Chapter 35
Arkady
Alina’s words resonate, but I don’t react. I’m already moving, pushing off from the desk and crossing to the safe. I move around the desk and grab the Glock from my drawer, shoving it in the back of my pants and clip the Vityaz to my belt before grabbing my jacket.
“Where are you going?” Alina asks, rising from her chair.
“To finish this.”
“I’m coming with you.”
I pause at the door, studying her face. The set of her jaw tells me everything I need to know about how this conversation will go if I try to argue. She’ll follow anyway, probably in a taxi, probably without backup, definitely without the ability to leave quickly if things go sideways.
“Move,” I say.
Dmitri shakes his head. “This is a mistake. You move on Pavel without preparation, without considering the consequences.”
“The consequences are that a man who wanted me dead is about to find out what happens when you fuck with me. Everything else is manageable.”
“And after? When the organisation realises you’ve killed a brigadier without calling a meeting, without presenting evidence?”
“They’ll realise I don’t require their permission to protect my life. Pakhan now, remember?” I spit out. “Anyone who disagrees can bring it to my attention personally.”
Dmitri absorbs the threat, weighs it, and nods once. “Where will you find him?”
“The Anchor. Thursday nights, corner table, same routine for three years.”
“I could provide backup.”
“No. This is between Pavel and me.”
Alina returns with her jacket, her expression calm and determined. I check my watch. Twenty past seven. Pavel will be settling into his usual spot with his usual whisky, conducting his usual business with the confidence of a man who believes himself protected by reputation and routine.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask Dmitri, getting close, so there is no mistaking the threat level has just shot into the red zone. “Why didn’t you inform your pakhan that one of his family members was gunning for him?”
Dmitri inhales and exhales sharply. “Nik told me not to. He needed you to figure it out.”
“Baptism by fire,” Alina murmurs.
“Precisely,” Dmitri says, giving her an approving look. “But we were watching him.”
“Baptism by fucking fire. I’ll give him a fucking fire up his arse!”
“Who, Pavel or Nik?” Alina asks as I storm out of the office and head to the driveway, where my Porsche awaits, ready to deliver me to the man who wanted me dead.
“Both of them,” I growl and climb in.
I don’t wait for Alina as I fire up the engine. She can either hurry up and get in or get left behind.
She hurries. The passenger door wrenches open, and she drops into the seat a split second before I pull out.
She growls at me, pulling the door shut with a slam that rattles the frame.
Her seatbelt clicks into place as I swing the Porsche out of the drive and hit the street hard enough that the tyres bark against the wet tarmac.
“You’re angry,” she says.
“Observant.”
“You’re going to do something stupid.”
“Probably.”
“At least you’re honest about it.” She braces one hand against the dash as I take a corner faster than the rain warrants. “So, what’s the plan? Walk in, shoot him in the face, walk out?”
“Something like that.”
“That’s not a plan, Arkady. It’s a public place.”
“It’s a Bratva place. Big difference.”
She doesn’t answer.
The streets are slick with the evening drizzle, headlights smearing across the windscreen in long streaks of white and red.
I drive the way I think, fast, aggressive, cutting through gaps that shouldn’t exist and creating them where they don’t.
A black cab blares its horn as I thread past it on the inside. I don’t acknowledge it.
“I’m not going to shoot him,” I say eventually.
“You’re going to let him live?” she exclaims, her eyes widening as I look at her with a smirk. “Oh, you mean you aren’t going to kill him with a gun.”
“Knife to the gut has so much more poetry, don’t you think?”
“I wonder why he wanted to do it,” she muses out loud. She doesn’t expect an answer because I don’t have one to give her.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Do you trust Dmitri enough to take his word for it?”
“Nik trusted him. With his life, apparently.”
“That’s not the same as trusting him yourself.”
“It’s close enough for tonight.”
She goes quiet, and I appreciate it. The Porsche eats up the distance between Mayfair and Bermondsey in a way that feels personal, the engine snarling through every gear change as if it shares my mood.
I take the backstreets south of the river, avoiding the main arteries where cameras cluster at every junction, and the Met’s ANPR system logs number plates with the indiscriminate hunger of a machine that never sleeps.
