Page 101 of Taken By My Grumpy Pakhan

It was close to midnight and the old me was a no-show when a blonde, confident in the way women trained themselves to be around men with my kind of money, sauntered towards me and settled into the empty chair beside me without waiting for an invitation.

I’d been approached by women like her more times than I could count over the years, and there had been a time, not so long ago, when I would have found her attractive enough to indulge for an hour, maybe two, before sending her home in a car with nothing owed on either side.

I looked at her now and felt nothing. Not distaste, exactly. Just a flat, complete absence of interest, like trying to find heat in a room with no fire in it, and the knowledge that Genevieve would never be caught tits out and desperate.

“Buy me a drink?” she asked, her hand settling lightly on my forearm.

“He will.” I pointed to Nikolai, who was in the middle of a conversation with a minister whose name I’d forgotten.

She regarded me for a moment before walking off to Nico. He took one look at her and the direction she came in before giving his head a shake and waving a waiter over.

My attention shifted from them and back to my drink and the face that was almost too real to be an imagination.

Genevieve Sinclair, and how she stumbled into my life like a clumsy kid caught where they shouldn’t be.

I was not a man given to sentiment. I’d buried that particular weakness early, somewhere around the time I buried my father and inherited a throne soaked in blood that wasn’t entirely his own.

Sentiment got men killed in my world. It made them slow, made them predictable, gave their enemies a lever to pull when they needed one.

And yet here I sat, surrounded by good whiskey and willing women and men who would have died for me without hesitation, wanting nothing more than to leave this entire room behind and find her instead.

My eyes darted to the right, finding Francis Sokolov, a close friend of Vasily’s, face deep in a woman’s bosom, and with the thought of Vasily came Svetlana.

Svetlana’s father controlled half the ports along the northern coast, ports my organization needed unimpeded access to if we wanted to keep moving product without friction.

I controlled a greater majority of the arms, connections and manpower and could’ve fought for the ports, but it’d create a friction that time wouldn’t heal, and with the already existing wars, it was the last thing we needed.

The marriage, when it eventually happened, would cement an alliance that had kept two decades of relative peace intact. And business running smoothly on both ends.

Breaking it would not be a quiet decision. Svetlana’s father was not a man who absorbed insult gracefully, and an insult to his daughter, however informal the arrangement technically remained on paper, would not be received as a personal matter.

It would be received as a provocation and a declaration of war.

I ran a fist through my hair as the waiter filled my glass for the nth time.

The fuck was I thinking about calling off the arrangement?

As Pakhan, I understood exactly where my loyalty lay. The organization came first. It always had. My father had drilled that lesson into me before I was old enough to understand what it would eventually cost me, and I’d spent thirty years proving I’d learned it well, sacrificing whatever needed sacrificing to keep the machine running smoothly.

Men. Money. Relationships and blood, and none of it had weighed a thing. They were all worthy sacrifices, but this shook the fragments of all I held dear and tilted the scale a little.

It weighed now. That was the problem.

I couldn’t make myself regret the elevator. I couldn’t make myself regret Moscow, or the soup, or the dozen small moments since then where I’d caught myself softening in ways I didn’t recognize and didn’t particularly want to stop.

I left the bar shortly after one, citing an early morning that wasn’t entirely a lie, and let my driver take the long route home along the avenue rather than the faster route through the financial district.

We were halfway through when a flashing banner caught my eye, but it wasn't the bright lights that had me ordering the driver to pull to a stop.

A banner stretched across the front of the opera house, illuminated against the dark street, announcing a limited run of Hamilton, the theatre show I’d seen her watching on the flight to Moscow and the same one that played on her TV.

I had zero interest in cinema and had only picked the name because she wouldn’t stop yapping about the opening to Rose and Caroline, with the duo reiterating their lack of interest in theatre.

I sat there longer, staring at the neon lights and wondering what the fuck I was doing and coming to a conclusion that would sound insane to a madman.

The decision about Genevieve wasn’t going to resolve itself simply because I avoided thinking about her for a few hours. I’d spent my entire life making the difficult calculations my position demanded, weighing costs against benefits with the same cold precision my father had taught me, and somewhere in the last several weeks, the calculation involving her had stopped balancing out the way it should have.

So, I did exactly what no sane Pakhan in my place would do. I told myself I would figure out Svetlana later. The organization wasn’t going to fall apart because I was nursing unexplored feelings for my assistant.