Page 128 of Pack Baby for the Bratva
Artem
Three months later
The London headquarters occupiedthe top floors of a building that pretended to be an investment firm. The lobby still had marble floors and a receptionist who could probably disarm a man with a letter opener, but the potted plants were new. Someone in the facilities had decided we needed greenery. But the ficus by the lift was already dying.
I made a note to have someone water it.
This was what being Pakhan did to a man. You walked into a building full of killers and noticed the ficus.
The council had been in session for three hours by the time I reached the final item on the agenda. Twelve men around an oak table that had been shipped from Moscow in 1987 and still smelled faintly of my father's cigars. The windows overlooked the Thames, which was surprisingly blue on this beautiful day.
I had restructured the northern supply lines, dismantled a faction that had grown too comfortable skimming from the old regime, and formally executed the succession documents transferring the Eastern European corridor to Yuri.
I didn't raise my voice. It wasn't necessary. My father had taught me that volume was a weak man’s substitute for authority, and authority was something you either had or manufactured from fear or respect. I preferred respect. It had a longer shelf life.
The final agenda item was a proposal to ban omega collateral from three major operations.
This was not a popular proposal.
I let the silence stretch while the older men glanced at each other, deciding who would speak first. Petyr removed his reading glasses and wiped them. Dmitri fiddled with his cravat, which was so annoying I wanted to push it down his throat.
Breathe Artem.
Yuri, who had already been briefed and had spent the first hour of the meeting looking like a man who'd swallowed a live frog, stared at the table, already deciding that agreeing with me was easier than arguing and slightly less humiliating than he'd feared.
"It's bad business," Dmitri said finally. "Omegas are leverage. Everyone uses them."
"Everyone used to ship cargo without manifests. We stopped because it was inefficient." I didn't look up from the document. "Men who use omegas as collateral create instability. Vendettas. Unpredictable heat signatures. Enemies with nothing left tolose." I turned the page. "The new corridors move money, medicine, papers, and protection. Not misery. Profit margins improve when cruelty is not permitted to be lazy."
Dmitri opened his mouth, and closed it. The numbers were in the appendices and the appendices were irrefutable, which he knew because I'd sent them a week in advance and Gregor had followed up with a memo titledClarificationsthat was essentially a threat in spreadsheet form.
The vote passed. Not unanimously—it was still the Bratva—but passed.
I adjourned the meeting and stayed in my chair as the room emptied.
My father's chair. It had seemed larger when he occupied it, a throne disguised as furniture. As a boy, I'd watched him sit here and believed power was the ability to make people afraid without raising your voice. Now the chair just felt like wood and leather.
I opened the top folder on my right.
Ivan, based on the handwriting, had slipped a nursery supply invoice between a weapons manifest and a shipping projection. Across the top, in his sprawling scrawl:
MAC NEEDS MORE SOCKS. THE TINY ONES. WITH BEARS.
Below it, in Gregor's block capitals:
APPROVED. CURRENT SOCK RETENTION RATE: 47%. UNACCEPTABLE.
And beneath that, in Maeve's neater handwriting was.
Why are all of you like this? Also please get the ones with the non-slip bottoms. He is crawling and I’m sure he’ll be walking before long.
I stared at the page for a long time. And then laughed.
Then I folded the invoice and put it in my inside pocket, next to the flash drive containing the new supply route encryption keys. Both were equally important. One was probably more so.
A knock at the door came half an hour later and Yuri entered without waiting for a response, which was either boldness or stupidity, and with Yuri the answer was usually a fluctuating ratio of both. He was carrying two glasses of vodka and looking like he was asked to eat crow and was trying to convince himself it was filet mignon.
"I was wrong," he said, setting one glass in front of me.