The Anchor sits on a corner off Jamaica Road, wedged between a betting shop and a nail salon that hasn’t been open in months.
From the outside, it looks like every other tired London pub clinging to relevance in a neighbourhood that stopped caring about it years ago.
Frosted glass. Peeling paint on the window frames.
A chalkboard outside is advertising a quiz night that hasn’t happened since before COVID.
Inside is a different story. Inside belongs to us.
I park around the back, in the narrow alley that runs behind the building.
Two cars are already here. One is a black Mercedes I don’t recognise.
The other is Pavel’s Audi, the same gunmetal grey A8 he’s been driving for two years because it’s the car of a man who wants to look successful without looking ostentatious.
Everything about Pavel is calibrated to that frequency.
Successful enough to be respected, modest enough not to be envied.
The perfect camouflage for a man planning a coup.
It suddenly becomes clear then. With me dead, he would have an in to be the successor. Seva, Grisha, even Miro wouldn’t have had an automatic right to pick up the baton. It would’ve gone to a vote. Pavel was hoping he would win everyone over and get what he has always wanted.
Power.
Unrestrained and irrevocable.
That fucker. I should’ve seen it a mile away, but they say hindsight gives you twenty-twenty vision.
I kill the engine and sit for a moment, my hands on the steering wheel, feeling the leather under my palms.
“Stay in the car,” I say.
“No.”
“Alina.”
“I said no. If you’re walking in there, I’m walking in there. You don’t get to tell me what you told me earlier about intention and partnership and then leave me sitting in a car park in Bermondsey like a fucking handbag.”
I close my eyes. Count to three. Open them.
“Are you carrying?”
She holds up the gun she shot a guy in the foot with, a grin spreading across her luscious lips. “Do you think I’m stupid or something?”
“Fine. Behind me. You don’t speak. You don’t draw unless I go down.”
“I remember the rules.”
I get out. The rain has thinned to a mist that hangs in the air like something undecided.
The alley smells like wet brick and stale beer, and the particular tang of a city that doesn’t care what happens in its darker corners.
I round the car, and Alina falls in behind me, close enough that I can hear her breathing, steady and controlled, the way Dima taught her. Good girl.
The back door of The Anchor is unlocked.
It always is on Thursday nights, because Pavel likes his privacy, and privacy means a secondary exit that doesn’t involve walking past the bar and every set of eyes attached to it.
I push it open and step into a narrow corridor that smells like industrial cleaner and old carpet.
The kitchen is to the left, dark and closed.
The sound of the pub filters through the wall, muffled voices and the clink of glass, the low murmur of men conducting business they don’t want overheard.
I move down the corridor, and the carpet gives way to sticky lino.
A fire exit sign throws a green light across the walls.
At the end of the hallway, a door leads to the main bar.
I can hear Pavel’s voice through it, low and measured, the particular cadence of a man telling someone something he expects them to agree with.
I push the door open.
The room opens up with low lighting, dark wood panelling, a bar running the length of the left wall, staffed by a single man who takes one look at me and finds something urgent to do in the cellar. Smart.
Pavel is in the corner, back to the wall, sightline to both doors.
He’s got a whisky in front of him, half drunk, and he’s talking to a man I don’t recognise, someone in a grey suit who has the particular look of a lawyer or an accountant or whatever hybrid species Pavel keeps in his orbit to make the ugly things look clean on paper.
There are two other men in the pub. One at the bar, nursing a pint with the studied disinterest of someone who is paid to be here. The other is near the front door, standing rather than sitting, which makes him security. Neither of them is armed visibly, but that means nothing in a place like this.
Pavel sees me before I’m three steps into the room. His glass pauses halfway to his mouth. Not a flinch. Not a startle. Just the precise recalibration of a man whose evening has just taken a sharp turn and is deciding in real time how to play it.
His eyes move from me to Alina, who has stepped in behind me and positioned herself exactly where I told her to, slightly to my left, back foot weighted, hands at her sides.
Then his eyes come back to me, and I see the calculation happen.
The precise, rapid-fire arithmetic of a man weighing his options and finding them thin.
“Arkady,” he says. He sets the glass down. “This is unexpected.”
