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NIKOLAI

Another server brought a drink to the table and lingered for just a moment longer than I cared for. Her presence forced us to pause our conversation, and a flight was coming up soon for the old friend of the family.

Move along…

A couple of years ago, I might have been interested.

That was before.

Before my brothers, cousins, and I were blindsided by the news that my father had a stroke. A stroke that had been slowly in the works due to his cancer diagnosis he hadn’t wanted to share with us. His decline was the start of all the changes that happened one after another, in a domino-effect sequence.

Adrik was taking over as interim Pakhan of the Volkov Bratva. He had gotten married and had a kid. Then Maksim too. Last week, Viktor had a wedding, and it left me as the last man standing among us four brothers. Even Lev, my younger cousin, was married and counting on a child soon.

“Get lost,” Alexei, my oldest cousin, growled at her when she tried to rely on a sultry smile and a preview of her cleavage to secure our attention.

I smiled to myself.

At least he’ll never change. There was no before or after with him and his pissy status of being a loner among all six of us.

Stefan Rossi, a Mafia boss from the Italian Outfit in New York, smirked from across the table in this VIP section of our club. “I think she’s got her eyes on Nikolai.”

I shook my head but didn’t stoop to glowering at her.

Because in the before, our old friend and distant ally would’ve been right on the mark with that assessment. Before so much had changed with my father, the Pakhan, dying, I would’ve been interested in her. Or any other woman. Any sweet piece of ass like these nameless, forgettable servers or the elegant and harder-to-chase, bored mistresses.

This was after, though.

After my whole family started settling down in reaction to the one and only Dmitri Volkov lying in a coma at the Volkov mansion. After we discovered that my uncle Gregori was still alive and forming a vast shadow network of minions and cronies to attack us.

“No thanks,” I told her when she still persisted, licking her lip and shining that fuck-me smile my way.

“Get lost,” Alexei said again, reaching for his phone. His patience was the shortest of all of us, but I supposed it made sense not to dwell on a distraction we hadn’t asked for. Stefan Rossi had his own problems to manage back home in the Big Apple, and he’d only come out to the Vegas area to congratulate Viktor and Wren on their wedding in that tiny-ass chapel. We were meeting for drinks now just to recap all that had been happening in the family before he had to leave.

“Like I was saying…” Stefan drawled. “You’ll probably be better off focusing on who could’ve tried to take that hit out on Adrik by looking into Kirill Konstantin.”

Alexei smirked, glancing off to the side. He’d already looked into the smaller Konstantin Bratva, but there wasn’t an easy method of getting answers.

“He’s definitely on our radar,” I said.

Adrik, as the oldest son, would become Pakhan as soon as our father passed away naturally. That was his stipulation in his living will, to let him die naturally—even though we’d all debated whether it was cruel to keep him living in that shell of his body. Because he was next in line to the throne, Adrik was targeted by our many enemies. He’d survived a shot from a sniper recently, but we weren’t getting too far with who could’ve ordered the hit.

As if we really need to wonder.

Gregori had to be behind it. My uncle had tried to steal the throne years ago and he was after the same thing now.

“But…” Stefan paused, glancing down at both my phone and Alexei’s ringing with the same tone.

It was a message in our group thread, but my phone rang with an incoming call, too.

“Adrik,” I said, seeing that it was a video call. Answering quickly, I propped it up so Alexei could be seen too.

My oldest brother didn’t wait for me to greet him.

“I just got a message from Rico Johnson,” he stated.

“I thought he was ‘missing’,” Stefan said.