Chapter 30
Artem
Three months later
The London headquarters occupied the top floors of a building that pretended to be an investment firm.
The lobby still had marble floors and a receptionist who could probably disarm a man with a letter opener, but the potted plants were new.
Someone in the facilities had decided we needed greenery.
But the ficus by the lift was already dying.
I made a note to have someone water it.
This was what being Pakhan did to a man. You walked into a building full of killers and noticed the ficus.
The council had been in session for three hours by the time I reached the final item on the agenda.
Twelve men around an oak table that had been shipped from Moscow in 1987 and still smelled faintly of my father's cigars.
The windows overlooked the Thames, which was surprisingly blue on this beautiful day.
I had restructured the northern supply lines, dismantled a faction that had grown too comfortable skimming from the old regime, and formally executed the succession documents transferring the Eastern European corridor to Yuri.
I didn't raise my voice. It wasn't necessary. My father had taught me that volume was a weak man’s substitute for authority, and authority was something you either had or manufactured from fear or respect. I preferred respect. It had a longer shelf life.
The final agenda item was a proposal to ban omega collateral from three major operations.
This was not a popular proposal.
I let the silence stretch while the older men glanced at each other, deciding who would speak first. Petyr removed his reading glasses and wiped them. Dmitri fiddled with his cravat, which was so annoying I wanted to push it down his throat.
Breathe Artem.
Yuri, who had already been briefed and had spent the first hour of the meeting looking like a man who'd swallowed a live frog, stared at the table, already deciding that agreeing with me was easier than arguing and slightly less humiliating than he'd feared.
"It's bad business," Dmitri said finally. "Omegas are leverage. Everyone uses them."
"Everyone used to ship cargo without manifests.
We stopped because it was inefficient." I didn't look up from the document.
"Men who use omegas as collateral create instability.
Vendettas. Unpredictable heat signatures.
Enemies with nothing left to lose." I turned the page.
"The new corridors move money, medicine, papers, and protection.
Not misery. Profit margins improve when cruelty is not permitted to be lazy. "
Dmitri opened his mouth, and closed it. The numbers were in the appendices and the appendices were irrefutable, which he knew because I'd sent them a week in advance and Gregor had followed up with a memo titled Clarifications that was essentially a threat in spreadsheet form.
The vote passed. Not unanimously—it was still the Bratva—but passed.
I adjourned the meeting and stayed in my chair as the room emptied.
My father's chair. It had seemed larger when he occupied it, a throne disguised as furniture. As a boy, I'd watched him sit here and believed power was the ability to make people afraid without raising your voice. Now the chair just felt like wood and leather.
I opened the top folder on my right.
Ivan, based on the handwriting, had slipped a nursery supply invoice between a weapons manifest and a shipping projection. Across the top, in his sprawling scrawl:
MAC NEEDS MORE SOCKS. THE TINY ONES. WITH BEARS.
Below it, in Gregor's block capitals:
APPROVED. CURRENT SOCK RETENTION RATE: 47%. UNACCEPTABLE.
And beneath that, in Maeve's neater handwriting was.
Why are all of you like this? Also please get the ones with the non-slip bottoms. He is crawling and I’m sure he’ll be walking before long.
I stared at the page for a long time. And then laughed.
Then I folded the invoice and put it in my inside pocket, next to the flash drive containing the new supply route encryption keys. Both were equally important. One was probably more so.
A knock at the door came half an hour later and Yuri entered without waiting for a response, which was either boldness or stupidity, and with Yuri the answer was usually a fluctuating ratio of both.
He was carrying two glasses of vodka and looking like he was asked to eat crow and was trying to convince himself it was filet mignon.
"I was wrong," he said, setting one glass in front of me.
"That must have been difficult to realize."
"You’re better than you ever were. The time away sharpened you." He raised his glass. "You are the Pakhan we need."
I looked at the vodka. I didn't drink during council meetings.
A rule my father had broken constantly and paid for in decisions he'd later tried to walk back, but I picked up the glass to be polite.
Yuri was trying. Yuri trying was a rare enough phenomenon that it deserved acknowledgment, the way one acknowledged a small child who had successfully used a fork.
Mikhail appeared in the doorway behind him, buttoning his coat.
He was seventy-two and moved like a man who had outlived everyone who'd ever underestimated him, which considering we were in the Bratva, was most people.
His waistcoat was the same one he'd worn to my father's funeral, and probably to my grandfather's before that.
"Your father's greatest failure," Mikhail said, "was not living long enough to see what you'd do with his empire. He would be proud. Of you and Ivan both. The succession—" He shook his head. "Flawless."
I set the glass down untouched.
"Not just Ivan." I held his gaze. "Gregor. Maeve. Mac." A pause. "Even Fergus."
Mikhail's brow furrowed. He opened his mouth, presumably to ask who Fergus was and why a name that sounded like a Scottish groundskeeper had been included in a list of Petrov assets.