“Is it?”
The man in the grey suit looks between us with the dawning comprehension of someone who has just realised he’s sitting at the wrong table on the wrong night.
Pavel doesn’t look at him, but he tilts his head a fraction, and he stands, gathers his briefcase, and moves toward the bar with the particular haste of a man who has been dismissed and is grateful for it.
The security at the front door straightens. The man at the bar sets his pint down.
I don’t care about either of them. They’re furniture. Furniture doesn’t concern me.
I cross the room in six strides and reach out to yank Pavel to his feet. This isn’t going to be a long, drawn-out discussion. My other hand pulls the knife free, and I bury it in Pavel’s gut before he can say a word.
The security guy lunges, but then stops when Alina raises her gun.
“You have precisely three seconds to apologise, or I make this more painful than it has to be,” I say to Pavel, who has blood dripping from his mouth already.
Pavel’s eyes bulge, his hands clawing at my wrist where I’m holding the blade steady inside him. The whisky glass topples off the table and shatters on the floor, and the sound is oddly satisfying. Like punctuation.
“Apologise,” I repeat. “For trying to take what’s mine.”
He coughs, and more blood comes up, dark and thick. His legs are going. I can feel the weight of him increasing against the knife as his body starts to give up the fight, his brain is still trying to win.
“I don’t...” he starts, and then his face twists into something that might be a smile if it weren’t soaked in blood. “You don’t have proof.”
“I don’t need proof. I’m pakhan.”
“The family will—”
“The family will do what the family always does. They’ll adjust. They’ll realign. And they’ll forget you ever existed, because that’s what happens to traitors.”
“Fuck. You,” he spits out, and I twist the knife.
That was all the confirmation I needed to end this.
His eyes go wide, then dim. The light leaves them the way it always does—not all at once, but in stages, like a building powering down floor by floor.
I hold him there until the last floor goes dark, and then I pull the blade free and let him drop.
He hits the floor with the dull, heavy sound of something that used to matter and doesn’t anymore.
Blood pools around him, spreading across the sticky floor in a slow, dark tide. The whisky from the broken glass mixes with it, amber threading through crimson.
I remove the blade, dripping with his blood and turn to the rest of the room. “Anyone else?”
“No, pakhan,” the security guy says. It’s predictable. It’s fucking powerful.
“Then clean this up and find someone else to work for.”
Grabbing Alina’s hand, I march us out of the bar and into the alley, where the rain has picked up again, fat drops hitting the pavement like something the sky’s been holding back all day.
Alina doesn’t speak. She keeps pace with me, her hand tight in mine, and I can feel her pulse hammering through her fingers, but her stride is steady, and her breathing is controlled.
She’s running on adrenaline and discipline and whatever chemical cocktail the human body produces when it watches a man die three feet away and doesn’t fall apart.
I stop and pick her up by her waist, placing her on the bonnet of the car and snapping her knickers to the side.
My cock is inside her in the next second, pounding into her, chasing the high that just came from defending my legacy against a man who wanted to remove me from the board to take it.
She gasps, her hands flying to my arms, nails biting into the leather of my jacket.
The Porsche’s bonnet is slick with rain, and she slides against it, but I grip her hip with one hand and anchor her there.
The other hand is still holding the knife, blood and rain mixing on the blade, running down my wrist in thin rivulets that I don’t care about.
She wraps her legs around me and pulls me deeper, and the sound she makes is raw and primal, ripped from somewhere beneath the civilised layer that she wears for the rest of the world.
I fuck her like I’m trying to prove something.
Maybe I am. Maybe the thing I’m proving is that I’m still alive, that the man who tried to end me is the one who ended up on the floor, and the woman who chose me is here, taking all of me, the blood and the fury and the darkness that lives in the marrow of my bones.
I have Pavel to thank for bringing her into my life. It’s not enough of a reprieve. He was dead the second he plotted against me; he just didn’t know it yet. But now I’m pakhan, I have my wife, we are going to start a family, and we will rule over this family in ways that Nik never did.
And maybe one day I will forgive him for what he did, probably on the day that I hold my son or daughter in my arms for the first time.
But for right now, none of it matters. Only Alina. Always Alina.