Page 117 of The Bratva Betrayal

Like it’s him that was supposed to be at my side all along.

28

Artem

Benedikt’s office looks the same as it always does.

The desk is huge, the windows fill the walls with the city spread out behind them, and the art on the walls is tasteful and cold.

I’ve sat across from him in this room more times than I can count. It has never felt comfortable, and I’ve never needed it to.

Today feels different.

Not because I’m uncertain about anything I’ve done, but because I’m not. Every decision I’ve made in the last week has been made with both the full knowledge of what it would cost and a complete willingness to pay it.

What’s different is that Cady is sitting beside me, her hands folded in her lap and her face composed.

Having her here, in this room that belongs to the world I’ve spent my life operating in, makes the last week feel suddenly real in a way it hasn’t until this moment.

Benedikt looks at her first. Then at me. Then back at her, quietly cataloguing what he missed and refusing to move on until he understands it.

He leans back in his chair and waits, because he knows that waiting is the most efficient way to get information from someone.

“Misha hit her.” I watch Benedikt’s expression shift into the controlled focus he uses when taking a report. “I went to Colin Gallagher, told him the arrangement was broken, and the marriage wasn’t happening. He pushed back⁠—”

“You told Colin Gallagher the marriage was off without bringing it to me first?”

Benedikt looks at Cady again, and I see him assessing the trouble she’s caused him.

“Yes,” I confirm. “Misha is gone. I sent him away so Cady’s brothers didn’t kill him.”

He stares at me. “And then?”

“Lucas Manifold approached her today. He knew Misha was gone, and he decided that his debt transferred to her. He told her she owed him three million dollars. I ended that, too.”

“How?”

“Clean exit through the service corridor, no witnesses worth worrying about, no footage that will cause us problems.”

Benedikt sets down the pen he’s been holding and looks at me with an expression I don’t see from him often, genuine surprise and the careful management of genuine shock.

Then he takes a slow breath and folds his hands on the desk.

“Let me make sure I have all of this correctly,” he says, choosing each word carefully. “In the span of one week, you removed your brother from the city, dissolved a sanctioned arrangement with the Gallagher family, made a unilateral agreement with Colin Gallagher regarding his daughter, and killed a sitting politician. And you did all of this without a single conversation with me beforehand.”

“That’s correct.”

“Artem.” He says my name the way he does when something has genuinely landed on him. “Have you lost your fucking mind?”

“No. I’ve been completely clear-headed through all of it.”

“Then explain to me why you moved all of these things without bringing them to me first, because in more than twenty years, I cannot think of one time you’ve done something of this magnitude without a conversation.”

I look at him steadily. This is the part I’ve been working out how to say, and I’ve decided the only way to say it is directly.

“If I’d brought it to you first, you’d have told me to manage it through the arrangement. To keep Misha in place, to let the Gallagher situation run its course, to extract what we needed from it and hold the line until it served us. And I knew when I walked out of your office the last time we spoke that I wasn’t going to be able to do that.”

Benedikt looks at me for a long moment, then at Cady. “Are you going to marry this girl?”