Chapter 5
KONSTANTIN
I stand in the center of the hallway, watching the shadows swallow her.
Helena Blackwood runs. Her bare feet make no sound on the polished obsidian floors of my penthouse. She moves fast, fleeing back to the safety of the prison I built for her.
But I notice something.
She does not run with the frantic, stumbling gait of a victim. She runs with purpose, like a soldier retreating to regroup, not a prey animal accepting its death.
I stare at the empty space where she stood a moment ago. The ghost of her perfume still lingers in the cold air.
Most people scream when they hear a finger snap. I’ve broken men twice her size—hardened criminals, cartel lieutenants, men who claim to feel no pain—who vomited at the sound of bone giving way. I’ve seen grown men beg for their mothers before I even picked up a tool.
Helena didn't scream. She didn't faint.
She flinched, yes. The color drained from her face. But she stayed on her feet. She took in the blood, and then she looked at me.
She called me a coward in the car. She called me a monster in the hallway.
I almost laugh.
She has no idea.
A dark, cold satisfaction coils in my gut. Taking the money was business. Taking the company was strategy.
But taking her? That is the knife in Arthur Blackwood’s heart. And I intend to twist it.
I walk slowly toward the open door of the interrogation room.
My mind replays the look on Arthur’s face. The absolute devastation when I told him I was taking his daughter.
That was the moment I truly won. I didn't just want to bankrupt him. Bankruptcy is temporary. Money can be earned again.
I wanted to hollow him out. I wanted to take the one thing he actually loves, the one clean thing in his miserable, whiskey-soaked life, and corrupt it. I want him to wake up every morning in that empty mansion, knowing that his daughter is sleeping under the roof of a monster.
I want him to imagine what I’m doing to her. Let the guilt eat him alive like a cancer until he puts a gun in his own mouth and pulls the trigger.
I’ll burn your world, Arthur, I think. I’ll dismantle your life piece by piece, and I’ll use your own daughter as the hammer.
I step back into the room.
"Boss."
I look down. Alexei is still tied to the chair.
He’s whimpering. His left hand is a ruin.
Lev is standing in the corner, two of our cleaners behind him. They are dressed in white plastic suits, ready to erase the evidence of my work.
"He’s still conscious," Lev notes.
"He stays conscious," I say, my voice flat. "The pain is the message. If he passes out, wake him up."
I walk over to the small steel sink in the corner. I turn on the tap and the water rushes out, icy cold. I examine my hands. A smear of Alexei’s blood, bright red against the crisp white cuff of my shirt.
I scrub it. The water turns pink, swirling down the drain.
I watch the blood vanish, and I feel nothing.
No guilt. No thrill.
This is just work. It’s the necessary maintenance of an empire.
To be the Bratva’s Enforcer is to be a garbage man. I take out the trash so the organization does not rot.
I dry my hands.
I was not born a butcher, I think, watching my reflection in the mirror above the sink.
I was made one.
My hand drifts to my neck. The scar is there, hidden beneath the collar of my shirt.
It starts to itch. It always itches when I spill blood.
It’s a reminder.
Twenty years ago, I wasn't a monster.
I was a Prince.
My father, Viktor Morozov, was the Pakhan—the King of the Bratva. We commanded respect from Moscow to New York. We lived in a palace protected by a private army.
I was supposed to go to university in London. I wanted to learn the business of shipping in a boardroom, wearing a suit that didn't hide scars.
I was supposed to inherit a clean empire.
And I remember her.
It comes back to me in a flash.
A garden party at my father’s estate, months before the end.
Arthur Blackwood was there, laughing, drinking my father’s wine. He shook my father’s hand, a smile hiding the dagger.
They were supposed to be brothers. That is what my father called him. 'My English brother.'
It was a symbiotic relationship. My father, the Russian Wolf, provided the capital and the muscle. Arthur, the respectable British merchant, provided the legitimate ships and the clean flags to move the Bratva’s goods through Europe.
My father made Arthur rich. He treated Arthur like family. He invited him to our table and let him hold his children.
And I remember a little girl running across the lawn. She was about four years old.
Helena.
She was wearing a white lace dress, her hair in ribbons, as she chased a butterfly. She was innocent. Protected. A princess in a castle.
I was thirteen. I watched her from the balcony. I didn't hate her then.
But I hate her now.
