Page 14 of Lethal Obsession

So yeah, I understand keeping one eye on the prize. I understand ambition.

But ambition is different than wanting more. Ambition is strategic. A steady grind toward an attainable goal.

Wanting more is different. Wanting more is what drives a man like Ron to give up a lucrative side hustle in the Cays and think that dealing second-rate highs in my clubs is a good idea.

It’s an insatiable craving for something that can never, in any reality, ever come to be.

Ofelia Borovsky is wanting more.

I turn the airboat hard enough to almost topple Dima out of the back. He gives me a sour look, and I flip him the bird.

Ofelia Borovsky is where ambition ends and insanity begins.

Seven years should have been more than enough time for me to get that through my fucking head.

But clearly not, because the formal card inviting me to France for Ofelia’s first solo with the Orchestre de Paris is sitting unopened in my desk drawer. And instead of preparing to join my father on the flight from Miami to Paris—a flight I promised my sister we’d both be on tomorrow—I’m dumping corpses in the marsh at midnight.

Not least because anything is better than lying in bed staring at the ceiling of my family’s Miami compound, trying not to see Ofelia’s face every time I close my eyes.

For many years the compound was my physical prison. Now it’s the memories it holds that bind me.

Memories that make me want more.

Memories that make me want to kill something.

I do a lot of killing to stop the wanting.

Fortunately, in my business, there’s no shortage of fuckers who need killing.

Dima is right—I don’t need to get my hands dirty anymore. I’m not the rabid dog the Orlovs kept chained and hungry for years, unleashed only to do their sickest bidding. The Orlovs are dead, and it’s been years since I succeeded Sergei, my father, as the Petrovsky pakhan. I could outsource the bullets, torture, and grim, bloody work it takes to run Miami’s biggest bratva clan. Move the entire organization off the streets and into cyberspace. Make my father happy by leaving the back rooms and dirty deals behind, become the kind of white-collar criminal organization everyone seems to want to be these days.

Except, somewhat ironically given how many people want to kill me, the dirt is what keeps me alive.

Miami might be a heaving swamp of coin, corruption, and death, but it’s my swamp. Like the gators, I rule the darkest waters and thrive on death.

Miami needs a twisted fuck like me, or the darkness will spiral out of control and take the entire city down with it. I might be hated by my competitors, loathed by the law, and feared by almost everyone else, but I’m a necessary evil, and they all know it.

I’ve rebuilt the Petrovsky clan into the hardest, fiercest bratva clan Miami has ever seen, and I plan on keeping it that way. There isn’t a girl, gun, or game in town I don’t own a piece of. There might be parts of the swamp I don’t personally run, like the drugs, but I control those who do, not to mention charge them a fortune for the privilege.

And I’m still the one who kills them when they fuck me.

It’s one of the reasons the Petrovsky clan came back so fast, and so hard, after the years of Orlov rule.

People had forgotten how to get their hands dirty. Learned to earn maximum money for smallest risk, all while staying as far away from the swamp as possible. By the time I overthrew the Orlovs, Miami had forgotten what real war looks like. The city had become a playground for coffee criminals whose reputations were made with one bullet and a flashy deal. None of them were prepared to meet a gator from the swamp who’d spent the past decade being starved and tortured.

But alligators know how to go hungry. For years, if necessary. Know how to hide far beneath the surface until everyone starts to think the water is safe.

It took me less than a year to restore order and remind Miami what a real predator looks like.

I know it kills my father that I’ve stayed in the game. He’d love to see me settled in Spain, close enough to Roman and Darya that I can dangle their growing brood on my knee at Sunday dinner.

But the swamp is the only game I know. The swamp is what the Orlov coup forced me to become.

And nobody wants a predator sitting at their family table.

I’ve diversified, sure. I’ve been a full partner in Andersson Technologies since Lars and I had the idea for it back when we were two teenage geeks rooming together at boarding school. The various tech companies under that umbrella alone make me a small fortune.

But the swamp is what I do.