"It isn't any single man that makes this syndicate function," I said before he could. "It's the pack. The unit. We're strong because we have something worth protecting. I’ll never forget that."
I didn't wait for a response. I picked up my coat and walked out.
The lift descended through all three security layers with the quiet hum of expensive machinery.
The receptionist nodded as I passed. The ficus was still dying.
I made another mental note. Possibly I would become the sort of Pakhan who sent memos about office plants.
Stranger things had happened. I'd married an omega who'd tried to stab someone with a steak knife in a Prague alley, and now I kept a nursery invoice in my inside pocket next to state secrets.
By the time the car pulled through the Surrey gates, the sun had given up entirely.
The house was lit from within, every window glowing gold against the dark of Winter.
The grounds were quiet. The Dobermans at the gatehouse had been joined by Fergus earlier that day, according to Gregor's patrol log, and one of them was now apparently answering to commands delivered in a frequency only Yorkshire terriers could produce.
I stepped through the front doors and handed my coat to the guard on duty. The house wrapped around me in the usual scents, but underneath all of it, was the sweetest champagne mixed with the depth of storm clouds.
Home.
I followed Maeve's voice to the den and stopped in the doorway.
She was on the sofa with her legs tucked under her, the phone pressed to her ear. Mac was asleep beside her. Fergus was curled into a tight, sweater-clad circle on her feet, having apparently decided that foot-warming was now part of his operational mandate.
"Mary, I know." Maeve's voice was soft and tired. "I miss you too."
I heard the faint, muffled sound of her sister crying on the other end of the line.
Boston seemed like the right decision. She craved distance, security, a university with a name that meant something, but distance was distance, and Mary was about to turn nineteen and alone in a country where she couldn't legally drink and everyone pronounced her fake name wrong.
"You're in Boston for a reason," Maeve said. "You're safe there."
“I'm trying to find a university to transfer to in England.” Mary's voice filtered through the phone, thick with tears. “I just want to be near you. Near Mac. Near everyone.”
"We'll talk about it. Give it a little more time." Maeve pressed her fingers to her temple. "I love you."
She ended the call and let the phone drop onto the cushion beside her. "She's so lonely," she said to the room at large.
Fergus opened one eye, assessed the emotional climate, and closed it again.
I stepped into the doorway. Maeve looked up, and the worry on her face didn't vanish but it changed. Her smile was the same one she'd given me from the altar in Las Vegas. Brilliant and slightly surprised, as if she still wasn't entirely convinced I'd show up.
She started to rise, but Mac made a small waking sound from the bassinet.
Maeve froze halfway between sitting and standing, caught between two gravitational pulls.
"Go on," she said. "He missed you too. Demanding little person. No idea where he gets it."
I crossed the room. Every part of me wanted Maeve in my arms, her scent in my lungs, the steady rhythm of her pulse against my mouth. But Mac had opened his eyes, dark and unfocused, and his fist was already waving, issuing commands and expecting compliance.
My son.
The words still had the power to stop me mid-stride.
I lifted him from the bassinet with both hands. He was heavier. More substance. More warmth. More certainty in the way he settled against my chest, as if this was where he'd been expecting to end up all along.
He smelled like milk, clean cotton, and Maeve.
"Hello, son," I murmured.
Mac caught my tie in one damp fist and pulled it until it was in his mouth.
I looked down at it. The silk was probably ruined. My son was used it as a teething aid. London had spent two days trying to take pieces from me and none of them had managed what this baby accomplished in one uncoordinated grab.
I lowered my forehead until it rested gently against his. His skin was impossibly soft.
"I am back," I told him. "You protected your mother well."
Behind me, Maeve made a small sound that she tried to disguise as clearing her throat.
"Careful," she said. "At this rate he's going to expect a salary. And benefits. Possibly a private pension and a place at Eton."
"He may have whatever he wants."
"We talked about this. Dangerous parenting."
I looked at her over Mac's head. "Did we have that conversation?"
"No, but I intended to. In a very stern tone. There were going to be bullet points."
"I look forward to the bullet points."
She crossed the room and slid one arm around my waist and the other around Mac, folding herself against us until all our scents tangled together with the clean, warm note of our son. I buried my face in her hair and let London fall away.
"I’m glad you're back," she murmured against my mouth.
I held her tighter. "Me too."
She kissed me. Not the careful kiss of a woman who was still learning to trust but with a kiss of a woman who had claimed her pack and her name and the life she'd built from the wreckage of the old one.
Fergus snored from the sofa, entirely unimpressed by the emotional reunion.
Mac tugged my tie again.
The ficus in London was probably still dying. The council was probably still arguing about the omega collateral ban in the corridors. There were supply routes to manage, enemies to monitor, an empire to run.
None of it mattered as much as this.