Page 30 of The Bratva’s Monster

Funny that there’s a record… Almost like he was trying to track his money. It must have been part of a system. Gedeon lost a lot, but not always. Not enough to bankrupt us completely.

I clean up those papers and set them aside in a little pile, then pull out the next bunch. More of the same. Little slips with names and numbers and dates. They all seem to be in order of the date.

The next pile, I do my best to arrange and put them in another pile. Now that I’m going through all these, I wonder if I should throw them out. If there is anything in all these numbers and names that might save his reputation and my life, I wouldn’t know it.

I stop at about the fifth pile of papers and just stare at it all. As much of an insight as this is into Gedeon’s favorite marriage-ruining hobby, for my purposes, it’s useless. Entirely useless.

Gedeon betraying the brotherhood seems completely out there to me, but that’s only because I knew him. I knew what he gave to the Bratva. I knew everything that he sacrificed and bled for. To betray them just seems so off base. I can’t see him doing it for any amount of money.

I continue on, going through file after file of dated papers before…

Suddenly, something starts to click. There is a pattern to these papers. In every file that I open, the numbers fluctuate and the dates get further and further along. This mess wasn’t his way of keeping track of his bets. They were how he was keeping track of his money, overall.

But why on paper? He knew how precarious keeping physical records could be in all this. He’d told me a million times that’s how they got guys like Capone. Through their bookkeepers. Okay, then what the hell is all this?

I decide to keep going, looking through piles of paper one after the other, and I start to see another pattern. The fluctuating numbers start to shift, less here, more there. If I wanted to, I could make a chart of his earnings from all this.

I get to the last drawer of the filing cabinet and I’m surrounded by papers and files. And there’s still another couple of filing cabinets to go through.

I could track his earnings this way. I’m sure I could. I don’t know what good it would do. In fact… In fact, if I went at this long enough, I could probably find the moment when he lost big.

I suppose that’s a question I don’t need an answer to because that had been the last straw for me. The moment I saw that ten grand was missing from our account, I flipped on him. That fight, I can still feel the despair in my chest as I begged him to tell me what happened to the money.

He accused me of being a gold digger and I called him a fucking addict, and he slept on the couch that night. Now I know that it had never been about the money. He could have lost five dollars in a card game and the fight would have still been the same.

It was about what he’d promised me. That he was done gambling. That he had let it rule his life for too long. He told me that he was going to be more responsible. He promised me that…

Dammit. I’m crying. I wipe my face of the bitter tears on my cheeks. Gedeon promised me a lot of things.

Within a few days after that fight, the money reappeared in the account and he never told me why or what happened. Maybe a week or so after that, he was dead.

Rikki told me that he had been killed in an ambush—the same one that took his father. He’d also said back then that it was an attack from their rivals, the Irkutsks.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that and how it is that the Irkutsks would kill one of their informants. I suppose there could be reasons that I just don’t understand… but if he was still useful to them to the point where they would have paid him right before he died…

I get up and go to the next filing cabinet and start looking. More numbers and dates, but this time, these files are a little more organized. Little notebooks instead of loose papers, scratches with names that I don’t recognize. Most of them are in Russian, but some of them aren’t. Stefan is one of them, with a question mark next to it.

He was floundering. At least that’s what this looks like. He fucked up and lost a shit ton of money and was looking for a way out. So… so he asked Stefan for it? That can’t be the same Stefan who’s running the Irkutsks. Can it?

The pieces are here, laid out in front of me. But none of it makes sense. His moral code aside, I don’t understand why he would align himself with someone whose boss, at the time, just ended up killing him in the end. If he was selling out the Rostovs, then wouldn’t their rivals want him alive? Regardless of the attack on Rikki’s father, wouldn’t they do whatever they could to ensure that their asset was still alive?

Including making sure that he wasn’t there when they ambushed the Rostov Pakhan?

I sit cross-legged among all the piles of paper, my hand protectively over my stomach. The answer is here. I’m just not seeing it. What I know is that he fucked up. He lost a ton of money, but he got it back somehow. If I’m interpreting these notes right, then he got it from Stefan. I don’t know if it’s the same Stefan as the one running the Irkutsks, but I’m pretty sure that’s where he got the money. Or at least he was considering getting the money from him.

Stefan would have no reason to give it to him unless he planned to use him for something. And a lower-ranked Bratva would never act outside of his Pakhan’s knowledge, so his boss had to know about it.

And that’s where the puzzle gets strange. These are all numbers and names without meaning right now and I need the meaning. I need to find the parts that are missing from this narrative if I have any hope of saving mine and this baby’s life.

I take a deep breath to calm myself a little, then I stand up and go to the filing cabinet for the next group of files.

The answer is here somewhere. I know it is. And I’m going to find it.

13

RIKKI

It’s been a day and a half since the night in the hotel room and I have to check in with Liz, despite my reservations about doing so.