Chapter 28
Alina
He goes to five normal seconds. Probably still three, but counting slowly so he doesn’t cheat. Then his eyes snap open. “He’s alive.”
I resist the inappropriate urge to snort into my hand.
But it’s not a question. Not even a statement, really. More like a man hearing a sound he recognises from a long way off and placing it before he’s consciously decided to.
I stand very still in the middle of the room and let him get there.
Because I’ve been sitting with this for the last however long, watching Dmitri’s stillness and Orhan’s eyes and the particular way a man speaks about a dead person when he knows they aren’t dead.
I’ve had time to build the architecture of it, brick by brick, while Arkady ran the room and I sat in the corner being decorative and dangerous.
He’s had approximately forty seconds, and he’s already arrived at the same place.
That’s either a very good sign or a very bad one, depending on what comes next.
“Nik’s arrangements,” I say. “Not the family’s. Not the Bratva’s. He said it three times.”
“I counted.”
“A man loyal to a dead pakhan doesn’t phrase it that way.
A man loyal to a living one does.” I watch his face.
It’s doing the thing where it goes very flat and very quiet, which I’ve learned means he’s processing something that has weight.
Not surprise exactly. More like the specific quality of stillness that precedes a decision.
“He staged it,” Arkady says.
“He staged it.”
“For me.”
“So who did we find?” I whisper.
“Good fucking question.”
The silence that follows is a different kind from the others we’ve had tonight. The others had weight. This one has depth. The kind you can’t see the bottom of.
I sit down on the arm of the chair because my legs have decided they’re done keeping me upright, and I press my fingers to my mouth and think.
Someone is dead. We stood in that room, and we looked at a body. You can’t fake a body without a body.
“Who did Nik know who was already dead?” I ask.
Arkady looks at me. His expression screams he is reluctant to say whatever is on his mind.
“Say it,” I murmur. “Vik, Dima and Kosta are seeing everyone out. What is it?”
“There is a story about certain people back in the old country where a body double is used for the small stuff and places that are maybe considered more dangerous. I wondered once or twice if Nik had one. There were times, certain events, where he seemed… off. But then he would say something or do something, and I’d brush it off as paranoia. What if it wasn’t?”
“Fuck.”
“Fuck doesn’t quite cover it.”
“Why wasn’t this an option before?” I ask carefully.
“Honestly? I forgot about it. It was years ago, and as I said, one minute I’d think something was strange, but then he would do something totally Nik. It’s only come back to me when you asked who did we find.”
“So Nik had a double, probably shot him in the head himself and then did a runner to Cyprus and his fancy new villa that has been waiting for him for months. All so you could become pakhan?”
“It sounds fucking crazy,” he mutters.
“Because it is!”
“Is it though?” Arkady says, and his voice has gone quiet in the way that means he’s stopped fighting the idea and started building with it.
He stands and moves to the window, even though the blinds are down and there’s nothing to see.
Old habit. Something to do while his brain catches up with itself.
“Think about it from Nik’s position. He’s pakhan for forty years.
He knows everything. He knows where every body is buried because he put most of them there himself.
He also knows that the moment he shows any kind of vulnerability, any kind of succession plan, the vultures start circling. They always do.”
“So he couldn’t just retire,” I say.
“He couldn’t just retire. He couldn’t hand it over. He couldn’t even visibly groom me for it without making me a target the second he looked the other way.” He turns from the window. “But if he’s dead—”
“Then you’re pakhan by blood and by right, and anyone who moves against you moves against the memory of Nik, which is a different kind of threat entirely.” I pull the rest of the knot out of my hair and let it fall, dragging my fingers through it as I twirl the blade absently.
The word memory settles into the room like a stone dropped into still water.
“And anyone who tries to challenge you looks like they’re pissing on his grave,” I finish.
“Exactly.”
I stare at the middle distance and turn it over one more time, checking for the cracks, the places where the logic gives out and leaves you standing on nothing.
It holds. Every piece of it holds. The shell company.
The twelve per cent dip. Dmitri’s vanishing act, both times, the first a dry run, the second the real thing.
The way he spoke tonight, present tense, living tense, the language of a man managing an ongoing situation rather than honouring a dead one.
Nik’s arrangements.
Not were. Are.
“He’s been planning this for at least eighteen months,” I say.
“Probably longer.”
“And Dmitri is the only one who knows.”
“And Orhan,” Arkady says.
“Orhan watches Dmitri the way Vik watches you.”
“I know.”
“So two people. Your father trusted two people with his life, literally, and built the whole thing around making sure you never found out. He used Dmitri. Not Miroslav, not Seva or Grisha. Not a blood family member.”
He doesn’t answer immediately. He moves away from the window and drops back into the chair across from me, elbows on his knees, hands loosely linked.
