I’m in a meeting at the Rudesian club discussing the expansion of my golf resort when my right-hand man Sergei arches an eyebrow from the doorway.
“Excuse me, gents.” I stand and follow Sergei from the room, my phone passing into the palm of my hand in one well-practiced movement.
My office at the resort overlooks the golf course, and I stare out of the window at the businessmen in their golfing slacks and Under Armor shirts, and wonder, not for the first time, what enjoyment they get out of pushing a tiny ball into holes in the ground.
“Pakhan?”
I recognize the voice instantly. It belongs to Ivana, one of the two young women on my team, and one of a very small group of people I would trust with my life.
“Speak.”
“We have been intercepted again.” Her clipped voice buzzes through the speaker like a fly trapped inside a closed window.
“Casualties?” Outside the window, a heavy-boned man with a hefty paunch resting on top of his pants shuffles his feet and practices his swing.
I focus on the arc of the metal club as Ivana’s voice buzzes in my ear. “Five fatalities. Some wounded. They’ve been removed as required.”
The golfer hits the ball, the club resting on his shoulder as he watches its progress. “Who led the attack?” The question is unnecessary; I already know the answer.
“Xander Amory.”
The leader of the Sicilian mafia in Chicago. The man who is single handedly trying to destroy me because no one ever explained to him that it is healthy to have rivals. It stimulates the brain, keeps you on your toes, promotes business transactions that might otherwise be ignored. Xander has decided that there isn’t enough room for both of us in this city, and I’m taking him at his word.
With one difference: I am going to win. And when I do, he will be sorry that he ever started this bloody war.
“Retreat.” I hand the phone back to Sergei.
The golfer is moving on, the caddy dragging the clubs along behind him. “Chyort voz’mi,” I curse in Russian. I inhale deeply, my diaphragm expanding with the air in my lungs.
The Sicilians are relentless. Their attacks have become an almost daily occurrence since the failed attempt to kidnap Xander’s wife and son, but this one was expected. It was a distraction while I set the wheels in motion to retaliate, and Xander swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. It was more than just a distraction though, which is why only a handful of people are aware of my intentions.
“Inform the men that the meeting has been adjourned.”
Sergei waits for me to continue. His olive-skinned face is a mask of serenity, but I can see the tension in his shoulders. You do not get to spend so much time in close quarters without learning one another’s tells, although if asked, he would remark that mine are not quite so obvious.
“It is time for the Sicilians to understand who they are dealing with, is it not?”
Sergei nods, a glint of amusement in his eyes. “Everything is in place.”
I am tired of being on the fucking defensive. That is not who I am. It is not how the Ivanov family works. But this time, I feel the cold burn of revenge coursing through my veins. The failed kidnap attempt was a hiccup, nothing more. But hiccups only serve to make the warrior stronger, more determined, more lethal.
I face Sergei, the man who has been by my side since we were teenagers. The man who is like a brother to me. The man who knows when I’m about to sneeze before I even know it myself.
“No fucking mistakes this time.”
His mouth curves into a smile. “Yes, boss.”
I wish I could reciprocate the gesture, but Xander has been a thorn in my side for far too long, and the thorn will sting on the way out. “Ramp up security and double the patrols.” Sergei responds with a curt nod. “And, Sergei, I wish to be informed the instant the asset is delivered to my door.”
“Of course, boss.”
He enters the boardroom, and I hear him dismissing the men who stack up their papers and leave in silence. I wait for Sergei to carry out my orders before leaving the resort, nodding at regular customers, and greeting the patient wives with wide smiles on my way to my waiting Cadillac. These people put dollars in my bank account, but I’ll never understand why so many of them have trophy wives, beautiful women who are content to be seen and not heard.
Maybe this is the reason why I have never married despite the pressure from my parents to extend the family bloodline. I will not be content to marry a woman who stands by my side, smiles in all the right places, and provides my guests with the kind of hospitality worthy of a Michelin starred restaurant. I want a woman who is prepared to stand up and fight for what she believes in. Sure, I want that belief to be in me, but I want a woman who will tousle me in bed rather than be submissive. I want to look at her and know that I have met my match as well as my soulmate.
It is a tall ask. Impossible, some might say.
Marco opens the rear door of the sleek black Cadillac as I approach. He’s a short solid man with clear blue eyes and thick hair that had turned silver-gray by his twenty-first birthday. He has been driving me for over a decade now, so I don’t need to tell him where we’re going.
The casino is busy. I navigate the VIP entrance, stopping to kiss the cheek of a regular Hispanic customer, and ignore the way her fingertips brush my sleeve, while her eyes slant suggestively. Some might see it as a perk of the position, but I never mix business with pleasure, especially when that pleasure will bring another mafia family knocking on my door.
The bartender has a drink waiting for me in the private lounge. Negroni. I peer over the balcony at the main area, at the losers with hunched shoulders gambling away their inheritances, at the wealthy Asians who throw money at the table knowing that eventually some of it will stick, at the winners who allow themselves a small gloating smile before they chance their luck again.
Chance is a peculiar concept. A possibility. Events beyond a person’s control. And yet so many people risk their entire lives on the flip of a card.
Unfortunately for Xander Amory, I leave nothing to chance.
We always knew that it would come to this. My family is the wealthiest and strongest Russian contingent in the United States. Xander Amory heads up the Sicilians. He has loaded his chips on the side of war, and I’m not a man who shies away from the front line.
