Sergei
PRESENT DAY
This city runs on information.
I built a network that tells me what’s happening before it happens. Who’s meeting who. What’s moving through my territory. Where it came from. Where it’s going.
That’s how I stayed alive long enough to take the head of the table. Nothing moves in this city without brushing my hand first.
Kirill sits across from me in my home office. He’s been my underboss for eleven years, and he knows better than to waste my time.
“Castellano moved two shipments through the West Side last week,” he says. “Same route. Same crew. He’s getting comfortable.”
“He’s getting sloppy.” I study the photograph. Three men. A loading dock. Timestamps that tell me Castellano’s operation hasn’t been tested in a while. “Let him. Comfortable men make comfortable mistakes.”
“Want to hit ’em?”
I catch the hopeful glint in Kirill’s eyes.
“No. Go on.”
“The Yee family is consolidating. Bought out two of the independents operating in Flushing.”
“Expected.” I set the report aside. “What about the ports?”
“Quiet.”
Good.
That means the pipeline is running the way I built it to run. No surprises. No mistakes. The men who survive in this city know where not to step.
I prefer reason. Blood is messier.
“And Baranov?” I ask like the name doesn’t make my stomach tighten.
“Close.”
“How close?”
“Mikhail had another episode last week. His doctor, the private one, not the one his people know about, is apparently recommending hospice within the year. Possibly sooner.”
I nod slowly, giving away nothing.
It’s just news.
“His people are already repositioning,” Kirill adds.
Mikhail Baranov. Sixty-two years old and built like a man who fully intended to live to be one hundred through sheer will alone. I’ve watched him operate for fifteen years. Sat across from him at the five-family meetings and pretended he was just another family head.
He’s not.
I don’t trust him. Don’t like him. And quite frankly, his death is something I will quietly celebrate. The feeling is mutual.
He has a dying empire and no male heir.
Only a daughter.
I reach for my coffee and let the smooth, rich flavor slide over my tongue.
“The legitimate holdings are already showing her fingerprints,” Kirill says. “Three of the subsidiary companies had management restructuring in the last two months. The construction arm renegotiated two contracts she apparently flagged as underperforming. No one’s told Mikhail.”
“He knows.”
“Probably.” Kirill almost smiles. “He hasn’t stopped it.”
I say nothing. There is nothing to say about that, nothing that doesn’t edge into my territory I do not talk about.
“One more thing.”
I look up and catch his reluctance before he says the last part.
"Yuri Baranov landed at JFK this morning. One-way from Moscow."
I look at Kirill.
He looks back.
My expression doesn't change. I've trained it not to. I could be standing in an inferno and my face would give away nothing. Instead, I watch Kirill and read his irritation with this new complication.
Yuri Baranov. Mikhail’s nephew. Raised in Moscow.
Educated in violence and leverage the way all the old families educate their heirs.
I know who and what he is. He’s thirty-three, intelligent, and has spent the last decade building relationships with the Moscow bratva’s senior leadership.
He’s been watching New York from a distance for years.
And now he's here.
He's not visiting.
“Does Mikhail know?”
Kirill slowly shakes his head. “Not that I can find. They could be keeping it close, but I have a feeling his nephew is paying him a surprise visit.”
Yuri didn’t fly to New York to pay his respects. He’s assessing. I knew this was a possibility.
A succession war. Not coming. Already beginning.
"Keep eyes on him," I say. "Everything—who he meets, where he goes, what he orders at dinner. I want to know his operational contacts in the city within forty-eight hours."
"Already started."
Kirill gets to his feet and leaves my office without another word.
I turn my chair and stare out the bulletproof glass window of my brownstone.
The street is quiet. Idyllic. My neighbors are all rich upper-crust people who host dinner parties and schmooze with the movers and shakers in the city.
They know me as the quiet businessman with an impressive real estate portfolio.
Some of them probably suspect I’m not exactly what I appear to be. None of them are stupid enough to ask.
I get up and leave the office. My guards follow me down the hall.
“No,” I say.
I go downtown and slide into the chair across from Nelson.
“Sir?” He sits up a little straighter.
“I’ll take over.”
He frowns, then nods.
I’ve done this before. Nelson gets to his feet. “Call me when you want me back.”
He doesn’t wait for me to respond.
Nelson is one of three men I have following Sofia Baranova. He looks like any other average American guy. Some days he wears a suit. Other days he’s homeless on the street. I’ve chosen him and the others because they blend in. Sofia has no idea they’re there. She’s watched twenty-four hours a day.
Her men watch her. Mine watch her and all of them.
