After looking at each of them directly, I ignored my reflection in one of the ornate mirrors. I didn’t need to see it to know I looked as haggard and stressed as I felt.
“Word will need to get out that the Volkov Bratva is not leaderless.”
Lev scoffed. “We’ve never been leaderless.”
Technically, no.But when his father nearly killed me the same night he’d murdered our grandparents, it seemed like we were leaderless for a few taut moments.
“I’ll move in now,” I added, my voice heavy. “I’ll…”Fuck, it’s too early for this. Why couldn’t you have told us about the cancer or tumors? Why couldn’t you have considered treatment to buy more time with us?I cleared my throat again. “I’ll move into his office now and start taking over.” The second the words left my mouth, I tried to envision it. Me, seated at my father’s desk. Me, in his sacred room where countless deals were brokered and hits were commanded.
Will I do him justice?
Dmitri Volkov was a strong leader, and it would be difficult to fill his shoes in such a way that he’d be proud.
“You won’t face this alone, Brother,” Maksim said, always having the right thing to say and always intuiting when to speak up with an order or advice.
“You can lean on all of us,” Viktor added. “We, as a generation, are a team.”
I nodded, staring in the direction of my father’s office. Where my office would be from now on.
Fuck, this is going to be hell.I couldn’t help another tense exhale.
“We are. We will always stand together,” I told them. “And I vow to focus on everything I can before anyone can even think about trying to encroach on our empire and legacy.” Making sure to look them each in the eye, I said, “I—we—will present a strong front, no matter what. It’s what he would want.”
As I headed toward the office where I’d take over the leadership, I knew that was what mattered most. Doing my father justice. Delivering on the wishes he’d want to have honored in keeping the Bratva line secure and strong.
It no longer mattered what I would want. Like that drink at the bar. Or that woman who offered herself to me.
I’d have time for no vices, nothing of pleasure. They’d only be a distraction, and at this precipice of change, I would be giving it my all to adapt to the constraints of leadership.
2
ELENA
Another Monday.
I turned off the engine of my car and stared out the windshield at the ugly parking lot. The same square of broken pavement as always, cracked with scraggly weeds poking up because my father refused to upgrade something as irrelevant as the parking lot surface.
Another workweek.
I supposed in a vague way that only a numbed-out employee who had let “burnout” become her whole personality could feel, the parking lotdidn’tmatter. It wasn’t supposed to be pretty. It shouldn’t make a difference in the overall sense of business happening here. It was just a flat place to leave our cars to bake in the Nevadan sun while we tried to avoid truly shitty posture in our sedentary existence in the building of Morovov Financials.
Another episode of busting my ass.
Nothing mattered anymore. So long as I was my father’s daughter, and so long as John Morovov owned and ran hisfinancial consultation firm, this would be my life. This would be my routine until…
“Forever,” I muttered to myself as I stayed perfectly still, lacking the energy to move.
I couldn’tseean end to my employment here. And I couldn’t see a break in the low level of interest in doing a single accounting task again.
Another employee parked next to me, and her cheery, hip hop music barely cut through the haze of burnout I mellowed out in. The radio was silenced as the secretary got out of her car and headed inside, happily chatting away to someone on her phone.
Another mundane spell of being in the office and losing any semblance of a real life.
I swallowed hard, despising how I had ever let it get to this morale-less point of depression and hopelessness. When my mother died when I was a little girl from an infection that never should have happened, my father had become all the family I had left. His style of parenting was to bring me into the office. Bored and a fan of numbers and math, I started doing little projects for him as a kid. By the time I was a teenager, he had me handling invoices no one else wanted to waste time on. And once I hit adulthood, I was a full-time—no,overtime—employee.
Another car parked and that employee hustled inside.
I sighed, finally reaching for my packed lunch. “May as well get in there.”
