Page 26 of Ruin
My territory—twenty blocks radiating out from Purgatory, the docks to the south, residential neighborhoods to the north and east.
Every block marked, every business notated, every protection route traced in red.
It's taken me sixteen years to build this grid. My father started it. I finished it. Refined it. Made it profitable in ways the old man never imagined.
Six months ago, it was untouchable.
Now there are holes.
"Show me," I say.
Vincent moves to the map. His finger traces a line along the southern docks. "They started small. Bribing dock workers. Not ours at first, but adjacent operations. Feeling out the supply chain. Then they moved to our guys. Three of our dock workers have taken payments in the last two months."
"Names?"
"Already handled. But replacing experienced dock workers takes time, and Zhukov knows that. He's not trying to buy our people. He's trying to slow us down."
His finger moves north. "Two weeks ago, a restaurant on Ninth—not one of ours, but inside the protection zone—stopped paying. When Peter went to collect, the owner said he'd made anarrangement with 'new management.' He couldn't give a name. Just said they were Russian andverypersuasive."
"How persuasive?"
"The owner's daughter received photos of herself walking to school. Timestamped. Daily. For a week."
My jaw tightens. Targeting children. Fucking disgusting. That's Bratva—old-school, scorched-earth, we'll-burn-your-world-to-teach-you-a-lesson bastards.
"What else do we know about Zhukov?"
Vincent pulls a file from his briefcase—a thick one. He's been compiling.
"Kirill Zhukov. Forty-five. Rose through the Bratva ranks in St. Petersburg before relocating to the States eight years ago. Spent three years in a federal facility—wire fraud, officially. Got out on good behavior and a suspiciously lenient judge."
"Bought."
"Almost certainly. Since his release, he's been consolidating. Started in Brighton Beach, expanded to Newark, now he's reaching into our territory." Vincent opens the file. More photographs of him. Zhukov outside a restaurant, Zhukov meeting with men in expensive suits, Zhukov at what looks like a charity gala, shaking hands with a state senator. "He's not a street thug, Cassius. He's organized. Well-funded. International connections back to Moscow, money flowing through shell companies we haven't fully traced yet."
"And he's been doing all of this while I was?—"
"Distracted," Vincent says it without inflection. He doesn't need to. The word lands like a slap. "Yes."
I don't argue because he's right.
For twelve months, I split my attention between running an empire and tracking a woman across Cambridge.
Every report about Selene's progress—her grades, her networking, the professors she'd charmed, the connections she was building, I read like a man studying scripture.
Meanwhile, Kirill Zhukov was quietly chewing into my borders like rot into wood.
"This is different from the Moretti situation," Vincent says. "Or the Colombians. Those were territorial disputes with rules. Zhukov doesn't play by rules. He uses kidnapping, psychological bullshit, public kills designed to terrify, not just eliminate. His people in St. Petersburg burned a rival's nightclub with sixty people inside. Civilians. He didn't care."
I take it in and let it settle.
"What does he want?"
"Everything. Drug distribution, the docks, our protection network. He's not nibbling at the edges, Cassius. He's coming for your entire empire. And the way he operates…targeting families, children…he'll go after anyone connected to you to get it."
"That's not happening."
"No. But he doesn't know that yet." Vincent closes the file. "What he does know, and this concerns me, is that you have a new vulnerability."
