“You’re not even Pakhan yet and grown men are already pissing themselves when they hear your name,” Mike says, grinning, leaning back in his chair like he owns it, vodka balanced on his knee with the casual confidence of a man who has never once spilled a drink in his life.
The fire in the east sitting room is going and the four of us are sprawled around it the way we’ve been sprawling around fires since we were twenty and stupid instead of thirty-something and marginally less stupid.
“It’s a gift,” Dmitri says without looking up from his phone. There’s a woman’s name on that screen. There’s always a woman’s name on that screen. “Some men are born with good looks. Razvan was born making people lose bladder control.”
Lyosha laughs. It sounds like gravel in a metal drum.
They’re not wrong.I turn the glass in my hand and don’t say anything.
The Wrath of the Pakhan.
That’s what they call me in the rooms I walk into and the rooms I’ve already left.
My father’s enforcer.
The one who comes when the Pakhan has run out of patience, which in this organization means I am very, very busy.
I’ve broken fingers and burned warehouses and sat across tables from men who thought they could lie to my face and showed them, methodically, why that was the last interesting decision they ever made.
Papa calls it education.
I call it what it is.
“Zhukov actually cried,” Lyosha offers, delighted. He’s been dining out on this story for a week. “Big man. Neck like a tree trunk. One look at Razvan walking through the door and the man starts leaking from his eyes like a?—”
“We were there,” Dmitri says.
“I’m savoring it.”
“You’re disturbing.”
Mike is watching me the way he does sometimes, that quiet assessment underneath all the easy warmth.
He’s the only one of the three who ever actually looks at me instead of just existing near me.
“You good?” he asks. Just that.
“Fine.”
“You’ve got the face.”
“What face?”
“The one where you’re thinking about something you don’t want to be thinking about.”
He’s too perceptive for someone who smiles that much.I take a drink. “I’m thinking that Zhukov has a very punchable face and Lyosha is not unique in noticing it.”
Lyosha points at me. “See, that’s a normal human observation. There’s hope for you.”
There isn’t, maybe.
That’s the thought I don’t say out loud, the one that sits in my chest on nights like this when it’s warm and easy and my father is somewhere across the city at a business meeting and everything is fine.
The thought that asks how much of me is going to be left when the education is complete.
Papa has been running me like this for three years—every punishment delivery, every enforcement job, every room that goes quiet when I walk in.
He says a Pakhan must be feared before he is followed. He says I need to understand power from the inside before I can wield it.
