint listening, especially considering that Adrian is treating him like an underling instead of the head of his own outfit. Not that I mind. Saint is hotheaded, and nothing sets him off quicker than mentioning his wife.
"Gemma is not the mole. She has no information about my operations?—"
This makes my brow raise in challenge because I know that Gemma and Saint enjoyed using her security knowledge to do exactly the type of things that the FBI are currently undertaking, only that time it was to her brother.
"And she doesn't know shit about yours unless you are going to tell me that a graduate student is somehow privy to the inner workings of the Russian Bratva."
I scoff. "You and I both know that Gemma is hardly just a graduate student. No need to insult the intelligence of your wife that way."
Saint glares, and I know he wants nothing more than to shoot me.
"Between all of us, the FBI is clearly sniffing around, and I believe you're right. There's a mole, and they are deep. We need to share information," Adrian says. "We need a truce."
I consider this. A truce with men I don't trust makes me uneasy, but I have enough problems and I'm not interested in adding the FBI to that list.
"Agreed," I say. "But I want something."
Saint curses under his breath. "Of fucking course." He shakes his head. "You can't do anything for free, can you?"
"I don't do favors for people who have not earned them."
Adrian sits stoically, which I find impressive. A year ago, he too would have been cursing me. He's become much more measured since. I suppose fatherhood does that.
"I want any information you have on Popov's shipments."
This stops Saint, and he chuckles. "Grandpa-in-law not cooperating?"
"I'm trying to gain more insight into Alexei's operations. He moved product through your docks, and I want to know what that was." It's the one hole in this whole thing, and I don't like it.
"Why don't you ask your wife?"
"Unlike your wife, mine keeps her nose out of my business."
Saint glowers, but Adrian has been silent. I notice his eyes are on my hands.
I freeze. I'd been turning my wedding ring with my thumb, slow, absent rotation, the way you worry a loose button without realizing. I don't know how long I've been doing it. I go still.
Adrian sees it, and a slow smile moves across his face, the kind that doesn't reach his eyes.
"Married life agreeing with you, Orlov?"
I ignore him. This is his attempt to needle me.
"Only asking," he says, unbothered. "Wouldn't be the first man to fall for his wife." He picks up his glass, tips it in my direction. "Stranger things have happened."
I say nothing. I fold my hands on the table, still. "Am I getting that information, or not."
Adrian glances at Saint, who curses again but nods. "I'll make a call."
"Then let's discuss—" I turn my focus back to business, ignoring the way my ring sits warmly against my finger.
My phone rings forty minutes later as I am making my way back to my offices.
It's Dmitri, Katya's detail.
I answer before the second ring. "Where?"
"She's gone, sir. Slipped out the side entrance twenty minutes ago. We have the last GPS ping from her phone, Riverside Park, about six blocks?—"
Pyotr meets my eyes in the mirror and is already turning the car around.
I find her on a bench near the water.
She's sitting with her face tipped up toward the December sky, eyes closed, hands loose in her lap. She looks like she belongs in a painting. Her pale cheeks are flushed from the cold wind and sun.
When she hears me coming, my shoes crunching on dead leaves, her eyes snap open. When she spots me, something moves across her face, defiance first, and then she braces herself.
I sit down beside her, my jaw clenched.
"Let's go, Katya."
"No."
"Katya." There's a warning in my tone.
"I said no." She turns to look at me fully, and her eyes are bright with anger. "I know you love controlling everything about my life, but I took a walk. I needed air."
"You lost your detail."
"I didn't lose them, I left them." She stands, and I stand with her, and for a moment we are very close in the cold air. "There's a difference."
"There isn't." I take her arm, not hard enough to leave bruises, just hard enough so she understands my point. "We're going home."
She pulls against my grip. "How did you even find me so fast?"
I say nothing, and I feel her go still.
I can see the exact moment it arrives, the way her expression shifts from anger into something colder and more calculating.
"My phone," she says, scrambling to grab it from her coat pocket.
I say nothing.
