27. Viktor
VIKTOR
The spy shrugged and took another hit on his joint. “All I’m saying is what I’m hearing.” He shook his head.
Alexei and I exchanged a glance. The supervisor at the club had called us to come and listen to what he’d picked up from a few guests.
Little did they realize that they were being monitored in that VIP room.
And little did they realize that this specific club on the Strip was one of our businesses.
It wasn’t formally known as a Volkov property.
My father had dabbled with having some legitimate businesses that weren’t funded by our illegitimate businesses.
The two men bragging about counting on a big paycheck were giving us tips that we really could use, though.
Alexei rubbed his face and let out a deep breath. “All right. Run this by me again. From the beginning.”
The manager indicated for the spy to speak up.
“They were talking about a big score coming up. Setting some places on fire, breaking in and smashing up places—”
“Details,” I said.
He nodded and sighed heavily. “Sorry, Boss. Sorry. I’m just so fucking tired. Wife just had a baby and I’m not sleeping for shit anymore. Uh…” He rubbed his head again. “Okay. They were talking about big jobs that they had coming up.”
“For how much?” I asked.
“Twenty grand,” he replied. “Each. They said there’s a bunch of them, though, so they mean business.”
“Go on,” Alexei said.
“They’re going to hit the clubs.” He mentioned them by address, and they were by far the biggest ones we owned. “To start fires and get them closed down.”
Fuck.
We were already dealing with the fallout of a couple of people being hurt near our SUV that was blown up. I thought again how damn lucky I was that Wren hadn’t been close to it and that she’d gotten that note in time. And that Mila saw the lights underneath.
We didn’t need to deal with a mass casualty event like fires at our most popular clubs, too.
“They’re going to hit the stores. The jewelry stores.” The spy listed them by name. “Then they’re going to hit some of the houses.” He rattled off the names of some of the supervisors and top guards within the organization.
“I’m just telling you what I heard. They ain’t say who hired them.
I’m just fucking lucky as hell that they didn’t name my place.
That they ain’t going to stir up trouble with my wife and baby at home.
” He shook his head sadly. “But this is fucking nuts. Fucking bullshit, Boss. All them people? In a hit this big?” He shook his head some more.
“This ain’t right. It ain’t right at all. ”
It wasn’t right, but this was war.
“Thank you for telling us,” I told the manager, who the lower-level spy had first reached out to. “And thank you for getting all that you could.”
The spy nodded. “But what the fuck are we gonna do?” He glanced between me, Alexei, and the manager. “We can’t just let them do this.”
My cousin and I shared the sentiment. But for as late in the day as it was and with the hits planned for the next day, it seemed like we didn’t even have the time to do anything fast enough.
As soon as we left, I called Paul and had him start contacting the supervisors and spies who were on the massive hit list. Many of the non-supervisory staff lived in apartment buildings or condos, and that meant more collateral damage.
“I’m assuming they’re going to bomb them,” Alexei said as he drove us back to the mansion so we could confer with Adrik.
“That’s the only way they could try to do this much widespread damage.
” I texted Paul all the names, leaning on him as more of an assistant than a butler.
“But the businesses?” I shook my head. "We can close as much as we can but if they still set fires or break in and do damage, that’s a hard hit to take.
We can’t secure everything all at once.” We had an army, but not one that could mobilize all at the same time to protect so many different locations.
“And if they hit them with bombs, there’s the collateral damage of other businesses nearby.” Alexei slammed his fist on the steering wheel. “Fuckers. That stupid fucker just couldn’t stay dead.”
All that we’d heard indicated an escalation of an attack on us.
Intercepting that communication was a fluke, too, because that spy had only been following those men because of their association with something minor.
Now that we had this heads up, we had to make the most of what we could do to thwart them.
Adrik was frustrated once we told him. He paced in his office, rubbing the back of his neck.
Twice, we ran through what the spy and manager at that club had told us.
Lev and Nikolai were with us as well, but Maksim was off taking Carina and Isabel to the doctor for a checkup and he hadn’t been informed yet.
