Chapter 2
Artem
I’d not slept in nearly nine months.
“An hour is not sleep.” My doctor had said.
My brother had screamed about it, and my Gregor had said, “You’re in decline.”
Gregor was not a man who wasted words.
At thirty-two, I was old enough to know better than to let one vanished omega dismantle the machinery of my life. But apparently, age hadn’t made me sensible. It had only made me better dressed while unraveling.
Outside, London was gray. And unyielding gray as rain slashed against the boardroom windows, streaking the glass like claw marks.
The Thames, visible from the floor-to-ceiling windows, churned under a sky the color of a bruise.
“Bloody weather,” my father’s right-hand-man, and my uncle, grumbled.
The Pakhan’s boardroom smelled like whisky as they argued about the same shipment of Turkish arms they had for three consecutive meetings.
I stopped listening approximately two and a half meetings ago. They hadn’t noticed. This was either because I had a great poker face or a lack of their observational skills. I suspected it was both.
We were in London now, but we’d been in Prague on business when it had all gone wrong. Prague, where the snow had fallen like a shroud over the city, muffling the sounds of the Old Town Square, turning the Charles Bridge into a silent, white tunnel.
The hotel suite had smelled of a scent that should not have been possible. Not just ours, but ours and hers together.
That scent, the one that had clung to the air like a ghost, was the reason Gregor had refused to let the maids clean his shirt. The one she wore when she was deep in heat. She said it smelled of all of us, right before she begged for more.
My father, the Pakhan, sat at the head of the table, his broad frame draped in a tailored suit that had once fit him like a second skin. Now, it hung on him like a reminder that he was sixty-eight years old and suddenly looked it.
In the last year he had aged in ways that tailors or hairdressers couldn’t fix.
His once dark hair was now streaked with white, and the lines around his mouth had deepened into something permanent.
And those hands that had once broken bones with a single strike now trembled slightly when he reached for his glass.
The Bratva didn’t speak of such things. Weakness was a luxury we couldn’t afford. But I saw it. We all did.
"Artem, the Turks are still demanding a forty percent increase on the next consignment," Volkov said, his mustache twitching like a disgruntled caterpillar. Volkov had an opinion about everything that happened, but while he’d been talking for forty minutes, I’d been thinking about the scent match and Irish fire for nine months.
"No," I said.
Volkov blinked. "No to the forty percent, or no to the Turks?"
"Yes."
Volkov opened his mouth, closed it, and looked at the Pakhan.
My father was watching me. He’d built an heir from the ground up and was now watching as I failed in real time.
He’d seen it. The machine I’d become. I could still move assets across borders with the efficiency of a man who had nothing left to lose.
But I was different. I had lost, and that was the problem. I’d lost it nine months ago in a Prague snowstorm, and I’d been staring at the empty space ever since.
"Artem." The Pakhan’s voice was gravel and authority, a tone that had once made underlings tremble. Now, it just sounded tired. "Are you listening?"
"I’m listening," I said. "You want to retaliate against the Turks. I want to wait. Retaliation is emotional. Strategy is profitable. We wait."
I’d said this very same sentence, in various forms, about fourteen times in the last month. About the Turks. About the Dublin situation. About the missing cargo from Rotterdam. The words changed. The meaning didn’t.
Ivan was to my left. My thirty-year-old brother.
My enforcer. The man who had put a hole through the wall of the Pakhan’s east wing last Tuesday.
It wasn’t because someone had insulted the family, but because the barista at the lobby coffee shop had put caramel in his flat white, and the smell of it had reminded him of her.
The hole was still there. The barista had been reassigned to another building.
We did not talk about the coffee incident.
We did not, in fact, talk about a great many things. The Petrov Pack had developed an impressive catalog of subjects that were permanently off-limits, and they all led back to the same five-foot-five Irish woman with black hair, green eyes, and a scent that had ruined us.
Champagne, storm-clouds, and caramel.
The same notes lived under our skin, but on her they had become unbearable. She was our scent match. The moment all three notes came from her we knew she was in heat. We also knew she was ours.
And that was the thing that had haunted my dreams for nine months, the one that had turned my brother into a man who punched walls and my bodyguard into a man who carried her hair tie in his pocket like a talisman.
