Velvet Chains (The Volkov Syndicate #1)

Chapter 6

Isign the contract before I can talk myself out of it.

The fountain pen is heavy in my hand. Brass and bone.

Old. My father used it. My grandfather before him.

Three people died this year after signing with this same pen.

A lieutenant who thought he could skim from the obshchak.

A banker who believed the FSB would protect him.

My father’s mistress, who screamed herself hoarse before her throat finally gave out.

I know the exact moment screaming stops. The body just quits. The voice breaks. I’ve heard that silence too many times, standing in doorways while men I called brat’ya did the kind of work you don’t come back from.

Outside the windows, the November night presses against the glass.

Solntsevo lies below—my territory, my problem—Moscow under my feet.

The iron gates in the courtyard carry our wolf sigil and St. George driving a spear through the dragon.

The same symbol is tattooed across my shoulder blades.

They inked it into me when I turned sixteen.

Two enforcers held me down while the needle dug in and Vadim stood over us and said it like a command: Volki ne plachut. Wolves don’t cry.

I didn’t.

The marriage contract lies on the old mahogany desk, the same one that survived the Soviet collapse and three generations of Volkov pakhans.

Two signature lines.

Mine already there in dark ink.

Hers still blank.

Anya Nikolayevna Morozova.

My fingers drift to the violin resting beside the desk.

My mother’s Stradivarius. The only thing that made it out of the fire before the Chechens finished the job.

I lift it, tuck it under my chin, and drag the bow across the strings.

Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique comes out without me thinking. Third movement.

The notes get too loud in my head. Too close to other sounds I don’t want.

The D string vibrates under my finger and suddenly I’m twelve again, lying on cold stone.

The air stinks of incense, piss, and something sickly sweet that clung to my skin for days.

Later, Father Alexei tells me it’s the smell of death.

Zapakh smerti. Upstairs, the Chechen crew reloads.

Boots on old floorboards. Shouted orders.

My mother’s voice cuts off. My father’s next.

My brother Piotr’s hand goes slack in mine.

I press my face harder into the marble in the church crypt and make myself so still I hardly breathe.

I stay like that until the shots stop, the boots leave, car doors slam, and the silence gets so big I think maybe I died too.

The bow slips on the E string. Ugly sound. I grit my teeth and dig my thumbnail into the rosin until the wood creaks.

That was twenty years ago. Some nights it feels like last week.

The music turns sharper because I can’t stop hearing Vadim’s voice from this morning.

Marry the chemist’s daughter or I give your seat to Yuri.

Yuri is twenty-four and thinks trafficking teenage girls is just part of doing business. He slapped a server at Café Pushkin last month because the vodka wasn’t cold enough and then smiled about it. That smile is what made me want to put a bullet in his head.

I would rather put my Makarov in my own mouth than let him inherit this Bratva.

The last note dies rough when I lower the bow.

Something buzzes wrong near the bridge. Out of tune again.

The last time I tried to fix it myself, the A string snapped and left a welt across my knuckles that took six days to fade.

I run my thumb over the spot. The skin is smooth now, but the memory stays.

My hands want to break something. The violin. The glass. Vadim’s neck. I flex my fingers instead and watch the wolf tattoo across my knuckles shift with the movement. Some nights I wake up scratching my arms like the ink wants to get out.

Her file is open on the desk, the edges bent from how many times I’ve gone through it. Twenty-five years old. Toxicology doctorate from Basel. Top of her class. Vadim never picks idiots when there’s money involved.

The surveillance shots show a woman who looks like she forgot how to relax—grey eyes caught mid-blink, hair tied up like she didn’t care what it looked like, scars along her left forearm where acid burns healed bad. Lab rat marks.

She looks ordinary at first glance. A scientist. The kind of woman who rides the metro, drinks cheap coffee, pays rent late sometimes, and has never watched a man bleed out on a carpet while his fingers twitch through the fringe.

A sticky note sits crooked over her photo in Luka’s messy handwriting: You’re going to like this one.

I peel it off and fold it in half, then half again, pressing the creases until the paper is ready to tear. Luka has been my sovietnik, my advisor since we were fifteen and he pulled me out of the Moskva when Vadim tried to solve a problem by tossing me in the river. He thinks he knows what I like.

Maybe he does.

That’s half the problem.

I flip the page.