I swallow the Negroni in my glass and signal for another.
I was five years old when I saw my first corpse. FIVE YEARS OLD.
I heard raised voices coming from my father’s study. The anger in their tones wasn’t what dragged me barefoot from my bedroom; in my father’s line of business, tempers often frayed at the edges, and deals got destroyed by a wrong word or an imagined slight, or a bullet in the back of someone’s fucking skull. No, it was the cold menacing threat behind them, and the ominous silence pervading the rest of the house.
I crept downstairs, my heart thumping inside my chest. I thought my father or one of his men might hear it, but no one was standing guard outside the door to his study. My toes sank into the thick pile carpet on the stairs in anticipation of what I might find when I reached the bottom. But nothing, literally nothing, could’ve prepared me for the sight of my father firing a bullet into the skull of his right-hand man.
My stomach lurched sickeningly at the same time as my body seemed to turn to ice. But I must’ve groaned like a ghost or squealed like a pig because my father turned his head and looked at me, the murder weapon still in his hand. Then he calmly rose from his seat, stowed the gun inside a drawer, and closed the door behind him as he came to me at the bottom of the stairs.
“Come, moi syn.” He placed his warm hands on my shoulders, turned me around, and guided me back to my room. When I was tucked up in bed with the comforter pulled up to my chin, he said, “Never allow love to cloud your judgement, Leonid, because heads turn for far lesser things.”
I nodded. I had no idea what he was talking about, but suddenly, with the firing of that single bullet, the man who had been my role model, my comfort blanket, my shelter when the rest of the world was raining, had taken on a ghastly appearance. My papa was gone, and in his place was a man whose footsteps I was destined to fill. That night, I fell asleep with the image of my uncle, a man I’d known my entire short life, sprawled on the floor of my father’s study with cold, vacant fisheyes and blood trickling from a hole in his head.
In the casino, I gauge the time by the fuzziness slowly wrapping itself around my brain from the Negroni. This coupled with the increasingly charged atmosphere from the casino bowl below has never let me down yet. The evening is still relatively young when Tamara enters the private lounge, collects her favorite tipple, Applejack and soda, and joins me at the table in the corner by the balcony.
“We have secured the asset, Pakhan.” She sips her drink and watches me coolly from beneath raven-black bangs.
Tamara and Ivana are identical twins, but few people realize it at first glance. Tamara’s curls, wide smile, and smoky eyes give her a soft appearance and an almost childlike quality that most people are instantly drawn to. Especially men. Ivana on the other hand wears her hair cut short and spiky, the tips dyed lurid green, the strange look accentuated by the elongated green flicks at the corners of her eyes and the battered Doc Martens that I’ve never seen her without.
I rescued them twenty years ago when they were just little kids. They’d been trafficked from abroad, arrived on American soil in a filthy container that stank of piss and shit, several of the adults with them already dead. My father had been tipped off that the cargo was entering our port along with another shipment that we were expecting, both of which had been made known to the police commissioner.
They were just a couple of scared little girls with wide green eyes and grubby faces, and the sight of them made me feel nauseous. What kind of sick bastard would abduct kids and sell them into the sex trade? My father said that they were probably sold by their own parents, and that was the fingertip that pushed me over the edge.
While my father handled the shipment we’d been expecting, I relocated the girls to our safe house and saw to it that the sick fucker who shipped them here would never touch a woman again.
My mother cleaned them up, fed them, gave them clothes to wear and moved them into a guest room in our home. She cared for them, but I was the one they looked to as their savior. Their superhero. Some kind of fucking demi-god in a gold loincloth and wielding a jewel-encrusted sword.
They still do, even though they know the real me.
Sergei would kill to protect me. But Ivana and Tamara would kill themselves if they believed that it would keep me alive.
“Where is it?” I swallow my drink in one mouthful.
“En route to your home.” She watches me coolly. “Do you want me to see that it is settled?”
“Where is Ivana?”
“At the safe house. She had to lose another man.”
Fuck! The body count is rising. This asset had better be worth its weight in gold or I might be forced to go in harder and lower.
“No, ask Ivana to arrange a little welcome party.”
No point going in soft with the new asset; she needs to know that we mean business, or she’ll get too comfortable, and we’ll have nothing left to barter with.
Tamara inclines her head. “As you wish.”
She is under no illusions that I wish her sister to be welcoming when our new guest arrives. They shared a womb. They know each other’s thoughts without speaking the words out loud. She might not like the way her sister operates, but she understands that they are both simply doing what needs to be done to survive.
Her glass is empty, but she doesn’t move.
“What is it?”
“Your father has requested that you dine with him tonight.”
“Has he now?” I sit back in my seat and signal the bartender to fix me another drink.
“Are you not going?” Tamara blinks her pretty green eyes at me.
As if I could ever refuse? She said it herself; my father requests my presence at his home tonight. Attendance isn’t optional.
The bartender places our drinks in front of us and removes the empty glasses.
When he is out of earshot, I face Tamara. “I’m going. Perhaps dinner with my parents is exactly what I need before I greet the new asset personally.”
I do not have to run my business decisions by my father before I carry them out, but he still has his finger on the pulse of every mafia family in the city. He will know the losses we have incurred at the hands of Xander Amory, and he will expect me to retaliate … with interest. This evening’s meal will not be a warning for me to back off but rather a reminder that I need to marry and produce an heir.
“And you’re coming with me.” I clink my glass against hers and down it in one.