Mine are better. If one of them gets spotted, he’s punished for it. But the report still tells me something useful. Sofia is sharper than she used to be. She notices what her world trained her to notice. She just hasn’t learned yet that the best eyes never look like eyes at all.
Then I hear her voice, and my body answers before I can think. She’s coming out of the coffee shop she visits almost every day.
At twenty-one, she moves like she owns the sidewalk.
Dark hair loose over her shoulders. Dark jeans today.
And a blue sweater against the early spring chill.
Ankle booties with a chunky heel. She always wears heels like that.
No stilettos. Nothing she can’t run in. She hasn’t worn a shoe she couldn’t escape in since she was eighteen.
She’s carrying her coffee in one hand, laptop bag slung over her shoulder.
To anyone else, she looks casual. But there’s a knife in that bag and pepper spray disguised as lipstick in the outside pocket.
My girl wants the world to think she’s fearless.
I know better. She’s ready. Almost as if she wants someone to try her just to prove she can handle it.
She could have hidden behind walls and guards.
Instead, she taught herself to survive the open street.
She took what was done to her and made herself harder to touch. I should not admire that as much as I do.
Her guard steps forward and falls into step as she starts down the sidewalk toward the library. I put my phone to my ear and follow.
She looks like her mother.
That is the part I never brace for.
Sofia’s got her mother’s dark hair. Her mother’s features. But those eyes are all Mikhail. Icy blue. I know her eyes. I see them in my dreams.
She walks with the confidence of a woman who knows she’s powerful.
She’s filled out, not as thin as she used to be.
I know she spends an hour in the gym every day.
She runs. Trains. Three years of martial arts and she hasn’t missed a day yet.
She has had to get a new trainer. When I was told the first guy touched her, I dumped his body in the Hudson.
She had clear rules: no touching off the mat.
He touched her.
He died.
She walks into the library, her guard taking a seat at a table by the door. I take a table across the room with a perfect view of her. The space smells like coffee. The university students drink it like water.
I watch her open her laptop, sip her coffee, then lick foam from her lips. My body reacts. I shut it down. I've been doing that for longer than I want to examine. The promise was never supposed to feel like this.
It still isn’t enough.
She scans every room she enters. Clocks every exit. Sizes up every stranger. I have watched her do it a hundred times from a dozen different angles. She has never once looked at me. I’ve made certain of that. Always staying hidden and out of sight.
But I want to be the one thing in her world she doesn't have to be afraid of finding.
She places her laptop bag on the table just like she always does. I know she’s going to turn it so she can slip her hand inside and grab that knife if she needs it. I also know her phone will go into her bra in three, two...and there it goes.
But she’s not done yet. She only studies with her hair up. This is the part I like. She pulls a clip from the outside pocket of her bag. Without thinking, she twists it up and clips it on top of her head.
Now she’s ready. She’ll focus on her screen. About every sixty seconds, she’ll look up and survey the room, but she won’t see me. I reach behind me, grab the first book I can reach, and open it with my head down. She lives by patterns now, and I know every one of them.
She has no idea a war is brewing. When her father Mikhail dies—and Mikhail will die soon—Sofia will be the primary obstacle between Yuri and everything he came for.
She is the legitimate heir. She is the one standing between Yuri and the Baranov empire.
He will not negotiate with her. He will not maneuver around her.
Men like Yuri eliminate obstacles and take what they want.
The clean move for me is to let it happen.
Yuri taking the Baranov empire destabilizes an entire sector of the city. That kind of chaos creates opportunity. Assets become available. Alliances shift. A Baranov power vacuum could hand me power that I don’t have to kill to take. In theory, I wouldn’t have to do anything except take over.
Letting Yuri replace Mikhail could be seen as efficient. But he’s a wild card, so even if he seized the Baranov power seat and I found and exploited his weaknesses, that doesn’t mean I’d be able to easily keep what I take. His ties in Moscow run deep.
The smart move is to do nothing, to prefer nothing, to let the heir and the cousin battle it out. I should want that more than I do.
She’s frowning at something on her screen.
Whatever problem she’s working through, she won’t stop at the first answer.
Sofia keeps pressing until she finds the right one.
That alone tells me she won’t be easy to steer once her father dies.
She’ll push back on the friendly alliance we currently have.
Friendly as in I won’t slice one of their throats if they don’t set foot in my territory.
Sofia could be harder to control initially, but I believe she would be easier to work with in the long run. Yuri would be easier to remove but dangerous to work with, especially if Moscow sends reinforcements. Pros and cons to each.
Please, please promise me you’ll keep her safe.
The ghostly words flit through my mind.
I promised her.
The practical move is distance from Sofia Baranova. The problem is that eight years ago, I gave my word to a dying woman. And there is nothing practical about that.