We didn’t talk about our omega running from us.
It had been nine months, and the best intelligence operatives money could buy.
Men who could trace the metadata of a nuclear submarine.
And we could not find one girl. Our omega.
She had walked out of a five-star Prague hotel suite and ceased to exist. The only thing we know was she landed in Manchester, and vanished.
We were, by any reasonable assessment, a mess. Three of the most dangerous men in London, brought to their knees by a twenty-seven-year-old Irish woman in Prague, called Milly. I was wondering if that was a lie.
She also left with my black credit card.
Though that was strategic. I’d tucked it into her coat pocket while she was half-asleep.
I could have locked the suite when we left to sort out the problem we were in Prague for.
I could have had Gregor stand at the door, which is literally what I paid him to do.
Instead, I gave her the card and whispered, "We’ll find you."
This was either the most romantic or the most strategically foolish thing I had ever done. Ivan had opinions about which one it was. But Ivan had opinions about everything.
The door to the boardroom swung open.
Mikhail stepped inside. The room fell silent as all eyes turned to him.
Mikhail was a man who moved like a shadow.
He ran the Russian leg of the operation.
He had a presence that made you wonder if he’d been there the whole time and you’d just failed to notice.
His face was unreadable, but his scent carried the sharp tang of urgency.
"She’s here," he said, his voice cutting through the tension like a blade. "Mary McCarthy is here with her family."
Ivan’s head snapped up, his sapphire eyes widening as the weight of the words settled over the room. He exchanged a glance with me, then Gregor, his bearded jaw clenching so hard I could hear his molars grinding.
"Who the fuck is Mary McCarthy?" he muttered under his breath.
My father’s lips curled into something that wasn’t quite a smile as he looked at me and then Ivan. "The woman who is about to join this family by marriage."
The words hung in the air like a grenade with the pin pulled and the thumb being the only thing stopping it from exploding.
Ivan’s face went slack.
Gregor’s fingers twitched toward the knife at his belt.
And me? I felt the first real spark of something in nine months. Not anger, but the promise of it, and it was simmering under my skin like a live wire.
My father stood, his chair scraping against the polished wooden floor. He stooped his shoulders slightly, as if the weight of the Bratva crown had finally begun to press down on him. His pale blue eyes flicked to me.
"Mary McCarthy," he said, as if the name alone should explain everything. "Daughter of Callum McCarthy, who is head of the McCarthy Syndicate in Dublin."
Ivan let out a low, disbelieving laugh. "You’re joking."
My father’s expression didn’t change. "The McCarthys control Irish routes into the United States. Ports, documents, private clinics, family registries. Their network is something we want to be part of. We control movement through Europe. Together, both sides become harder to touch."
"And the girl?" Ivan’s voice was a rumble, deep and measured.
My father waved a hand, as if the details were beneath him. "Eighteen. Unbonded. Healthy. The contract is already drafted. All you have to do is marry her, produce an heir for both families, nothing more."
Ivan’s laugh turned into something darker. "You want one of us to marry an Irishman’s daughter like we’re your latest deal."
"Not you," my father said, his voice smooth as aged whisky. "Just Artem."
The room went still. Even the rain outside seemed to pause.
I stood so fast my chair toppled backward. It hit the floor with a crack that echoed like a gunshot. "We haven’t had an arranged marriage in this family in twenty years."
My father didn’t flinch. "Times change. Alliances must be strengthened."
"Strengthened?" My voice was a blade, honed to a razor’s edge. "You think selling your heir strengthens us?"
"It’s not selling," my father said, as if the semantics mattered. "It’s a union. A merging of interests. The McCarthys bring the American routes. We bring Europe, money, and protection. Together, we control both corridors."
Ivan’s hands were clenched into fists. "And what does she bring, besides a last name?"
My father’s gaze flicked to the door, as if he could already see her standing there. "An omega for my son. Connections. A bloodline that keeps the Irish in check."
I stepped forward, my shadow falling across the table like a dark tide. "And what do I bring? Or does my opinion not matter in this?"
My father’s jaw ticked and for the first time, I saw a flicker of something in his eyes. I thought it was a moment of doubt, but no, it was his usual calculation. "Your opinion matters. But the family’s future matters more."