Chapter 10
Artem
I looked at the photograph until Ivan said my name twice and I realized we'd arrived, and I was still staring at a screen like a teenager with his first crush.
"Put it away," Ivan said. Not unkindly. "You're about to walk into a room full of men who can smell sentiment like sharks smell blood."
"He's got her finger," I said.
"I know. I saw. You've shown me four times."
"That's his whole hand around just her finger, Ivan."
"Artem."
I locked the phone. The screen went dark but I remembered Mac's furious newborn concentration.
That scrunched-up look babies get, like they've just been handed the world's worst contract and they're already drafting revisions.
Maeve had been half-asleep behind him in the frame, one hand curled around his tiny back, the other still wrapped in his grip.
It had been thirty-six hours since Gregor delivered him. And I hadn’t held him.
I was three thousand kilometers away, stepping out of an SUV into air cold enough to make my lungs feel like they'd been scrubbed with steel wool.
My father’s Russian estate hadn't changed since I was nine years old. That was the problem with it.
It had the same iron gates, repainted so many times the scrollwork had gone soft at the edges.
Same floodlights bleaching the snow into something surgical.
Same black cars lined up like the world's most depressing wedding procession.
Same armed men smoking under the portico, collars up, pretending the cold wasn't winning.
One of them nodded at me. Viktor. He'd been working my father's security since before I could drive. His mustache had gone entirely gray and he'd developed a gut that strained at his coat buttons, but the rifle slung across his chest was spotless.
"Artem Petrovich." He stamped his feet against the cold. "Condolences."
"Thank you." I didn’t want to correct him for using our old name.
"He's in the morgue at St. Alexei's. Guarded. We've had three attempts already."
"Three?"
"Amateurs." He spat into the snow. "Didn't even get past the parking lot."
"Who stopped them?"
Viktor's mustache twitched. "Your father's dog."
I blinked. "Duke?"
"Took a chunk out of the first one's calf. Second one tripped over a flower arrangement. Third one ran." He shrugged. "The dog's still at the morgue. Won't leave."
Of course it wouldn't. That animal had hated everyone except my father and, inexplicably, the cook's eleven-year-old daughter who fed it table scraps. It had once bitten a federal prosecutor and my father had framed the incident report.
"Make sure it's fed," I said.
"Already on it. We've been giving it the good stuff. It earned it."
Ivan snorted behind me. "The dog did more for the succession than the entire council. Maybe we should take it back to England."
Viktor's eyes flicked to Ivan, then away. Smart man.
“Send the dog to England,” I called as we walked toward the house.
The cold had teeth. Not the polite, damp cold of London that seeped into your joints and made you grumble. This cold wanted a fight. The kind that made your nostrils stick together when you breathed in and turned the snow into powder so fine it squeaked under your boots.
Ivan's breath plumed in the dark. "I've always hated this place."
"You've told me. Every time we visit."
"Because it never improves. Look at that." He pointed at a gargoyle above the entrance, its stone face worn nearly smooth. "That thing has looked constipated since the eighteen-hundreds and nobody's done anything about it."
"It's a grotesque, not a gargoyle. Gargoyles have water spouts."
"Thank you, Wikipedia." He shoved his hands deeper into his coat pockets. "You know what I mean, though. This house eats people and shits out portraits."
I did know what he meant.
The entrance hall hit us with the usual assault: beeswax polish, wet wool, gun oil, and the staleness of central heating that hadn't been updated since the Soviet Union.
Somewhere a radiator clanked. The chandelier, which was a monstrosity of Bohemian crystal that my grandmother had imported at ruinous expense, threw fractured light across the marble floor.
And everywhere, the portraits. Dead Petrovs in oils and gilt, each one wearing the same expression of hereditary constipation.
My great-grandfather. His brothers. Their wives, pale and unsmiling, hands folded in laps as though they'd been told to sit still and had been sitting still for a hundred years.
"Uncle Sergei still looks like he's passing a kidney stone," Ivan observed.
"He was shot in the stomach."
"Then he had an excuse."
A nervous footman tried to take Ivan's coat. Ivan let him get within arm's reach, then turned his head just enough to make eye contact. The footman stopped. Recalculated. Stepped back.
"He'll keep the coat," I said.