"You're tracking my phone." Not a question. Her voice has dropped into something quiet and dangerous. "You've been tracking my phone."
"Yes." I'm not going to deny it.
She stares at me, and I expect more anger, but then she laughs, a short, disbelieving sound that has nothing warm in it.
"Of course you are. Of course." She pulls her arm free, and I let her, because we are in public.
"Is there anything in my life that you haven't decided to manage? My role, my schedule, my location?—"
"Your safety."
"I don't need?—"
"You are married to the head of the Bratva." The words come out harder than I intend them. Harder and louder. A woman walking a dog ten meters away glances over. I don't care. "You think that comes without consequence? You think the men who want to put me in the ground won't use you to do it?"
"Then maybe you should have thought about that before you decided to marry me." Her voice cracks on the last word, not with grief but with fury. "You did this. You made this. And now you're going to stand there and tell me I can't walk six blocks without a handler?"
"Yes." Simple. True. I want to point out that she was born a target, but I hold my tongue. "Your grandfather might have been content to allow you to do whatever you wanted, but I'm not."
"Fuck you!"
"Stop being a child."
She moves surprisingly quickly, and I feel her nails before I process her action.
Four lines of fire across my left cheek.
I go absolutely still.
She does as well. Her eyes are wide, and her hand, still raised, is shaking.
I reach up slowly. Touch my own face. Look at the red on my fingertips.
"You've got claws, little princess."
She shakes as I walk toward her, but she doesn't back down.
My voice comes out low. Almost quiet. She hears what's underneath it because she's perceptive and she's watching me very carefully, and I watch her understand it, watch her face change as the understanding arrives.
The violence doesn't frighten her. I can see that plainly.
What frightens her is my response to it.
She takes a step back. I let her.
"Come," I say. "We're going home."
This time, she listens.
We don't exchange a single word, and when we return home, we both retreat to our corners. Her to her room, and me to mine.
I clean the scratches that are already starting to scab over, and then I leave an hour later.
The cemetery is forty minutes outside the city. I've made this drive so many times I don't need to think about it. My hands know the turns. My body knows the parking lot, the gravel path, the slope of the hill where her body is resting.
Irina Orlova. Beloved daughter. Beloved sister.
The stone is clean. I pay someone to clean it weekly. I lay a large bouquet of white dahlias on her grave and stand there, staring, for a long time.
I don't speak. I never speak here. Words feel wrong, too small, the wrong vessel for what I carry when I come to this place. I just look at her name carved into the granite and I let myself feel the full weight of it.
She was too young. Too far from home. She died in a city that didn't know her name, surrounded by people who saw her as a means to an end, and no one who loved her made it in time.
No one who loved her made it in time.
The winter wind comes off the hill, and I don't move against it. The cold grounds me. Reminds me what I'm made of, what I've been built into over the years since I stood in a hospital corridor in this same city and was told there was nothing to be done.
I think about what I'm doing. I think about Viktor Popov, about the long patience of revenge, about the pieces I've moved into position over three years. I think about the endgame, still months away, still requiring precision and control and absolute clarity of purpose.
I think about a woman sitting on a bench in the cold with her face tipped up to the sky.
I think about four lines of fire across my cheek.
I reach up and touch them again. They'll scar, maybe. Probably not. But I'll feel them for days.
I look at Irina's name.
This is why. This has always been why. Everything else is noise — the Bratva, the FBI, the ring I keep turning on my finger like a man who has forgotten what his hands are supposed to be doing. Noise. Distraction. She is why. She was always why.
I am not a man who falls for his wife.
I am a man who keeps promises to the dead.
I stay until the cold gets into my bones. Then I get up, brush the grave dirt from my knees, and I drive home.
She's left the guest room door open.
I stand in the hallway and look at the strip of light under it for a long moment.
Then I go to my room, and I close my own door, and I lie in the dark and I stare at the ceiling and I think about nothing at all.
I am very good at thinking about what I choose to think about.
Tonight, it doesn't work.