Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Victor
The school disappears in the rearview mirror, and I have my phone out before we clear the first block. Dialing David.
He picks up on the first ring.
“What you got, boss?” he says, which means he is already aware of at least some of the situation.
“I need five men to guard the apartment,” I say.
“Our most trusted. Call in Stepan, Yuri, Boris, Denis, and—” I thought for a moment, who would Alex and Evie feel safest with?
Who wouldn’t the men watching recognize as one of mine?
“Bring in Vera, she will be the least inconspicuous to post inside Alex’s. ”
“Consider it done,” David says, and I can hear his fingers tapping away at the keyboard. “Where do you want them?”
“Tell them to go in separately, different entrances, different intervals. Plain clothes, nothing that would link them back to our organization. Anyone watching the building sees nothing more than visitors and residents moving about.” I keep my voice even and low, aware of Alex and Evie’s presence in the small space of the car.
“Two on exterior rotation – I want to know every move those Koshkin men make without them knowing they’re being tracked.
Three inside, one in the lobby, one in my apartment, and Vera goes in through the front door straight to Alex’s apartment once we get back.
She will be their guest, a friend visiting, staying with them while she’s in the city. ”
“Understood. Anything else?”
“Yes, arrange a dinner for the board. Tonight. Make it look impromptu and important — a summons that requires attendance. No specifics. Everyone,” I take the last turn toward our apartment building, “including Pavel.”
A pause. “And where will you be?”
“You and I have an errand to run while they are all pre-occupied.” I park the car, glancing at Alex. “Two hours. Meet me at north side, we go together. And pull up everything you’ve got on Pavel’s house.”
“His house?” There’s a tone of amusement in his voice now, “Why do I have a feeling we are going to play burglar?”
“Because we are,” I pause, looking in the rear view mirror at Evie, she’s looking out the window still, “but the only thing we are going to be taking is information.”
Another pause, shorter this time. “Victor. As soon as you don’t show up to the dinner Pavel’s—”
“By that point it won’t matter David.” My tone is pointed and serious now.
“Understood.”
I hang up the phone and slip it into my jacket pocket. Alex’s eyes are locked on me from the passenger's seat.
“Who are you?” Evie asks from the back seat. Not alarmed, but also not impressed. Her tone is that of a suspicious and somewhat judgmental tween.
I glance in the rearview mirror. She is looking at me with her arms crossed and one eyebrow lifted.
“Same man I’ve always been, Evie.”
“Uh-huh,” she says, “you know what I mean – who are you?”
Alex makes a sound beside me that she immediately tries to disguise as clearing her throat, but fails. I feel the corner of my mouth turn up as I meet her eyes. I can tell she’s still processing everything that’s happened, but the glimmer of humor lightens the mood in the car.
“Five guards,” she says. It’s not a question. Just her brain accepting what was happening around her aloud.
“I trust them completely,” I tell her. “Vera, she’s good. You’ll barely notice she’s there. She’ll stay out of your way, but will be there just in case anything else happens. If I’m not with you, she will be — at least until this is over.”
Her expression shifts, “And the others?”
“They’ll be there,” I reassured her. “Just in case.”
There's a moment of silence in the car as I check all the mirrors, looking for any signs of Koshkin’s watchdogs.
“I need you and Evie to stay inside tonight.” I meet Alex’s eyes again and then look at Evie in the rearview mirror. Impressing upon them the seriousness of my command. “You go nowhere without me.”
Alex swallowed harshly, turning to look at Evie, who only nodded in response.
Good.
“For how long?” Evie asked quietly.
“Hopefully, this will all be over by tomorrow night.” I tell her.
“What are you going to do?” Alex asks.
“What needs to be done,” I say coldly.
“That’s not much of an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have right now,” I say. “The less you know right now, the safer you both will be. What I need from you is to stay inside that building with my people.” I hold her gaze again. “Give me twenty-four hours. If I don’t sort it out by then, I’ll help you run.”
She looks at me for a long moment, searching my eyes for something to quell her own self-preservation. Finally, she says, “Okay. Twenty-four hours.”
With that, I get out of the car and open the back door for Evie, who climbs out with her backpack and looks up at me with those dark eyes.
“Are you coming up?”
“For a minute,” I say.
I walk them up. The hallway on the fourth floor is empty and quiet, and I wait for Alex to unlock the door and open it. I go in first, doing a quick sweep of the small space, before signaling them inside.
“Vera will be here within the hour,” I say, low enough that it’s just for her. “Don’t open the door for anyone until she gets here, she’ll knock three times and say her name. Anyone else comes to the door, you call me.”
She nods.
I look at her for a moment longer, the urge to kiss her nearly winning over rational thought. Then I look past her at Evie, who stands in the kitchen doorway watching us.
Not now, I tell myself. Not with Evie here.
“Stay inside,” I say instead. To both of them.
“You’ll come back, right?” Evie asks.
“Yes.” I tell her with absolute certainty. Then I slip out the door and wait to hear it lock behind me before heading down the stairway.
Pavel’s house is on the north side of the city, a brownstone and boring. He’s lived here for the last eleven years, and in all that time, I’ve only been inside of it a total of four.
I know the layout, though. I’d logged it in my memory the first time I’d visited the way I did with any new space.
But David knows it even better; he knows the security rotations, the spaces the cameras can’t see, the men Pavel keeps on post overnight — and from some mysterious source, he even knows that the window on the east side of the ground floor has a latch that doesn’t fully lock.
Using that information, we slip through the window while Pavel is at the board dinner I’d conveniently arranged to miss.
The politics of it should give us at least two hours of his absence, but the rotation schedule only gives us eighteen minutes to get in and out without being discovered by security.
“Search the office first,” I said. “Then the study.”
