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“Anyway,” his brother Eric said across from Roman, “he didn’t want to pay at first, but I appealed to his better judgement.”
He was energetic tonight, bordering on manic, and Roman searched his brother’s eyes for some clue about his state of sobriety. Eric had declined a pre-dinner cocktail and the wine served with the food, but there was an unnatural shine in his eyes, and Roman couldn’t help wondering if his brother had done a line or three before coming to dinner.
“Akim says you’re doing a good job,” Igor said from the head of the table. He beamed at his younger son. “He says you’re his most reliable collector!”
His father’s voice was expansive, his praise sincere, as if being an excellent collector required some kind of business acumen instead of the infamous Kalashnik temper unleashed by someone unable to control it, as if collecting wasn’t one of the lowest jobs in the bratva, one typically assigned to thuggish associates who enjoyed using their fists to hurt people.
Not that Roman didn’t, but he’d learned to control it.
Channel it.
Eric was thirty-four years old, well past the age when he should have achieved more status in the bratva. Roman had been a brigadier for four years at the same age, and his father had never issued him a single compliment about his job performance.
Still, Eric’s slow advancement in the bratva wasn’t all his fault. Addiction was a terrible disease. It had cost Eric precious time, had wreaked havoc on his life, on the lives of their parents.
The real problem was Igor’s desire to paper over it, to act as if Eric’s history with drugs and alcohol hadn’t happened, as if Eric were any other man, capable of managing the burdens of a leadership role in the bratva without succumbing to the substances — part and parcel of their world — that made him careless and unreliable.
Igor had always favored Eric, had always protected him with one hand while beating Roman with the other.
“And what of your collections?” Igor asked Roman stiffly.
“Up to date,” Roman said. He didn’t do them himself anymore, but he’d appointed men who were skilled at the task. “On time.”
“It’s a good thing,” his father grumbled. “Our latest shipment of gold was pirated last night. It will leave us short.”
Roman kept his expression impassive. “Can Lev expedite another shipment?”
“For a premium,” Igor said. “Money we don’t have.”
“Must we talk of business at the family table?” Roman’s mother asked.
Eric’s state of sobriety might have been undetermined, but there was no doubt in Roman’s mind that his mother was slightly drunk. Her dark hair was pulled back, her elegant face carefully made up, but none of it could hide the gentle slur of her words.
“It is the family business,” Igor said.
To an outsider, he might have looked like someone’s genial grandfather, a cardigan over a dress shirt, his glasses folded and sitting next to his dinner plate.
But Roman knew the truth. Igor was still substantial in his old age. His dark hair had whitened over the years, but it remained thick and full, his eyebrows bushy over sharp blue eyes, the deep creases in his face speaking to dark things seen and done.
Roman was confident he could hold a pillow over the old man’s face long enough for him to stop breathing, but Igor would put up a fight.
“What of your marriage, Roman?” his mother asked, changing the subject. “Valeriya Orlov is a beauty.”
“Nothing has been decided,” Roman said.
Roman’s father set down his fork and stared him down. “It has.”
“By you,” Roman said. “I’ve not made up my mind.”
He had to be careful. The pirated gold had arrived in New Jersey early that morning and was already being distributed to the buyers Roman had arranged in advance. In a few short days, he would have all the capital he needed to launch an offensive against his father.
But not yet.
Still, Roman would have bristled at a marriage to Valeriya Orlov under any circumstance, so his objections were to be expected.
“We both know you will marry Valeriya,” Igor said, the color rising in his cheeks, his Russian accent more pronounced for his agitation. “You’re being stubborn for the sake of being stubborn.”
“It’s not stubborn to want agency over my life,” Roman said. “Over the person I’ll spend it with.”
