Page 50 of Pack Baby for the Bratva
And everywhere, the portraits. Dead Petrovs in oils and gilt, each one wearing the same expression of hereditary constipation. My great-grandfather. His brothers. Their wives, pale and unsmiling, hands folded in laps as though they'd been told to sit still and had been sitting still for a hundred years.
"Uncle Sergei still looks like he's passing a kidney stone," Ivan observed.
"He was shot in the stomach."
"Then he had an excuse."
A nervous footman tried to take Ivan's coat. Ivan let him get within arm's reach, then turned his head just enough to make eye contact. The footman stopped. Recalculated. Stepped back.
"He'll keep the coat," I said.
The footman nodded and retreated. Ivan hadn't said a word.
This was the thing about my brother that people in these halls always forgot. He had been terrifying at eighteen, back when he was all sharp smiles and broken bones but with a beauty that made people underestimate him exactly once. Nine months without Maeve had scraped something raw behind his eyes. He looked less like a weapon now and more like a man deciding whether to become one.
The men in the corridor gave him space without making it obvious. They remembered.
What they didn't know wasn't whether Ivan would break. It was whether he'd bother to stop once he started.
We pushed through the oak doors.
The council room.
Twelve men in various stages of expensive decay sat around a dark wooden table long enough to land a small aircraft. Theair thick with cigar smoke and the particular mustiness of old paperwork that had absorbed decades of bad decisions.
My father used to say a Pakhan does not ask to enter a room. He becomes the reason the room exists.
I was nine when he first told me that. He'd made me stand outside this very room for six hours with no food, no water, no sitting, while the old men argued about ports, debts, and a cousin whose body turned up in the Moskva River. When the doors finally opened, he put one hand on my shoulder and delivered the line like it was scripture.
At nine, I thought that sounded profound.
At thirty-two, with my father in a morgue and my son three thousand kilometers away and my brother vibrating with suppressed violence beside me, it sounded like the sort of thing damaged men said to children instead of holding them. Which, I supposed, was its own sort of legacy.
I scanned the table.
Mikhail at the head. My father's older brother, seventy-two, with the face of a man who'd been disappointed by everything since approximately 1974 and had made peace with it. He wore a waistcoat that had been expensive when Brezhnev was alive and drank tea from a glass holder that had belonged to my grandfather.
Next to him, Yuri.
Of course, Yuri had taken my father's chair.
Five years older than me, softer around the middle, slower upstairs, and convinced neither of those things mattered because his mother had been a Volkova before she married in and he'd chosen a wife whose family owned half of all illegal shipping channels. He was the sort of man who mistook proximity to power for possession of it.
The other ten faces were variations on a theme, from cousins, faction heads, men who'd eaten at my father's table for decadesand would happily carve up what he'd left behind before the body was room temperature.
"Artem." Mikhail's voice carried down the table, perfectly neutral. He could have been discussing the weather. "You made it."
"Did you doubt me?" Acknowledging obstacles in front of these men was like bleeding in front of sharks.
“Never. Sit.”
I pulled out a chair and sat. Ivan stayed standing just behind my right shoulder. A silent threat until he needed to bare his teeth.
If anyone got close enough, they'd have smelled what the jet shower hadn't fully erased. Caramel. Champagne. Storm clouds. Home. I hadn't tried to hide it.
Yuri leaned forward, elbows on the table, and smiled the way a man smiles when he thinks he's already won.
"My father is dead," I said, before he could open his mouth. "The seat is mine."