Mikhail Morozov. Fourteen. Mathematics prodigy. I tap his school photo with my thumb—serious eyes, dark hair, no idea what kind of men are using him as a bargaining chip. I make myself stop after two taps. Any more and it turns into something someone could notice.

MX-42 has its own folder. Thick. Dense. Clinical language, chemical diagrams, test reports. One breath and you drop. I’ve seen the test footage. Men in a room going limp in six seconds, like someone cut their strings. One didn’t get up.

Good money in something like that.

If it behaved.

Stability is the problem. Instead of a quick fade to black, you get bodies on the floor with foam at their mouths and lungs tearing themselves apart.

Six Chechens died that way last month when a batch spoiled in transit.

Three of ours. One chemist tore his own eyes out after the hallucinations started.

Screamed about things that weren’t there until his voice broke.

I watched that video once. Once was enough.

Vadim needs someone to fix it. Make it travel. Make it sit safely on a shelf until someone decides who dies. Her thesis title sits halfway down the page: Stabilization Mechanisms in Synthetic Opioid Derivatives.

Perfect. It might just say please ruin my life.

She’s not really coming here because her father lost eight million euros in Monaco to the Bratva—that’s the story we’ll tell everyone else. The truth is simple: Mishka lives if she signs. Mishka disappears into black waters if she doesn’t.

Luka’s report on her is only two lines: Contact made. Threat understood.

Medieval. Crude. Po ponyatiyam—according to the code. Exactly the kind of move my father would’ve made without blinking. The kind of move that used to make my stomach twist before I learned to shut that part down.

I slam the folder harder than I mean to. The sound cracks through the room like a shot.

* * *

The door opens without a knock.

Galina Ivanovna doesn’t believe in knocking.

She enters like it’s still her house. In a way, it is.

She survived everything this family put her through—Stalin, the wild nineties when Bratva wars made Moscow look like a war zone.

She poured tea and hid bodies and outlived everyone who thought they could tell her what to do.

Bergamot hits my nose before I see the cup. Fine bone china, the old St. Petersburg pattern she refuses to give up. She sets it on the desk with a click. Her way of saying pay attention.

“Pokhoronnye marshy, vnuchok?” she rasps. Funeral marches? Her voice is all cigarettes and old rage. “Devochka yesche dazhe ne priekhala. The girl isn’t even here yet and you’re already burying her.”

“Soon,” I say. I keep my back to her. Galina taught me to lie, but she also taught me she’d always know when I did it.

“Tridtsat’ shest minut.” Thirty-six minutes. She’s been counting since Vadim announced his little ultimatum at the skhod last week. “You have time to stop torturing Tchaikovsky and think like a human being.”

I don’t answer. The tea sits there, untouched, sending up little curls of steam.

She moves up beside me and puts her hand on my elbow. Her grip is stronger than it should be at seventy-eight. She’s put people in the ground who were younger and healthier than I am now.

“You signed that contract this afternoon.” Her thumb presses into the inside of my arm like she’s checking my pulse. “Before the Bratva vote. Before you had to.”

“Blyad,” I mutter under my breath. “Should’ve known you would notice.”

“You wanted this,” she says.

“I want my chair,” I answer. “This is the price.”

“Mmm.” That sound means she doesn’t believe me and doesn’t feel like arguing. “A brat, huh? Luka told me you sent him to arrange Belgian boarding school papers three days ago. Before anything was agreed.”

My jaw locks. That little fucker is going to lose a tooth for that. Sovietnik or not, some things stay between me and my decisions.

“You’re not just securing an asset, Romochka.” She pats my chest right over my heart. It’s beating too fast. “You’re planning something that needs her to say yes.”

If I deny it, she’ll know I’m lying. If I confirm it, she’ll remind me what it cost every other Volkov man who tried to be smarter than the game.

“What did Vadim tell you to make?” she asks at last.

I close the violin case with a strong click. I flatten my hands on the velvet lining instead and hold still. Stillness and control. The only armor I have that works around Vadim.

“Chemical weapons,” she answers herself, when I stay quiet.

Her fingers are already straightening my collar with hands that smell faintly of Krasnaya Moskva.

She’s been wearing that perfume longer than I’ve been alive.

“Trafficking draws too much attention now, too many task forces. But compounds? Chemicals? You can send those as ‘samples’ and call it research.”

She looks up at my face and watches it. I keep my expression blank.