“What can we do to avoid their hitting any of those places?” Lev asked.
“We have the manpower to protect some of them but not all,” Adrik replied.
“Paul’s been contacting the ones whose homes were listed.”
Alexei stood and paced, too, opposite of Adrik. Both of them were too mad to sit still. “If we knew all the men hired for this hit, we could take them out.”
I nodded. “At least those two were handled,” I reminded him. The spy hadn’t wasted time to knock them out and leave them for dead. They couldn’t go damaging our business or bombing anyone for this collaborative hit if they could barely hold their heads up or walk straight.
“Two out of how many, though?” Nikolai asked.
Too many.
“He’s upping the stakes. He’s escalating…
” Adrik muttered something else but I didn’t catch it.
“If he’s not still pissed that we eliminated his lieutenant, then he’s literally trying to break the empire apart.
If he’s trying to get close to take the throne, why the fuck would he hit so hard at so many things that we rely on? ”
“Who gives a fuck what Gregori is ultimately planning?” Lev scowled after he blurted that out. “He can’t win. He can’t get away with it. And we won’t fucking let him break us apart or be in the position to be overtaken. Whatever his plans are, we’ll stop them.”
“How?” Adrik asked, exasperated. There was no doubt he was the ruthless leader we needed him to be, but he still counted on us.
We were a team of brothers and cousins and he never shied away from leaning on us.
“He’s upping the challenges too quickly.
Even with the help we’re getting from Wren and all the intel she’s been sourcing for us, we can’t stay one step ahead fast enough. ”
“Since we foiled their last plan against us,” I said, referring to the law enforcement agencies who were setting up that road block to justify their excuse of killing some of our men, “they’re planning to hit even harder without any communications we can track.”
“There’s not a chance of diplomacy either,” Adrik said, hanging his head. “I keep asking myself what Father would do. How he would handle this…”
I wished I could know that answer too. Dmitri Volkov was a strong leader with a legacy of overcoming any odds, even his own brother trying to kill him.
Now as he lay upstairs, a shell of the mighty man he used to be, we had no easy answers from him.
He had no guidance for us. Nothing like this had ever happened under his rule, and on that, I had to be grateful.
He’d suffered enough damage from his brother.
Gregori had almost killed him, and it had taken my father a long time to recover from the fallout.
He’d spent years building us into the power we now were and it was up to us to defeat the same threat that had almost felled him.
“Diplomacy with who, though?” Nikolai asked. “The Feds?” He scoffed. “Like the ones who tried to bomb the car Wren took?”
“Not only Wren, but my wife, as well,” Adrik growled. “Lev’s wife.”
“No one is going to listen from that angle,” I said, shaking my head. “No one is even approachable now that they know Wren’s been working for us.”
“Diplomacy seldom works anyway,” Alexei groused. “Talking things out? Negotiating? Fuck that.”
“There isn’t anything to negotiate,” Adrik said. “What, we beg them not to hit us like this in exchange for what? I’m not giving anything to them. I’m not handing over a single fucking thing for what Gregori wants.”
I watched him pace some more, frustrated that we could be forced into a corner like this.
“The throne? Is that what he wants?” Adrik growled.
“He can’t hire a hit to succeed in taking me out so now he needs to try to dismantle the whole fucking empire to force me into forfeiting the throne?
” He slashed his arm through the air. “Fuck that. Fuck that. I’m not—” He growled again.
“Fuck that. I keep asking myself what Father would do and it would never be to surrender. Never.”
Everyone stayed quiet. We let it sink in how grave of a situation this was getting to be, and I realized there was only one option.
“Then we fight. We fight and defend. The best we can.” I shrugged and despised the hopelessness that we faced.
Not only because I needed to protect who and what we had now, but also because this would be one more step back and hindrance to getting the future that I was envisioning with Wren.
One with peace that we could count on to start our family should she want to marry me, not because I forced her to live with me as my captive but because she might love me as much as I was coming to love her.