1
VICTOR
The whiskey burns, but not as much as the knife wound. It's a dull, persistent ache that's yet to go away.
The stitches were removed today, but shifting in my leather chair still sends that sharp, radiating pain through my side.
I keep my face neutral, however, my breathing controlled, and I don't spill a drop from my glass.
I've become an expert at hiding this during the past two weeks.
Part of me can't believe it's been that long since that Romanian piece of shit Cornel bled out in his chair, but with every breath I'm reminded of that blonde Russian woman who decided it was a good idea to slide a knife between my ribs.
I take another sip of my drink, letting it settle on my tongue for a moment before swallowing.
The drive to the hospital in Cluj that night is still a blur of a blood-soaked car and tunnel vision. I remember the Dacia's headlights cutting through the darkness of the rural area on myway back. I remember my hands slipping on the steering wheel, leaving red smears, and I remember thinking,Just get to Cluj. Just get to Cluj.
I didn't make it.
I woke up in a hospital bed with an IV in my arm and a doctor telling me that I'd lost enough blood to kill most men.
When I asked how I got here, he told me about Gheorghe, a seventy-three-year-old farmer who found my car wrapped around a tree, with me inside unconscious, bleeding out into the footwell.
He somehow pulled me into his car and drove me to the hospital, where he stayed in the waiting room for six hours, praying to a god I stopped believing in when I was twelve that I'd make it.
The doctor made it abundantly clear that without Gheorghe's help in bringing me in, I would have died.
I didn't need convincing that he saved my life, and in my world, debts like that don't go unpaid.
The moment I was discharged, I sent him a wire transfer for five million dollars. Anonymous, of course, but I made sure he knew it was because of his good nature.
My contacts at the bank who brought him in told me he and his wife cried for an hour when they saw the number. They thought it was some kind of mistake. It wasn't.
I finish my drink and I set it down. I tap on the tablet on my lap and it glows. 10:32 p.m. Getting late.
My study is dark save for a single lamp and the ambient light from outside. I prefer it this way. Shadows hide the small tells,the micro-expressions, the involuntary twitches that could give a man away.
Not that anyone's here to see them.
Lucian has been consumed with the transition. Our father's "heart attack" was announced, and he stepped into the role of don as easily as I expected him to. The funeral was three days after I got back from the hospital, and I stood in the front row in a black suit, my face a mask of appropriate grief, my ribs screaming beneath the bandages.
No one noticed.
Adrian was too focused on Elena. Matei was counting the seconds until he and Jordan could run back to the expansion in LA, and Lucian, he looked at me once during the service, and I met his gaze without flinching.
"Focus on the family," I told him, and that's what he's done.
I told them about Cornel's death, of course. Explained that someone had beaten me to it, that the rat was already dead in his chair when I arrived. I described the execution and suggested the Volkovs were cleaning house.
I left out the part about the blonde.
Left out the way she moved like smoke, the way her perfume mixed with the copper smell of blood, the way her lips brushed my ear when she…
I stop that thought cold.
Amateur.
That's what she was. An amateur who got lucky.
