15. Timur
TIMUR
Ipull my car into Morin's driveway and sit for a minute before I cut the engine.
His place is modest compared to mine, a single-story brick house on a quiet street that he bought outright with cash six years ago.
He doesn't like debt and he doesn't like his neighbors to know how wealthy he is, which are two things I've always respected about him even when everything else about the man makes me want to put my fist through a wall right now.
The past few weeks have been difficult, but Morin's hasty decisions have put us both in danger.
I can't imagine how I'd feel right now if I'd have walked into that clinic to hear he didn't make it.
Morin and I aren't necessarily on the best terms, but he's still my best friend.
And I still owe him. This welfare check is more than just obligation as his boss.
I walk up the front steps and knock, and his maid, Betya, answers the door in her usual way, pulling it open just wide enough to see who's standing there before she commits to letting them in. She smiles and closes the door before I hear the chain slide through the lock and the door reopens.
"He's in the living room," she says. "Would you like some tea?" She steps back and I pass by her, nodding.
"Thank you, Betya, tea would be nice... Is he doing alright?"
She chuckles and shakes her head. "Incorrigible like a child, if you ask me. But he's healing nicely. I've already changed his bandages for today."
"Good, good..." I take a few tentative steps closer to the living room and turn back to her. "On second thought, hold the tea. Just let me talk to him."
Her head bobs as she closes the door behind me and disappears toward the kitchen while I walk down the short hallway to the living room.
Morin's stretched out on his couch with his laptop balanced on his hips and his bad arm resting on a pillow beside him.
The sling is off, which tells me he's either healing faster than Levin predicted or he's ignoring medical advice. Knowing Morin, it's the second one.
"You look comfortable," I say as I drop into the armchair across from him.
"I'm bored out of my mind is what I look." He shifts the laptop and winces slightly. "I've been sitting on this couch for two weeks. If Betya brings me one more bowl of soup, I'm gonna throw it at the wall."
"She's taking care of you." I chuckle, glancing at what's on his screen. I can't see it well from this angle, but it looks like a video. I told him I'd be coming by to go over some new intel he has on the Mirovs, and it appears as if he's been prepping for our discussion.
"She's smothering me... I need out of this place." For a housekeeper, Betya sounds like she's acting more like a mother, which isn't a bad thing. Morin could use one of those.
He looks better than he did at the clinic. The color's back in his face and his eyes are sharp again, not glassy with pain the way they were when I last saw him. The bandage on his shoulder is smaller now, just a square of white tape visible under the collar of his shirt.
"How's the arm?" I ask.
"Getting there. Levin says another two weeks before I can use it properly, but it's functional.
" He demonstrates by lifting his left hand to chest height and rotating his wrist. The motion is stiff but controlled.
"I'm not going to be swinging on anyone for a while, but I can hold a phone and work a keyboard. "
"Which you've been doing...?"
"Which I've been doing." He grumbles as he sets the laptop on the coffee table between us, turning the screen toward me. "I talked to Rostik yesterday. Got him to walk me through exactly what happened when those guys jumped him."
"And?" By the time Kaz and I showed up, he was nothing but a heap on the ground. We got Levin to look in on him, but the damage was done. He was pretty well beaten up.
"He's certain they were Mirov's crew. One of them called the other by name during the beating. He didn't catch the full name but he caught enough. It was a Mirov soldier, no question."
I lean forward and look at the screen. Morin has a series of notes typed up, timestamped and organized like he's building a case. Dates, locations, names where he has Mirov movement, and a summary of Rostik's account of the attack. It's thorough, which is Morin at his best.
"That lines up with what we already suspected," I say. "Dugan does the drive-by on you and Dracon, and then a few days later, they go after Rostik to cripple our fight card. They're hitting us from multiple angles." I swipe a hand down my face and sigh.
"It's coordinated. This isn't some hotheaded kid lashing out. Dugan pulled the trigger on me, sure, but someone told him to..." He sits up and winces as he does so but then says, "Mirov is coming for us, Bruh, and we gotta fight back."
He clicks through a few folders and opens a video file.
