Shattered Altar: Chapter 11

ALEKS

The door opens a crack, enough for me to see the swish of her long white skirt.

“Aleksandr?”

I recognize my mother’s voice. But even if I didn’t, no one else would dare walk into my office without knocking.

“Come in,” I tell her. “I’m alone.”

She walks in, her lips pursed, expression carefully composed. She made the same face when I was a child and I did anything she disapproved of. It had no effect then. It still does not—under normal circumstances.

But today, it irritates me.

She sweeps the room with her eyes, just like she does every time she walks into my office.

And it is my office. She was once the one who sat behind the desk, but that was a long time ago. Still, my mother looks at me as if I’m in the wrong seat.

I lean back in the chair and fold my arms behind my head. “Is there a reason you’re here?”

She lowers herself into the chair opposite my desk. “The girl you have locked in the upstairs bedroom…”

“What about her?”

“I just paid her a visit.”

I sit upright, eyes narrowed in annoyance. “Why?”

“Because I think you’re making a mistake.”

“I don’t remember asking for your advice.”

“It’s not advice,” she corrects. “It’s a warning. Taking the sister is not going to get the FBI off your back.”

“This is not about the FBI,” I say. “This is about him. The brother.”

“Then take him. What does this have to do with her?”

“I don’t owe you an explanation,” I snap. “But taking that pompous fuck would only bring about more questions. The investigation he’s leading would take on a new priority. If I take his sister instead, he can close this little investigation as easily as he opened it.”

She doesn’t look convinced. “You think it can be that simple?”

“I know it can be. The case has no teeth, anyway. He’s under the false impression I have something to do with his fiancée’s disappearance.”

“Don’t you?” she asks, raising her eyebrows.

I snort. “It’s the story I’m sticking with.”

“Holding her here is risky.”

“It’s riskier holding her somewhere else,” I counter. “I want her where I can keep an eye on her.”

“Is that so?” she asks, her tone dripping with far too much understanding.

I wrinkle my nose in distaste. I despise these little games my mother plays. “If there’s something you need to say, just say it.”

She lifts one shoulder in a shrug. “She’s rather attractive.”

Chert voz’mi,” I curse in Russian. For fuck’s sake. I roll my eyes for good measure.

“I know how men think, Aleksandr,” she says, unbothered by my irritation. “I know how men are. I don’t think keeping her close to you is the best idea.”

I lean forward and drop my voice to a low timbre. The kind that promises I mean business—or violence. “You think I can’t fucking handle myself, Mother? You really think I’m going to get distracted?”

“Men are weak that way,” she says, doubling down. Her eyes are iron. Unflinching.

“I’m not just any man.”

“I just don’t want your manhood to distract you.” She exhales deeply. “Throw the girl back to her brother and let him fumble on with the investigation. Unless you were careless, he’s not going to find anything. So why go through all this trouble?”

I narrow my eyes, wondering if I should even share this part with her. It’s not about trust in this case—it’s about the balance of power. More specifically, the power she lost when I took over as don of the Makarova Bratva.

“Do you know when the FBI started sniffing around?” I ask casually.

“No,” she says. “Should I?”

“Three years ago.”

Her brow creases. “How do you know that?”

“I have my sources. Reliable ones.”

“How can you be sure?” she asks.

I push myself to standing and walk around the desk. She’s a small woman, but with an audacity that far outweighs her. From time to time, she needs to be reminded of the order of things.

I sit on the edge of my desk and lean in towards her. “Because I’m the best there fucking is, Mother.”

She flushes, falling back against her chair.

I nod, satisfied. “Now, are you properly convinced or is this disappointment I’m seeing?”

She looks at me with wide eyes. “How can you ask me that question? I’m your mother.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I have always been proud of you,” she snaps. “I raised you to be the don you are now.”

“Then why won’t you let me do my goddamn job?” I ask. “I don’t need you second-guessing my decisions. I know what I’m doing.”

“It just doesn’t make sense—”

“Because you’re not privy to the same information I am,” I tell her. “Of course it doesn’t make sense to you.”

Her jaw snaps shut. I know I’ve hurt her. There’s a twinge of guilt, but it’s buried almost immediately by a cascade of justifications.

This was always my Bratva to take.

She was simply the placeholder.

“I see,” she says with a curt nod. “So none of my years behind that desk mean anything to you. After your father suffered his stroke, I was the one who picked up the pieces. I kept this Bratva floating for years—years!—before you were ready to take the reins.”

“You don’t need to repeat the story, Mother. I remember.”

“Do you?” she presses. “Because all I see is a boy who’s trying to shut out the woman who built the empire he’s now running.”

That does it. Ignites the fire.

“Let me make myself crystal fucking clear.” I lean forward further, trapping her between my forearms as I grip the sides of her chair. “You are my mother. My blood. And that is the only reason I’m not currently ripping your tongue out with my bare hands for talking to me like that.”

Her eyes grow wide, but for the first time, I see an inkling of fear in them.

“That was your first warning,” I tell her. “Mother or not, there won’t be a second.”

I step away and sit back on the edge of my desk. She looks up at me with new caution. “You’re right,” she says with a repressed shudder. “You are good at this.”

