21. Rowan
ROWAN
Ihave spent my entire life obeying Ivan Kuznetsov.
From the moment he pulled me out from those fighting rings half-starved and already hardened by a life most children could never survive, my world had been simple.
Ivan gave me food, shelter, purpose, and in return I gave him everything else—my loyalty, obedience, and blood when it was required of me.
I have never once questioned an order.
Until Sofia.
Until now.
The private meeting takes place in Ivan’s study two days after my run-in with Volkov.
It’s within the same room I have stood in a thousand times before receiving orders without question.
I know every corner of this room like the back of my hand, every shadow, every blind spot, every man standing shoulder to shoulder with me while Ivan continues to lecture about the agenda for the first forty-five days of his plan.
The familiarity of it all makes what I’m about to do feel even more unnatural.
“I think you should reel back on your plans.”
The entire room seems to completely stop, the low murmur completely silencing instantly.
Dozens of eyes snap to me, all of them with varying degrees of disbelief.
Speaking out of line like this is punished severely when it comes from anyone else.
Ivan does not tolerate public doubt. Not from lieutenants or soldiers.
Those who have survived long enough in this organization know that without question.
But for me to do it?
For Ivan Kuznetsov’s blade to question his master?
It is unfathomable.
I keep my eyes completely focused on Ivan. If I look away, I will lose my nerve to do this. It is because I love Ivan that I am willing to risk losing his trust. I cannot allow him to fall on his own sword when there is a chance I can stop him from it.
My voice has a slight tremor when I speak again that I try desperately to flatten. “The last meeting with the Pact was… tense. They are already uneasy after your assassination attempt.”
I hate the little betrayal in my own throat. I have faced guns trained at me with steadier heartbeats. I have walked into rooms knowing one of us would be leaving with someone else’s blood on our hands and felt less exposed than I do now standing in Ivan’s study under the eyes of our own men.
Ivan studies me with quiet disbelief, as if trying to understand when his most loyal weapon had begun to go so rogue. He sits behind his desk with his hands folded calmly before him on the polished wood. Documents are spread across the desk, each of them outlining the early steps of his plan.
“What?” is all he says to me.
My hands flex at my sides. “Starting the first phases of your plan may intensify their scrutiny and provoke them to retaliate. I suggest you table it for the time being and focus on rebuilding your relations with them.”
I do not mention the apartment, or finding Dmitri Orlov bound and bloodied in his own kitchen. Or the fact that two of the four Iron Pact members are already working behind his back against him. That information is too volatile for this room.
His eyes move over me slowly, surveying what he has built with his own two hands and finding an unexpected flaw in the steel setting. Something forged for obedience that has developed, impossibly, a will.
Ivan leans back slightly in his chair. “We will not need to worry about the Iron Pact once I take over the government. They will be nothing more than an afterthought.”
Once, I would have taken those words and considered them nothing more than his unyielding ambition.
Of Ivan thinking ten steps beyond men too comfortable with the old ways to do so.
Refusing to settle for bribed officials and temporary influence, choosing instead to inhabit the system so completely that the state itself would become another room in his house is exactly what a man determined to leave his mark on the world would strive for.
There had been brilliance in that mind of his once.
There still is, I think.
But now it’s been overtaken by insatiable hunger, madness dressed well enough to pass for strategy with no one left at the helm to turn the ship around once the skies begin to darken.
Challenging a swell of this magnitude, going up against the Iron Pact as a whole in general, will end with only one conclusion.
Complete and utter destruction of the Kuznetsov Bratva.
Malyshko, Volkov, and Sokolov will make sure of it. They will not allow defection to go unpunished. Not even when one of their own is at the center of it.
I force myself not to lower my eyes. “You would be a fool to believe that, Pakhan.”
His eyes harden. “If you are not with me, Rowan, then you are against me.”
The room seems to tighten after that sentence.
My chest squeezes.
I feel seventeen years old in the wrong memory, small and filthy, and starving for approval, terrified of losing the only hand that has ever fed me. Back then, I mistook being chosen for being saved. Maybe that is the cruelest kind of shackle, the one forged out of gratitude.
I’m not prepared for the emotion that swells within me, the pieces of that little boy begging for affection from my master slowly rising from the dead.
They crawl out of every buried place inside me, starving and open mouthed.
A lifetime ago, one word from Ivan would crush even the smallest traces of rebellion within me.
It would be so easy to fall back into that familiar cage and allow the door to slam behind me.
“You know I am always with you,” I say.
His eyes narrow. “Then you will support me in this.”
Three months ago, I would. Without question.
But Sofia has changed me. She has taken those small embers within me and blown gently into them, coaxing them slowly into a fire I can no longer starve of oxygen.
“I can’t.” The words are barely above a whisper.
For the first time since this conversation started, true sadness fills his eyes.
“Then you leave me no choice but to exile you.”