CHAPTER 8
LIAM P.O.V.
The warehouse reeked of fear and piss, a familiar scent.
Oleg Volkov was a whimpering mess at my feet, blood oozing from his mouth where my fist had connected with his jaw.
Vasily and Sergei stood guard, their faces impassive, shadows against the dim, industrial lighting.
The silence was broken only by Oleg’s desperate, ragged gasps.
“Where is he?” I snarled, my voice a low, guttural rumble that vibrated in the concrete floor. “Konstantin. Where the fuck is he hiding, you rat?”
Oleg shook his head, a pathetic, frantic movement. “I don’t... I don’t know. He... he moves. Always moving.” His eyes, wide and bloodshot, darted between me and my men, searching for an escape that wasn’t there.
I kicked him, a brutal, precise strike to his bruised ribs.
He cried out, a pathetic, reedy sound that grated on my nerves.
This sniveling fuck wasn’t going to hold out long.
He was weak. All of Volkov’s pawns were weak.
Except, perhaps, my brother. Dmitri. Even in his insanity, he’d had a twisted kind of strength.
A strength born of his master’s insidious lies.
The memory of Dmitri’s eyes as the bullet tore through him, the shock, the betrayal, still clawed at my gut. And Rose’s face, etched with horror, condemning me. You broke me. Her words. They were a fucking brand on my soul. A monster, she saw. Good. Let her. She was mine to break, mine to keep.
“You’re lying,” I pressed, kneeling, grabbing a handful of Oleg’s greasy hair, yanking his head back. His neck was stretched taut, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Konstantin brought you into this game. He trained you. You’re his fucking errand boy. You know where he is. Tell me.”
“He... he’s old. He relies on others. He doesn’t expose himself,” Oleg whimpered, tears mixing with the blood on his chin. “He uses... proxies. Like Dmitri.”
My grip tightened, pulling harder. “Dmitri was his brother. My brother. Not a proxy.” The words were sharp, edged with a cold, hard certainty that had, until recently, been absolute. But Rose’s journal, her quiet probing, had planted a seed of doubt, a festering suspicion I hated.
Oleg’s eyes widened, a new kind of terror dawning.
“No. No, Dmitri was always... a tool. A means. Konstantin... he built him. Molded him from the shadows after... after what happened to his family years ago. He found him, a scared boy, broken. Filled his head with lies about your father, about the Morozov name. He promised him revenge, power.”
A cold, sickening dread snaked through my veins, coiling around my heart.
What Oleg was saying, it mirrored the fragmented, insane ramblings Dmitri had spewed in his final moments.
And it echoed the fucking suspicion Rose had stirred in me, the one I’d fought to ignore.
The truth I already half-knew, half-feared.
“What happened to his family years ago?” My voice was low, dangerous.
Oleg choked, struggling against my hold.
“The... the raid. When your father rose to power. Konstantin orchestrated it. Blamed it on your family’s rivals.
Used the chaos to position your father, and simultaneously, to isolate Dmitri, to feed his resentment.
He wanted... he wanted to weaken the Morozov line from within.
To play you against each other. For the throne. ”
My head reeled. The raid. The one that solidified my father’s brutal reign.
The one that, according to the official story, had been a bloody turf war.
But Konstantin... he had been there. A consigliere, a respected elder.
Always in the shadows, always whispering in my father’s ear. An adviser. A fucking mentor.
“You’re telling me Konstantin Volkov engineered the raid that put my father on the throne, and then used my brother, a boy he twisted, to undermine us for decades?
” My voice was flat, devoid of emotion, a chilling calm descending over me.
This wasn’t just betrayal. This was a goddamn symphony of deceit. A generational lie.
Oleg nodded frantically, tears streaming down his face. “Yes! He’s a monster. He believes the Morozovs are weak. That you are weak. That you are unfit to rule. He always intended to replace you. To take it all.”
The anger that had been a raging inferno in my gut solidified into a cold, diamond-hard resolve.
Konstantin Volkov hadn’t just betrayed me.
He had orchestrated my entire fucking life.
My father’s rise. Dmitri’s hatred. My own path, forged in the fires of vengeance, had been a puppet show, directed by a ghost. And Dmitri, my brother, the man I had put a bullet in...
he had been nothing more than a manipulated pawn.
The weight of it was staggering. Everything I believed, every brutal choice, every act of ruthless power, had been part of a grand design, a tapestry woven by an unseen hand.
