Page 2 of Beautiful Ruin

My own Pakhan, Ivan Kuznetsov, leans forward slowly from where he had been resting against the back of his chair. His elbows settle against the polished surface of the table, his fingers lacing in front of his mouth. The low amber light overhead catches the silver in his hair, turning the strands at his temples almost metallic.

There is no strain in his expression tonight, nothing that would betray the ambition coiled beneath it. To most, he looks like the very picture of ease. A statesman draped in criminal power. A patient ruler thinking five moves ahead while everyone else is still congratulating themselves for surviving the first.

He wears composure so well, it has become part of his legacy.

The polished Pakhan.

The strategist.

But I know better.

I know exactly what sits underneath that calm façade because I have spent years standing in its shadow. I know the difference between Ivan at ease and Ivan pretending to be. What sits beneath his composure is not simple ambition. It is a hunger that has become insatiable. Other men build empires because they fear losing power. But that is not my Pakhan. Mine wants permanence, a legacy carved so deeply into the bones of this world that no election, shifting alliance, politician, or act of God could ever pry it from him.

That is the truth the others at this table barely understand. Ivan has always preferred patience to spectacle, always favored slow encroachment over noisy conquest. He is not Volkov swinging brute force like a sledgehammer or Sokolov dressing cruelty up in silk promises and calling it civil.

Ivan is patience personified.

Which is exactly why the past few weeks have been eating him alive.

“We’ve spent weeks cleaning up the aftermath of the Borchins’ mess,” he says, his voice clipped with barely contained disgust. “Now half the city thinks a shadow government is what put the bullet in him.”

His lip curls around the words shadow government as if even repeating the phrase leaves a bad taste in his mouth.

The public narrative irritates him far more than the obvious reason. It is not fear of exposure, exactly. Ivan has lived too long and climbed too high within the underground’s upper echelons to be rattled by gossip alone. What angers him is the clumsiness of it.

The death of Ramil Borchin should have created an opportunity, a facture point to exploit and crack open a door that has been locked down for years. Infiltrating deep into Russia’s government sectors has always been tricky business, establishing any type of mole even more so. But instead of taking control and filling the vacuum left in Borchin’s absence as planned, the whole thing quickly spiraled into a public spectacle.

News cycles had fed on the scandal within hours of it happening like vultures, the rumors surrounding the incident multiplying, all of them plastering the same rhetoric—a daughter with too much nerve and too little loyalty demanding retribution, and a father whose loose morals had finally come back to haunt him.

Every ugly possibility had been quickly dragged into the daylight and forced under public scrutiny, turning it into the one thing Ivan has always hated the most—a complete and uncontrollable mess.

He hates improvisation even more. And worst of all, he hates having to sit at this table pretending the last several weeks have not disrupted the careful timetable he has spent years constructing in private.

His thumb shifts once against his knuckles. A tiny motion, meaningless to anyone who doesn’t know him. To me, it may as well be a snarl.

Aleksandr Volkov is the first to speak.

He does it with a soft, derisive snort, like the entire conversation has already bored him. He leans farther back into his chair until he is practically sprawled across it. One arm hooks lazily over the side and his other hand drifts toward the glass near his elbow, though he doesn’t lift it. His fingers glide over the sweaty surface. Everything about him at first glance reads like carelessness and insolence.

I used to think he was a man too arrogant to bother respecting the room he’s in. Over the years, I’ve come to understand differently. Nothing about Volkov is careless.

It is all theater.

I have watched him do it before, letting people talk themselves into thinking he is less attentive than he is. Then the mask slips for half a second and suddenly, someone is choking on their own blood before he fully understands the conversation has turned.

“She did us a favor. Better he’s dead than making a mess. You really think this shitstorm wasn’t going to happen eventually?” His mouth twists into something that is not quite a smile. “Think logically, Kuznetsov. My wife did you all a favor.”

There is a ripple of tension that runs throughout the room after he says it. For all Volkov’s swagger and all the offense baked into the way he says my Pakhan’s name like an insult, there is logic in his position.

Katerina Borchin publicly condemning her father, then later helping to execute him for his crimes, personal and otherwise, had been an impulsive move from Volkov’s camp. No one here would argue against that. It had detonated in public view, the fallout spreading in every direction and forcing everyone to spend weeks containing the damage.

But that did not make it the wrong move, because the truth of the matter was that Borchin had become an infection needing to be culled.

His debts alone were enough to convince the tabloids to continue sniffing around his finances after his daughter exposed him, chasing salacious details about gambling losses and expensive habits that didn’t match his official income. Sooner or later, someone would have followed the paper trail far enough back to find the source of the money, or rather, the source of the debt. And once they found that, everything would begin to unravel.

Volkov holding leverage over a government-connected man would be unable to be wiped away with something as simple as a few backroom deals and threats disguised as blackmail to keep certain mouths shut. A public scandal like that never stays neatly contained in our world when the one at the helm of it has his hands dipped in more than just one government official’s back pocket.

Catastrophic is too soft a word for what that would have become.