With a slight nod, David moves off into the dark house ahead of me, quiet and efficient.
If there was something to be found, we’d find it.
Pavel’s house smells like him — expensive cologne, old wood, and the dry musky scent of a house that prioritizes money over warmth.
No photographs hang on the walls in the hallway, no personal effects on the flat surfaces of the furniture; the entire space is dry, sterile, just like Pavel himself.
I've been here four times, and it’s never felt lived in. I feel that now more than ever.
We moved through the space without touching anything but the floor until we reached the office at the end of the hallway on the second story.
The desk, the filing cabinet, and the safe behind the obscene painting of some naked Roman goddess are locked — for all of about forty seconds once David gets his hands on them.
Inside the desk and filing cabinet were various documents, some to do with the household, others with Pavel’s various businesses. But in the safe, there is a stash of cash in multiple currencies, and a passport under a false name. Beneath those is a folder. Just one.
Plain. Manila. Unmarked.
I take it to the window, using the light from the streetlamp outside to look at its contents. Four pages, dated eight months ago. A contract between Pavel and Nikita Koshkin.
I read it once. Then read it again. The paper feels cold in my hands — eight months.
Pavel was offering the Koshkins full organizational partnership — territorial access to three eastern shipping routes through Rozovsky-controlled ports, and a board seat that had never been offered to any party outside the family in the history of the organization.
In exchange, the Koshkins offer political and financial support for Pavel’s transition to Pakhan, the votes of two allied families, and one additional security: Yarina Koshkin’s hand in marriage.
Instructions to secure the contract terms were listed on the third page: Locate Yarina Koshkin and return her unlawful ward, Evangeline Koshkin, to Nikita Koshkin’s custody.
I turn to the fourth page. This page, I noted, is slightly different from the rest — added later, signed by Pavel alone. A single paragraph. Pavel agrees to facilitate the marriage of Yarina Koshkin to himself upon her return to Koshkin custody, thereby securing the alliance.
My stomach drops. He was going to marry her.
Alex — Yarina — was the currency chosen to seal the deal with the devil. Not because he knows her, not because she matters to him, simply because she serves a function. And because in our world, she was considered property, Koshkin's property, to be used as Nikita sees fit.
I stand at Pavel’s window in the dark with his contract in my hands and feel cold anger settle in my chest. Growing by the second.
All this time, he has been moving every piece toward a single outcome — replace me as Pakhan and secure his future.
I hold the folder in my hands and think about Alex in that alleyway. The way she’d said I was the most dangerous thing that had come near them in three years, and think about how little she really knew. Danger was coming for her with or without me in their lives.
The real danger to her and Evie had been sitting across from me in board meetings the entire time.
It was clear that Pavel was responsible for Mikhail’s death in more ways than one.
He set him up. And I had accepted Pavel’s evidence against him — the communications, the account transfers, all of it carefully curated.
But instead of acting on it like Pavel had wanted, I scheduled a board meeting to address it reasonably, which forced Pavel to make his move early.
I would have given Mikhail the floor, let him address the accusations against him. After all, he has given me nothing but his loyalty since I became Pakhan. Pavel couldn’t allow that.
Pavel didn’t shoot him because he was a traitor. He shot him to prevent himself from being revealed as the traitor.
“I got what we came for,” I tell David quietly. “Put everything back the way we found it. Leave no trace.”
I put the folder back exactly as I found it.
David closes the safe and carefully replaces the painting.
Once the office is put back in order, we move back through the dark house and out into the night with four minutes to spare.
Neither of us speaks a word until we are outside.
Even then, it was brief and quiet. David doesn’t ask, and I don’t divulge what I’ve discovered until it is relevant to the conversation.
When we got back to the car that David had carefully hidden in the alleyway behind Pavel’s place, my thoughts wandered to my older brother, Boris, as we drove away.
Four years older than me, Boris was supposed to take over.
He had been prepared since childhood, while I learned everything I could in his shadow.
Ignorance in this world is a liability that I have never been willing to carry.
He died when I was twenty-six, and I took on what he left behind.
I spent the next seven years rebuilding something he would be proud of, something that would withstand the test of time.
I didn’t grieve properly until four years after his death, when I finally deemed the organization stable enough to afford the mental break. By year seven, everything had become functional like a well-oiled machine.
The Koshkins were among the families who attempted to take my organization by force during that process.
They never accepted me as Pakhan. They accepted Boris because he was firstborn, and when he died, they saw it as the opening for a future opportunity.
Pavel knows that, and he has used it to his advantage.
He grew up in this world beside us. Has sat across from me for the past seven years, called me Pakhan, shaken my hand, and watched my back.
Just to betray me at the first opportunity.
And he has given the Koshkins exactly what they needed: someone inside my organization willing to dismantle it from within.
The car moves through the dark city, I watch it out the window, and think of the contents of that folder, and of the woman who has spent thirty-seven months building a life outside of the one she was born into.
Hiding from the same people who want me gone.
I think about Evie’s hands and the scars they carry— what it would have required to put them there.
The cold in my chest grows beyond anger, shaping into fuel that will wait much longer to ignite.
I made two decisions then. The first is to organize a board meeting. Tomorrow. With every captain at hand, every allied family, and everyone who has a vote. I’ll send the call out first thing, so nobody has time to prepare to double-cross me before they walk through the door.
The second is that nobody— not Pavel, not Koshkin’s men, and certainly no one else — is going to touch Alex or Evie.
“Call everyone in,” I tell David. “Tonight. All of them.”
With the press of a few buttons, he is already dialing.
“Vsyo,” he says quietly.
I go back to looking out the window at the city, and think about what is coming. What Pavel’s face will look like when he walks through that door and understands that I know everything. The fear he will feel.
I have never been less afraid of anything in my life.