The rage now was something new, something deeper than mere retribution.
It was a primal scream for my stolen agency, my stolen truth.
I released Oleg, letting his body slump to the floor, gasping for air. He was a broken man, useless to me now, but his words had set my world on fire.
“Get him to the secure facility,” I ordered Vasily, my voice raw, tight. “He’s no longer useful alive. Make sure he tells us every last detail about Konstantin’s network before he’s... disposed of.”
Vasily nodded, his face grim. He knew the implications of what I’d just heard. We all did. This wasn’t just a war. It was a damn purge.
I turned, walking away from the whimpering man, my boots heavy on the concrete.
The drive back to the penthouse was a blur.
My mind raced, connecting the dots. Rose’s obsession with the documents, her endless questions, the way she had looked at me when I told her about Volkov’s manipulations.
She had seen it. Or parts of it. She had been unraveling the lie even as I clung to my righteous rage.
The thought of her, tucked away in my gilded cage, writing her truths, suddenly shifted. She wasn’t just documenting my sins. She was deciphering the fucking blueprint of my enemy. She was doing what I, the all-powerful Pakhan, had been too blind, too consumed by inherited vengeance, to see.
I burst through the penthouse door, the familiar opulence suddenly feeling like a gilded prison.
My men, scattered throughout the sprawling space, stiffened at my entrance, sensing the shift in my demeanor, the raw fury radiating off me.
I ignored them, my gaze sweeping the room, zeroing in on the closed door to the master bedroom.
She was in there. My rose. My captive. My unwilling accomplice. And, goddammit, my unintended prophet.
I threw open the bedroom door. She was at her antique writing desk, just as I’d imagined, hunched over her journal, a scattering of old, yellowed documents around her.
The same damn documents I’d dismissed as trinkets.
Her head snapped up, her eyes wide, startled, reflecting the pale light of the desk lamp.
They were still swollen, shadowed, but now, a flicker of defiance burned within them. A fierce, intelligent fire.
The sight of her, so fragile and yet so unyielding, a small figure armed only with a pen and a truth I was just now fully grasping, sent a tremor through me.
My rage, instead of consuming her, twisted into something else.
A desperate hunger. A possessive need to bridge the chasm.
To make her understand that we were tied together in this bloody labyrinth.
Her journal lay open. I could practically smell the ink, the truth she was pouring onto those pages. I stalked towards her, my heavy boots thudding on the plush rug. Her eyes followed me, wary, but unblinking. There was no fear in them now, not entirely. Just a fierce, assessing gaze.
“What have you found, Rose?” My voice was rough, low. Not a demand, not entirely. A challenge.
She stared at me, then her gaze flickered to the documents.
“The truth,” she said, her voice soft, but edged with steel.
“Or at least, a version of it you haven’t seen yet.
” She pushed a crumpled, yellowed parchment across the desk.
It was the family tree fragment I had seen a hundred times, dismissed as ancient history.
“Dmitri Anatolyevich Morozov. Date of death. Years ago. Not a birth date.”
My eyes locked onto the faded Cyrillic, the circled name, the old date. It was right there. Staring at me. The confirmation of Oleg’s words. The undeniable proof of Konstantin’s centuries-old lie.
“Oleg just confirmed it,” I rasped, the words thick in my throat. “Konstantin manipulated Dmitri. From the very beginning. From the raid that put my father in power.”
Her gaze sharpened, a flicker of something like grim satisfaction in her eyes. “So, he’s been playing all of you. Your father. Dmitri. And you.”
The bluntness of her words, the stark, brutal reality they conveyed, hit me with the force of a physical blow. The Pakhan. The man of unbreakable will. The monster. I had been a fucking puppet. My life, my purpose, my revenge... all a staged performance for an old man’s twisted ambition.
“He played me for a fool,” I growled, the words tasting like ash. My hands slammed down on the desk, not out of aggression towards her, but a desperate need to ground myself, to control the earthquake inside me. The documents scattered.
She didn’t flinch. Instead, she leaned forward, her eyes blazing, no longer just a captive, but a force. “You won’t dominate me alone this time, Morozov.” Her voice was low, laced with a raw challenge that vibrated through the air. “I am your partner. And I want what is mine.”
My breath hitched. My cock, already hard and throbbing with a phantom ache for her, tightened. The audacity. The sheer, ballsy defiance. She wasn’t just talking about answers. She was talking about power. Her power. Over me.