The footage is shaky, shot from what looks like a parked car across the street from a restaurant.
Through the window I can see a table with two men seated at it.
One of them is Victor Mirov. He's unmistakable with that silver hair and angular frame.
But the other takes me a second to place.
When he turns his head toward the window, it clicks into place.
The image isn't as clear as Mirov's reflective head of hair, but there are enough details there for me to recognize the man.
But I still can't see why Federov would be meeting with Mirov, anyway.
He's never had a sit down with Roman like this, though, my brother never had to try to woo bettors in for the kill.
"When was this taken?" I ask.
"I shot it myself four days ago from the parking lot across the street."
I watch the footage play. Victor and Federov are eating dinner together, talking casually. At one point, Federov pulls out his phone and shows Victor something on the screen, and Victor nods slowly before reaching across the table to shake his hand.
"That doesn't look like casual," I grumble as it dawns on me what this means.
Federov may be placing bets at Mirov's fights, but that's not our problem.
The problem is that Kazimir's talent is waning.
When Federov gets bored of the Kuzin ring, he'll move all his assets over to Mirov and others will follow.
"It's not. That's a deal being made."
I sit back and stare at the frozen frame on the screen. Federov is our highest-paying bettor. He's been with us for years, attending every invitational, placing six-figure bets that anchor the entire pool. If he's sitting across a table from Victor Mirov shaking hands, it means he's already gone.
But something about the video nags at me.
The quality is grainier than what Morin usually produces, and the angle seems off, like the framing was adjusted after the fact.
I lean closer to the screen and study the edges of the image, looking for anything that doesn't sit right.
But while I'm the one Roman relies on for tech expertise, this isn't my forte.
I can hack, and I can run security, but I can't necessarily spot a fake.
"The resolution on this is rough," I tell him, not really wanting to confess that I think he faked this video, but why would he fake anything? Why get us all worked up about Federov leaving if he's not? Morin's on our side.
"I was shooting through a car window at night across a four-lane road. It's not going to look like a Hollywood production, man." Morin shuts the laptop, effectively cutting my view off, but it doesn't stop my scrutiny.
"The color balance looked off too. Federov's jacket shifts between gray and blue depending on the frame."
Morin gives me a flat look. "Those were compression artifacts from the export.
I had to shrink the file to send it to my own server.
Tim, I was sitting in that parking lot for three hours waiting for them to show up.
I shot this myself. You want me to describe the fucking appetizers?
" He's starting to sound pissed at me, and I get it. If he didn’t believe what I told him when it was my work, I'd be pissed too.
Sort of how Kazimir keeps doubting me about Kira when I've told him I checked her out.
I hold up a hand. "Alright. I'm just being thorough."
"Be thorough about the Mirovs, not about my camera work."
He's irritated and I can see it in the way he purses his lips, but I let it go because he's not wrong. I'm nitpicking details when the big picture is staring me in the face. Victor Mirov is courting our biggest bettors.
"There's more." Morin reaches over to his end table and grabs a stack of papers, spreading them out on the table between us.
"Federov has moved money three times in the past month to accounts I've traced back to Mirov-affiliated shell companies.
The amounts are significant. We're talking mid-six figures total. "
I scan the spreadsheets. The transfers are dated and the amounts are consistent with what Federov typically moves through our betting pools, which means he's not just diversifying.
He's redirecting the bulk of his action away from us.
If this is happening right under our noses, what is Mirov doing behind our backs?
This isn't the type of shit he can keep hiding.
"Where did you get these?" I ask.
"I have contacts at two of the banks Federov uses. They owe me favors."
"These contacts are reliable?" I pinch the bridge of my nose and sigh. Roman isn't going to like this.
"I've used them before and they've never been wrong."
This is all bad. All of it. Victor Mirov is a cancer spreading through our organization and he has to be stopped.
We have to go to Federov right away and find out what sort of deal the man has made with our enemy and why.
And we need to put an end to these lazy, underhanded tactics to cut us out of our profits.
