Chapter 14 Maksim
MAKSIM
It’s no secret that part of the Bratva has been shifting beneath me like cracks forming over a frozen lake.
It’s not the young bloods. They’re fine.
Better than fine, actually. The ones who came up with me, the ones I’ve personally molded when I took over after my father passed, they understand that the world doesn’t run on brute strength anymore.
Not in this day and age with modern technology and instant gratification at the forefront.
You don’t hold power by pointing a gun at someone’s head anymore.
You hold it by knowing the code to their vault and taking their things for ransom, the numbers for their offshore accounts and draining them dry for fucking up, the skeleton in their second cousin’s closet and weaponizing it against them.
These days, it’s all about digital information, control and pressure from outside in order to force people back into their places like the good little cattle they are.
The new generation gets it. They’ve grown up with it, understand that we aren’t just a syndicate anymore that takes out hits on our enemies to get what we want.
We’re a shadow institution, a government structure beneath the actual government, and power now lies in leverage against our enemies still alive, not bodies we accumulate in our wake as we tear through families.
My own problems are in the old guard. My father’s men.
The ones who still believe loyalty is built on broken bones and laundering money through shady deals that attract the attention of local PDs.
The ones who spat at my digital expansion initiatives five years ago and snorted at the cyber-forensics I instilled when I took Matvey in, all the while asking me how much digital currency was backed by real-life gold.
They don’t adapt. They refuse to. In their minds, the Bratva they pledged to die for died with my father. Following me? I’m just the steward of a corpse now buried six feet under.
I’ve tried everything—reason, threats, bribes. Hell, I even tried brute force at one point with quiet executions of the worst offenders and disappearances disguised as retirement. I’ve spilled blood to hold the line and still, the rot grows.
What’s worse is I know exactly who is at the center of it. Anton. Our Bratva’s obshchak.
Sidorov’s always cloaked his resistance in faux diplomacy.
His manners are tailored, his actions pristine and well managed, but underneath it all, he’s the last of the wolves who thinks a snarling show of teeth is how you win wars.
He’s never hidden what side of the line he stands on—tradition, brutality, and obedience.
All hallmarks of my father.
He wears the role of treasurer well. Too well, sometimes, but I see through it. He’s not counting rubles like he should be. He’s weighing the cost of rebellion and figuring out whether a coup is really worth the trouble it’s going to cause in the long-term.
For the time being, I can’t root him out just yet because I’m certain I’ll end up tearing my entire Bratva in half due to loyalties already being tested and frayed.
The fracture is already forming in the whispers behind locked doors.
In the sudden silences when I enter a room and they think they’re being covert.
Usually, I have nothing that can be held over me.
But now Ivy is in the middle of it and I’m being looked at as housing a potential liability.
She shouldn’t be here, that much is clear. That much I know.
She was supposed to be background noise that no one ever noticed, an American tutor playing house with Sergei’s daughter while he consumed himself with our business and our projects. She was never supposed to be a liability, let alone a variable I needed to keep easily contained.
For reasons unknown, someone pulled her background information before she ever set foot in Moscow, and that changes everything.
It means whoever is holding interest in her is now my number-one suspect. The coincidence of her coming over here and starting a new life and the timing of my Bratva splintering is too much for me not to look into.
I find Matvey down in his workroom in the basement, in his natural habitat. He’s hunched over one of his many curved screens while clicking away at hundreds of still frames. The faint whir of cooling fans fills the air, accompanied by the rapid click-click-click of his mouse.
Blue light spills from the screen, bouncing off his glasses, turning his lenses into mirrored pools that hide his eyes, but I know better than to mistake the reflection for distraction.
Matvey’s gaze never stops moving, darting from screengrab to screengrab, frame by frame, picking apart still images from security feeds like he’s conducting surgery.
Every so often, his fingers flick across the keys, magnifying a section of grainy footage, running enhancement filters, then discarding the image just as quickly.
He works with the focus of a sniper, calm, deliberate, and absolutely patient.
I lean down on my hands next to him, wrapping my fingers around the edge of his desk, and focus on the screen too. “Find anything?”
