Page 86 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
“Grigori Volkov,” I say. “He was the one behind all of this.”
“Yes.”
“He’s the reason I was taken.”
“He arranged it. He is no longer a problem.”
I look at him. I think about whatno longer a problemmeans. I press my hands harder against my stomach, and I breathe.
“The chamomile,” I say. “Someone put something in it.”
“A woman named Irina Volsk. She was on the household staff. She has been dealt with.”
I close my eyes for a moment. Eleven mornings. I drank it every morning because Mara switched me to chamomile. I liked it, it made me feel calm, and it was doing the opposite the entire time.
I open my eyes.
“Roman.”
“Yes.”
“I need you to tell me everything,” I say. “Not a summary. Everything. From the beginning. Your father, the building, the key, all of it. I need to understand what I am inside.”
He looks at me for a moment. Then he says sit down and I sit down, and he begins.
He talks for a long time.
His father was Bratva before him, a mid-level operative who rose through the organization over thirty years on intelligence, loyalty, and the kind of patience that builds things slowly.
He brought Roman into it the way Bratva sons are brought in, gradually, through proximity, through watching, through understanding the structure before being handed any piece of it. Roman was sixteen in that lobby.
He was nineteen the first time he understood what the organization actually required of the people inside it. He was twenty-two when his father died, and he stepped into the vacancy his father left, not at the top, not yet, but close enough to see it.
The Pakhan position came seven years later.
He tells me about the council, twelve men representing the major factions of the Russian Bratva network in the northeast, each with their own operations, their own loyalties, their own histories, all operating under the umbrella of a structure that has existed in this city for longer than either of us has been alive.
The territories, the businesses, the architecture of how legitimate operations and illegitimate ones coexist inside the same corporate structure, the same correspondence I managed for two years.
I sit across from him, and I listen, and I think about every document I ever filed.
He tells me about Grigori, fourteen months of coordinated operations against him from the inside, the intelligence leaks, the Marchetti syndicate, the council maneuvering.
He tells me about the meeting in New Jersey and what they wanted from me and why they believed I had it, and I think about the man with the wire-rimmed glasses sayingyou know everythingand the terror of knowing I did not.
He tells me about Irina and the compound and eleven mornings, and I watch his face while he tells me this part, and his jaw is set in the way it sets when he is controlling something that would otherwise surface, and I understand, looking at his face, that this is the part that cost him the most.
When he finishes, the room is quiet.
I look at my hands in my lap.
“I worked for you for two years,” I say. “I managed everything. Every call, every meeting, every name on every document.”
“Yes.”
“You kept me outside it deliberately.”
“Yes.”