“You’d do well not to forget it.”

She exhales slowly. “I know… and I’m sorry, son. It’s just…” She raises her eyes to mine. The resentment ebbs and something else takes the forefront. “It’s hard for a woman to find her place in this landscape. I thought I’d found mine.”

I know what she means. I observed it first-hand. My father’s stroke had come out of nowhere. But in the wake of that shock, my mother had found herself in a position that rarely comes around for a woman in the Bratva: she was in charge.

She took the wheel of my father’s legacy willingly, and she thrived. He may have laid the groundwork, but she built a fucking palace on top of it. An empire worthy of the name.

Unfortunately, the position was never hers to keep.

“You did well,” I tell her, knowing she needs to hear it. “But you aren’t made for this. Not like I was.”

“I know. I was just keeping the seat warm until you could get here.” She twines her hands together, lost in thought for a moment. “It’s not easy, you know? Once you’ve sat in that seat for long enough, you forget the fact that it was never yours to begin with.”

I nod. “I understand.”

“I don’t know that you do,” she says. “You came back from Russia and… I always understood that I would have to step down eventually, but it was more than that. You didn’t just dismiss me from your throne; you slammed the door in my face. I was left in the darkness, in the cold, in ignorance.”

“Because you would have questioned me,” I say unapologetically. “I needed to establish myself as the leader.”

She sighs. “I would have liked to be included. I still would.”

I observe her carefully, trying to see things from her perspective. It’s not a gesture I’ve attempted very often. “There are still duties that are required of you.”

“Yes,” she says bitterly. “That of a glorified housekeeper. How could I forget? Tend the gardens, oversee the staff, dust the bookshelves.” Her expression twists into disgust, mixed with anger. “I led this Bratva through war, through expansion, through everything. You think I’ll be satisfied folding laundry?”

“There is a life for you outside this Bratva, Mother,” I say. “You just have to find it.”

“Is this your way of asking me to get out more?”

“It wouldn’t hurt.”

She presses her lips together tightly. “I’ll work on it.”

“Good.” I walk back around to the seat behind my desk.

She nods and stands, hands folded in front of her lap. “I stand by what I said before: I think you’ve made this thing bigger than it needs to be by taking the girl.”

I don’t even bother looking at her. “I can handle it.”

“Which one: the girl or her brother?”

“Both. All of them. Anything.”

“Then why such drastic measures to ensure he backs off?”

Finally, I meet her gaze and give her the crumb of information she’s so desperate to feast on. “Because I’m trying to catch a bigger fish.”

Her eyes go wide with excitement. “What do you mean?”

“The FBI didn’t come across my name by accident,” I inform her. “It was planted. Someone decided to frame us for something they did.”

She frowns. “I don’t understand.”

“That’s okay. I do. This thing started long before Robert Lawrence was ever involved.”

“Do you have any leads?” she asks.

“Not yet,” I lie, keeping the other details of my discoveries to myself for now.

My trust in my mother has always been somewhat fluid, to put a word on it. Ever since the moment I walked in on her fucking one of the men who came in to take care of the gardens.

I was ten at the time. She gave me explanations. Tried to convince me I didn’t understand what I saw.

I never said a word about it to anyone, including my father. I knew he fucked other women, too. So why shouldn’t she?

The cheating isn’t what bothered me. It was that she tried to sell me a different story. She tried to convince me she was eternally loyal to my father when I’d seen evidence to the contrary with my own two eyes.

I’m no saint. I have crimes and sins under my belt, and I own them both. Which is why I’m immediately wary of anyone who pretends they are above such things.

“I have to be delicate where the law is involved,” I explain. “And since Lawrence is the one who gave this case momentum with his personal vendetta—”

“You targeted him,” she finished.

“He’s nothing more than a cockroach beneath my heel,” I say. “But the FBI’s monitoring is making it difficult to operate the way I want. And I don’t like being restrained. Regardless, I’m not worried. Lawrence isn’t going to risk his sister’s life for the memory of a missing woman, fiancée or not.”

“You’d really kill the girl to make your point?”

“I think I’ve made it clear that I’ll do anything to make my point,” I snarl.

My mother nods and glances downwards as if thinking. But I know her. She had a plan for this conversation before she ever set foot in my office.

So I bide my time and wait for her to say what she came here to say.

“She wants to talk to you,” she says at last.

I snort. “I’ll bet she does.”

“She’s young and pliable,” she points out. “She’ll be easy to manipulate.”

“Is that what you saw in her?”

“You didn’t?”

“She’s scared,” I acknowledge. “But she’s smart. She’s not going to be as easy to crack as you might think.”

I don’t say it aloud—God knows my mother doesn’t need the fucking suggestion—but there are many ways to crack a person, no matter how difficult they may be. And the image in my head of a naked Olivia begging to do as I say is enough to get me very excited about a particular course of action.

“You know the reason we butt heads so much, don’t you?” she asks, interrupting my thoughts. “It’s because you’re too much like me.”

I don’t dignify that with an answer. I just wave a hand to dismiss her. “You can close the door on your way out.”

She nods and grabs the door handle. But she freezes as I give her one last order.

“Oh, and… send the girl to my office.”

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