The lamp throws amber light across the ink on his forearms, and I watch him think.
It’s not a comfortable thing to watch. It’s like watching a machine run a process that requires everything it has.
“Dmitri is not ambitious enough to use what he knows as leverage and not stupid enough to sell it.” He pauses. “Which makes him exactly the kind of man you trust with something like this.”
“Someone with no stake in the outcome,” I say.
“Someone with everything to lose if it goes wrong and nothing to gain from betraying it.” He looks up.
“Nik was a bastard in a hundred ways, but he understood people. He understood what motivated them and what paralysed them. He would have picked Dmitri because Dmitri’s loyalty doesn’t run to power. It runs to the man.”
Something about that lands differently than anything else he’s said tonight.
I look at him. Arkady Saranov, who has been pakhan for less than a week, who found his dead father and married a stranger and sat in a room full of men calculating his expiry date, and who is now sitting across from me in the wreckage of that same evening, working out that his father chose to love him in the most brutal, most Bratva way imaginable.
By disappearing.
By making himself a ghost, so his son could become something solid.
I don’t say any of that. I’m not sure I could get it out without my voice doing something I’d have to apologise for.
“Are you going to find him?” I ask instead.
Arkady’s jaw tightens. Not anger. The other thing. The thing he does when emotion arrives somewhere he wasn’t expecting it, and he has to decide what to do with it before it shows. “No. This is what he wanted, so let him have this happy death.”
“You sound bitter.”
“I sound pissed.” He stands up abruptly and marches out of the room, taking the stairs quickly enough that I can’t catch up. But I follow him, anyway.
Not because I think he wants me to, but because I’m his wife and that means something, even if neither of us has fully worked out what yet.
He’s in the bedroom when I get there, jacket off, thrown over the chair rather than hung up, which tells me everything about where his head is.
He’s standing at the window again, arms crossed, and the set of his shoulders is the particular kind of rigid that means he’s holding something in with both hands and the grip is slipping.
I close the door behind me and lean against it.
I don’t speak. I’ve learned that much.
He stands there for long enough that the room settles around him, the light from the lamp on the dresser catching the ink on his forearms where he’s rolled his sleeves up. He is a man trying to outrun something that lives inside him and has nowhere else to go.
“You don’t have to pretend it doesn’t hurt,” I say eventually.
“I’m not pretending anything.”
“You left a room rather than sit with it, which is something you do.”
He turns from the window. His face is doing the flat, quiet thing, but the edges of it are wrong. Too controlled. The kind of control that costs something.
“He made a decision,” Arkady says. “A unilateral, fucking enormous decision, and he didn’t tell me. He just—” He stops. “He let me stand in that room and look at his face and think he was dead. He let me carry that. For days.”
“Because he needed you to,” I say quietly.
“I know why he did it.” The words come out sharp. “I understand the logic. I can follow every step of it, and I fucking hate that.” He drops his arms and turns away again. “I hate that I understand it. I hate that one day, if we… I might have to make the same decision.”
I freeze. The depth of emotion on his face scares me. But I have to say something, anything to diffuse the tension that has skyrocketed. “You don’t even have to think about making a decision like that.”
“Yet,” he grits out.
“We just got married,” I say lightly. “We haven’t even talked about kids.”
“So talk. I’m pakhan now,” he spits out. “It’s not only expected, but it’s also a certainty.”
The word certainty lands in the room like a dropped weapon.
I stare at him.
Kids.
I’ve thought about kids. I thought about not having them.
I’m not sure what I want right now.
“A certainty,” I repeat.
“You know what I am. You knew before you signed anything. A Bratva pakhan without heirs is a liability. It’s an invitation. Every family with a son old enough to hold a gun starts calculating the gap.”
“I understand the politics.”
“Good.”
“I’m not arguing the politics.”
“Then what are you arguing?”
“I’m not arguing anything. I’m processing.”
“You don’t want kids because your mother walked out on you. Is that it?”
“Ouch,” I mutter. “Why are you attacking me?”
He gives me a confused stare. “Attacking? I’m observing.
I’m trying to make sense of your hesitation.
” He holds up a hand as I open my mouth.
“Don’t say to me we have only just met, and all that bullshit.
I knew the second I laid eyes on you that I would have you.
All of you. Wife, lover, mother of my children.
You think you can walk away from this? From me?
I won’t let anyone else touch what’s mine, Alina.
You’re the only spark that ignites this chaos inside me.
You think I’m just a man? I’m the storm that’ll tear apart anyone who tries to take you from me.
You’re not just someone I want; you’re everything I need.
I’ll burn the world down to keep you safe, to keep you close.
You’re my obsession, and I’m not letting go.
” He moves in close and grips my throat, tighter than he has before. I gag, but I’m not scared.
I want it. I need the darkness. I need this man to possess me completely.