The footman nodded and retreated. Ivan hadn't said a word.
This was the thing about my brother that people in these halls always forgot.
He had been terrifying at eighteen, back when he was all sharp smiles and broken bones but with a beauty that made people underestimate him exactly once.
Nine months without Maeve had scraped something raw behind his eyes.
He looked less like a weapon now and more like a man deciding whether to become one.
The men in the corridor gave him space without making it obvious. They remembered.
What they didn't know wasn't whether Ivan would break. It was whether he'd bother to stop once he started.
We pushed through the oak doors.
The council room.
Twelve men in various stages of expensive decay sat around a dark wooden table long enough to land a small aircraft. The air thick with cigar smoke and the particular mustiness of old paperwork that had absorbed decades of bad decisions.
My father used to say a Pakhan does not ask to enter a room. He becomes the reason the room exists.
I was nine when he first told me that. He'd made me stand outside this very room for six hours with no food, no water, no sitting, while the old men argued about ports, debts, and a cousin whose body turned up in the Moskva River.
When the doors finally opened, he put one hand on my shoulder and delivered the line like it was scripture.
At nine, I thought that sounded profound.
At thirty-two, with my father in a morgue and my son three thousand kilometers away and my brother vibrating with suppressed violence beside me, it sounded like the sort of thing damaged men said to children instead of holding them. Which, I supposed, was its own sort of legacy.
I scanned the table.
Mikhail at the head. My father's older brother, seventy-two, with the face of a man who'd been disappointed by everything since approximately 1974 and had made peace with it.
He wore a waistcoat that had been expensive when Brezhnev was alive and drank tea from a glass holder that had belonged to my grandfather.
Next to him, Yuri.
Of course, Yuri had taken my father's chair.
Five years older than me, softer around the middle, slower upstairs, and convinced neither of those things mattered because his mother had been a Volkova before she married in and he'd chosen a wife whose family owned half of all illegal shipping channels.
He was the sort of man who mistook proximity to power for possession of it.
The other ten faces were variations on a theme, from cousins, faction heads, men who'd eaten at my father's table for decades and would happily carve up what he'd left behind before the body was room temperature.
"Artem." Mikhail's voice carried down the table, perfectly neutral. He could have been discussing the weather. "You made it."
"Did you doubt me?" Acknowledging obstacles in front of these men was like bleeding in front of sharks.
“Never. Sit.”
I pulled out a chair and sat. Ivan stayed standing just behind my right shoulder. A silent threat until he needed to bare his teeth.
If anyone got close enough, they'd have smelled what the jet shower hadn't fully erased. Caramel. Champagne. Storm clouds. Home. I hadn't tried to hide it.
Yuri leaned forward, elbows on the table, and smiled the way a man smiles when he thinks he's already won.
"My father is dead," I said, before he could open his mouth. "The seat is mine."
"That's what we're here to discuss." Yuri's smile widened. "The seat requires a leader. Not a man playing house in where? London? Edinburgh? You seem to bounce around."
He knew.
“You followed me?”
“Just a precaution.”
Ivan leaned forward and stared at Yuri. It was just enough to make half the men at the table twitch. Uncle Grigory actually knocked over his tea. The cup rolled, clattering against the saucer, and nobody moved to right it.
I lifted one hand without looking at Ivan. He stopped.
"Playing house," I repeated, letting the phrase sit in the air like something unpleasant someone had left on the carpet. "London has never been more profitable. I doubled our arms revenue in two years. Our European distribution is cleaner than it's been in a generation. The Irish route—"
"Is theoretical," Yuri cut in. "And you remain unbonded."
There it was. The real argument.
"A Pakhan without an omega is a liability," he continued, settling back in my father's chair like he'd already had the upholstery changed. "Volatile. Unstable. The Bratva needs alliances, Artem. It needs stability. You offer neither."
Which means he had me followed to Edinburgh but didn’t know what I left there. Interesting.
Murmurs around the table. The older men especially. Dmitri with his ridiculous cravat, Petyr with his reading glasses perched on his nose like an accountant who'd wandered into the wrong meeting. They all nodded along.
The same argument, generation after generation. An alpha rules better with an omega under his roof. An omega softens him and gives him heirs. Proves he can be managed.