"When you're healthy," I say, and I meet his eyes to make sure he understands the weight of what I'm about to say, "I want you to shut the Mirovs down. Whatever it takes, however you have to do it. We can't afford to waste any more time. You have to end this now."
Morin doesn't smile at my orders, though I half expect him to, what with his thirst for blood most days. He nods and says, "I'll have a plan ready before the sling comes off."
"Just keep it clean..." I slowly stand.
"You have my word."
We talk for a few more minutes about logistics, timelines, the number of men he'll need, and where to pull them from without leaving our other operations exposed.
It's the kind of conversation I've had too many times in my life.
The cold arithmetic of planning a murder.
And every time I have this conversation, I feel a piece of myself go numb.
I wasn't raised to be a killing machine, but that's what this life has made me at times.
When we're finished, Betya walks me out and I climb in my car feeling less enthusiastic than I did when I arrived. His news took the wind out of my sails, and it takes me the entire drive home to shake the nagging feeling I can't quite pin down.
Morin has never given me bad intel before.
Not once in twenty years. He's meticulous, almost obsessive about the quality of his work, which is why the rough footage bothers me.
It doesn't match the standard he holds himself to.
But I'm probably overthinking this because I'm tired and stretched thin and looking for problems where there aren't any.
I have to let him deal with this and focus on keeping my tasks caught up so Roman doesn't have another reason to be pissed.
I let it go by the time I pull into my driveway. When I walk through the front door, Kira is pacing back and forth between the kitchen and the living room doorway with her arms crossed over her chest. She stops when she sees me and turns, and I can tell immediately that something is on her mind.
"Hey," I say, setting my keys on the stand. "You alright?"
"I'd like to talk to you about something." She steps forward, picking at her fingernails. She looks worried, or maybe scared, and I immediately want to fix that problem for her.
"Okay." I shrug off my jacket and hang it on the hook by the door. "Can it wait an hour? I'd like to take you to dinner."
She cocks her head, acting confused. "Dinner?" Her tongue draws over her bottom lip and then she bites it, looking like whatever is going through her head is causing her a great deal of internal conflict.
"Out. Just the two of us. There's a place I think you'd like.
" I take her hands and clasp them in mine.
I could really use a good evening with her, and we can talk as much as she wants over dinner.
Maybe she's going to ask to go home again, and maybe this time, she'll give me a straight answer about being a part of my life after all of this is over.
"Out as in outside this house?"
"That's generally what out means," I say, chuckling.
She unfolds her arms and stares at me for a few seconds, pulling back from me. I can see the conflict working through her, the thing she wanted to talk about competing with the thing I just offered.
Almost four weeks she's been inside these walls, but I can see how much she wants something different.
"I mean, I don't have anything to wear to a restaurant," she says, which isn't a no.
It makes my eager heart all the more hungry for her attention.
And the weight on her shoulders is slowly lifting, taking her worries with it.
"Well, I can have Sonya bring you a dress... Maybe something pretty in blue?"
Kira's eyes bat and her lips curl into a smile. "You really want to take me out?"
I take her hand again, pulling her toward me, then press a kiss to her knuckles.
"You aren't a prisoner, Kira. You're my guest. I told you that a long time ago.
And it's time I took you out on this town to show the world how intoxicatingly beautiful you are.
Would you join me?" I dip my head to bow from the shoulders as she beams.
"Yes..." She pauses and sighs. "But we can talk over dinner?"
"About anything you wish... Go shower. I'll get Sonya to bring you something nice."
I watch her saunter off, catching every sway of her hips and the way she smiles over her shoulder as she ducks into her bedroom, and my body feels supercharged. Whatever it is she's going to talk to me about, I can handle it.
If she asks to go home, maybe—just maybe—I'll take her there myself tonight.
Without even telling my brother who she is.
Sergei will have to get fucked if he thinks he can come after us for his stupid mistake.
It was his fault he sent her to Mirov territory.
He should never have run a secret op without telling us.
Now Kira is mine. And with a smile like that after a dinner invitation, imagine how she'll feel when she learns I want to keep her around permanently, maybe as my wife.