Because Arthur Blackwood sold that innocence. He sold the coordinates of our convoy to the Moretti family for a payout. He traded my family’s location for a shipping contract.
My father made the fatal mistake of a King. He forgot that a hungry dog will bite the hand that feeds it if the price is fat.
I don’t pretend my father was a saint. Viktor Morozov was a criminal. He ordered executions. He was a predator who feasted on the weak.
But he had a code. The Vory Code. You don’t betray your own. You don’t touch women and children. You stand by your word, even if it bleeds you.
Arthur Blackwood had no code. He was a civilian who wanted the profits of the wolf without the teeth. And when the Italians offered him a way out, he didn't just leave. He burned the den down with us inside.
I remember that day perfectly. The formation is burned into my nightmares.
The Lead Car: Security. Four men with automatic weapons.
The Middle Car: The Target. My father, my mother, and my little sister, Katya.
The Rear Car: Me.
I was thirteen years old. I had begged to ride with them in the middle car. I wanted to sit with Katya and play cards.
But my father refused. "Bratva protocol, Kostya," he had said, kissing my forehead. "The Heir never travels with the King. If they strike the head, the heart must survive."
It was supposed to be a secure route.
But Arthur didn't stop at selling the coordinates. He sold the formation. He told the Morettis which armored SUV carried my father. He knew my mother and sister were in that car, and he signed their death warrants anyway.
I saw the explosion from fifty yards away. Boom.
The sound hit me first. A physical blow to the chest that knocked the wind out of me.
Even from fifty yards away, inside an armored car, I felt it. A wave of oven-hot air that turned the world orange.
My driver slammed on the brakes. Tires screeched. I was thrown forward against the seatbelt.
Black smoke surged into the gray sky. It smelled of burning rubber, gasoline, and burning meat.
I screamed. I clawed at the door handle, desperate to get out, to run to them. But the security held me back. They locked the doors. They drove me away while I witnessed my life turn to ash out the rear window.
The middle car didn't just catch fire; it disintegrated. My mother and sister died instantly.
My father lingered.
The explosion drove shrapnel into his chest, lodging a piece of jagged steel near his aorta. He survived the transport, but he was shattered. He spent two weeks in a sterile hospital room, hooked up to machines that breathed for him.
I sat by his bed every day, holding his hand.
But the worst day wasn't the pain. It was the visit from the Elders.
They stood at the foot of his hospital bed—old men in expensive suits whom my father had led for decades. They studied his broken body and the tubes. They didn't see a friend. They saw a liability.
"A Pakhan must be strong, Viktor," the eldest had said. "A man who cannot protect his wife cannot protect the organization. You are crippled and weak."
They stripped him of his title and our money. They cast us aside.
My father died three days later. Not from the wounds, but from the shame. He gripped my hand with his dying strength. His eyes burned with a feverish hate.
"Take it back, Kostya," he had rasped, his final breath rattling in his chest. "They think we are weak. Show them. Burn them all. Take everything from Arthur Blackwood. Leave him with ash."
Kostya was my father’s name for me. No one else used it.
At thirteen, they threw me onto the streets.
While Helena Blackwood grew up in that mansion, playing with ponies and going to private schools paid for with my family’s blood, I lived in the slums of St. Petersburg, fighting rats for bread.
I’ve dedicated every second of my life to this moment.
I didn't marry or have children. No vacations or educational pursuits.
I became a weapon and joined the Bratva organization at the bottom and killed my way to the top, one broken finger at a time, fueled by my father's dying wish: "Burn them all, Kostya."
My father knew the truth in his gut. But I needed it in black and white.
A King does not start a war on a whisper. Even a whisper from a man he loved.
I needed proof. Absolute, undeniable proof.
If I were to destroy the Blackwood line, if I were to punish a child for the sins of her father, I needed to know they deserved it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
It took five years to find the paper trail.
I hunted down the Moretti family’s old accountant—a man hiding in a basement in Naples. I broke him.
Three hours in that damp cellar, and he confessed, all but begging to give me the ledger and make it stop.
That day, I saw the transaction with my own eyes.
Date: August 12th. Two days before the explosion.
Amount: Five million dollars.
Recipient: Blackwood Holdings.
Reference: 'Cleanup'.
It was all there, black and white, as requested. A brutal truth labeled cleanup. As if my family were nothing more than dust to be swept into a bin.
Arthur didn't stop at betraying us. He sold my mother and sister for the price of a yacht.