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But life is full of hard choices. More than usual, lately.
I blink hard, once, enjoying the momentary rest. Then I open my eyes. “I’ll give you five minutes.”
He starts to respond, but I hang up.
“Who was that?” Piper asks. “Where are you going?”
I head down the hallway. I can see the woman in her wheelchair sitting by the rickety table. She’s trying to pretend she isn’t eavesdropping, but her head is tilted awkwardly towards our conversation.
Just before I reach for the door, I look back at Piper. “You only have five minutes, too. Then we’re leaving.All of us.”
37
TIMOFEY
Unfortunately, Sergey is unarmed. Unfortunate in the sense that it doesn’t give me an excuse to slaughter him immediately.
He’s standing purposefully under a streetlight, his hands limp at his sides. He’s ditched his coat to show that his silhouette is weapons-free. As the one who taught me to shoot first and ask questions later, he wanted to make sure I didn’t have a question to ask.
“Are you done poisoning my men against me?” I ask when we’re still far enough apart for my voice to echo off the line of rusted-out cars parked along the littered curb. “Decided to take a leisurely drive now that you’ve divided the Bratva I saved?”
He smirks. “You’ve always been grandiose. The Bratva existed before you, son.”
“Don’t call me that. And you know as well as I do that I saved your ragtag little ring of crooks and made it into something worthwhile.”
“It didn’t need saving.”
Sergey is an easy liar. They say history is written by the winners, but Sergey rewrites his own history either way. He inflates his successes and papers over his own shortcomings and failures with an alternate reality. One that ignores how I streamlined his string of businesses into a corporation and once again made the Viktorov Bratva the most feared force in the city.
“If that’s true, then why didn’t you hand it over to your biological son?” I ask. “Afraid that one apple who fell a little too far from the tree could bring the whole thing tumbling down? Doesn’t sound secure, if you ask me.”
He arches a brow. “No one asked you.”
Sergey and I have always been good at this back and forth. We’ve butted heads since the beginning, but I always curbed myself. I knew he could get rid of me if I caused too much trouble, so I mediated. I found the compromise. That’s part of being a good leader, after all.
But now, being a good leader requires getting the Bratva as far from Sergey as possible.
“Tell me why you’re here. You have three minutes.”
“Has my time started already?” he sighs. “I should have known you’d try to waste it.”
“You’re wasting it now. Two minutes and thirty seconds.”
His papery lips press into a thin line. “If the Bratva decides that you are the one who killed Rodion, they’ll rise against you. Especially now that you’ve told them who Rodion truly was. His connection to me makes what you did that much more heinous. It almost seems like maybe you were nervous he’d claim your throne.”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” I grit out. I’m stating the obvious, just in case Sergey is wearing a wire. I wouldn’t put it past him.
“Maybe the men will believe you. Maybe they won’t.”
“I know you’re not here to warn me since you’re the one who set us down this path to begin with. You’re lucky I don’t kill you now for infiltrating a Bratva meeting against my direct orders.”
His eyes flick down to my hip. To where he knows I have a weapon hidden. “I’m here to warn you that the men’s anger might not be a clean shot. It could come with collateral damage.”
He doesn’t have to elaborate for me to understand what he’s talking about.
Piper.
It wouldn’t be the first time a girlfriend—or whatever the hell Piper is to me—was caught in the crosshairs of a mutiny. She may not have a ring on her finger, but she has a womb. Even the potential of an heir would need to be annihilated. Keeping the line of succession clean is the best way to avoid strife and division.