“If I did, Pakhan,” he replies without looking up, “I would’ve told you by now.”
My lip twitches.
Most men would be sweating under the weight of my shadow this close to them, but Matvey isn’t most men.
Outside of Lev, he’s the only other person in my inner circle who can speak to me this casually and live to do so.
It’s not defiance. It’s simply the fact that his value far outweighs the need for ceremony.
I rely on him too much to waste time on intimidation games, anyway.
Plus… I usually do find his quiet, snarky attitude amusing.
“So,” I drawl. “You’re telling me you’ve gone through every second of footage from the cafe and still have nothing?”
“Not nothing. Just nothing you’ll like.” His eyes glint behind the glass when he turns to look at me.
I arch a brow. “Meaning?”
He swivels in his chair, typing in a few commands until the still frames start to play in slow motion.
A grainy, timestamped video of the street outside the cafe fills the screen.
He freezes it at a particular moment when two men pull up in a blacked out vehicle, the window rolled down on the door facing the cafe.
“Watch,” Matvey says.
The playback begins at normal speed, the midday traffic crawling by, people bundled in coats against the bite of Moscow’s winter. Then he slows it to half speed, then a quarter.
That’s when I see it. From the dark interior, a pair of binoculars emerges. They glint in the light for a fraction of a second before angling toward the cafe’s front windows, narrowing in on something, or someone, inside.
The footage keeps moving forward, frame by frame. A second figure inside the car leans forward. His arm extends through the gap in the window. In his hand, a short-barreled weapon.
The cafe’s window explodes inward in stuttering bursts of violence, glass spraying across tables. Patrons scatter. Chairs topple. A woman in a pale coat goes down hard. The air inside must’ve been full of screaming, though here it’s silent, just the faint hum of Matvey’s computer equipment.
Thirteen seconds. That’s how long it lasts.
Thirteen seconds of chaos before Roman, out of frame until now, returns fire from inside the shop.
The muzzle of his gun flashes, strobing as he takes cover when shots are returned.
Three and a half seconds later, the black vehicle jerks forward and peels away, disappearing around a blind corner up the block and out of view of the feed.
Matvey freezes the frame on the last visible glimpse of the car—the back bumper, a partial plate blurred by motion.
He sits back, his chair creaking. “I don’t think Roman’s contact was the intended target.”
That earns him my full attention. “Interesting theory. Why do you say that?”
He exhales through his nose, swiveling the monitor so it’s angled toward him again.
“Because I pulled the metadata from a private forum on the dark web. One of my better honeypots caught it before it vanished. Someone bought a profile dump on the tutor. Thorough. Deep scan. We’re talking employment history, travel logs, medical files, even school records from high school and college.
It was a full digital scrape. That’s not a background check for a job. That’s a dossier for a mark.”
My gaze hardens. “You’re suggesting someone was watching her during this incident.”
He shrugs. “Why else would they check to see who was in the cafe, fire off rounds, and then not stick around to take out Roman? None of it adds up if you consider Roman’s contact was the intended target.
If that were the case, they did a sloppy job.
They could’ve gone around the alleyway, taken the back entrance, and dealt with him quietly.
Everyone who visits that cafe knows the owner stays tucked in there during business hours. ”
I glance at the frozen frame again, my mind turning over every piece of information as he speaks. It’s certainly an interesting theory, though one that doesn’t quite stick.
What value would killing Ivy have?
Sergei would replace her by the week’s end. Going by her family history that I’d seen, she’s not in contact with her immediate family and only has three friends from college that she regularly speaks to.
None of whom come from politically driven backgrounds, or families, that would have enough pull to make her disappearance—or death—a national sensation. Killing her would be a complete waste of time.
Matvey leans back in his chair, tilting his head toward me.
“All I’m saying is that if she was the target, someone went to an awful lot of trouble to confirm she was in that building.
They made a whole big show of trying to take her out without actually following through.
That tells me it wasn’t about taking her out.
It was about flushing her into the open for some reason. ”
“Why, though?” I ask.