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Just not in our world.
“What’s aPakhan, anyway?” she asks rolling her eyes.
It dawns on me that for as long as she’s been with us, she knows next to nothing about the organization. She hasn’t needed to, but since she’s asking, I’ll tell her the bare minimum she needs. Not sure how my brothers will feel about this, but they’re across the room, letting me take the lead.
I speak before they can interrupt me. “He’s basically the head guy, the head of several factions, anyway. The Bratva tends to be flatter than other organized… groups. That way, if something goes wrong, there’s always somebody to take over. We’re never caught without a leader. We’re harder to dismantle that way.”
She looks at me like I’m crazy. Maybe I am.
I decide to give her a little context. “Russia’s organized crime pretty much started during the imperial times, when we had tsars and such. The rift between the haves and have-nots was beyond extreme. Some took from the rich and gave to the poor like Robin Hood, and an organized method for doing that came into being. They were folk heroes in their day.”
She furrows her brow. “Are you serious? Is that a true story?”
“That’s how I always heard it from my papa. I mean, it makes sense. It’s part of what brought Imperial Russia down. You know, Nicolas and Alexandra?”
She looks at me blankly.
I’m no expert in Russian history. Hell, I’ve never even been there. After Mama and Papa came to the US, they couldn’t have gone back if they wanted to. Apparently, Papa left behind some people who didn’t like him very much. There was a price on his head, which meant never seeing the old country again. When it came down to it, though, I’m not so sure he missed it. Here in the US, he built a life surrounded by other Russians in the same situation. It’s like he brought a piece of the land with him but with less danger and more opportunity. He exploited those opportunities every chance he got and made it into the empire my brothers and I run today. Some people would never approve of what he had to do to get buy, but they can suck my dick. We provide products and services that are in demand. Very high demand.
It's not hard to see that Charleigh has absorbed all the history she cares to for one day. She’s antsy, not happy with unfinished business hanging over her head, and isn’t buying my plea for patience. I know how she’s thinking. I’ve seen it a hundred times, and it never works out the way people think it will. She wants to just walk up to Dimitri and put a bullet to his head. To her, that’s the end of things, and a new beginning for her.
I mean sure, she could do that, but she’d just end up facing a dozen other problems. We have our ways of doing things, and if we follow protocol, things will be resolved to her satisfaction. If we don’t, a tit-for-tat response will consume all parties, and there will be more people left dead than not.
Of course, Charleigh wants to hear none of this. I can’t blame her, so our job, for the time being, is to keep her focused and out of trouble.
She crosses her arms tightly. “I don’t want to wait for thePakhan’sblessing. I don’t need it. He’s nobody to me. I’m not part of his or yourBratvaworld, so I don’t give a shit what he says about anything.”
My brothers and I look at each other. If she doesn’t get it now, she never will. That’s the difference between someone brought up in our world, and someone brought up outside it.
I hate to see her like this, obsessed with something a girl like her was never meant to be confronted with. The attack by Dimitri killed something in her, and I don’t like it. None of us do. The light in her eyes is dimmer, and the spring in her step is pretty much gone. Her voice is nearly always flat, and she just picks at the food on her plate.
What angers me the most about this is that Dimitri didn’t just steal something big from Charleigh. He took it from us, too.
Which was the whole fucking point.
So yeah, I’d like to see the fucker on his knees, begging for mercy with tears running down his face and snot leaking from his nose before one of us explodes his skull with a bullet. I’d like to see that right now. Maybe even more than Charleigh does.
But it will happen, in due time. He’ll never get away with what he did and what he took from us.
Because what he took, we may never get back. The guileless young woman who enchanted my brothers and me could very well be gone forever.
Meaning this will be the second woman I’ve lost. I’m not sure I can take that again.
My own issues aside, no one is suffering more than our Charleigh. It’s like there’s no containing the anger seeping from her pores, and the consequences of rash choices—like killing Dimitrinow—seem mild compared to what she’s carrying around. There is no hiding it, her suffering, wearing it on her sleeve as she does. We stalled on setting up her meeting with thePakhanas long as we could, using her injuries as an excuse, because there’s no telling whether she’ll listen to him quietly as he expects, or lose her shit all over him.
Things could go right… or terribly wrong. There’s no controlling her, much as we’ve tried to. When Dimitri messed with Charleigh, he bought an enemy for life, adding to the roster of people who’d like to see him leave this earth.
What not only worries us about Charleigh not knowing our customs and saying the wrong thing, is also the knowledge of the deal she’s likely to be offered by thePakhan—one where she walks away and forgets the attack ever happened because he offers her a large sum of money. That’s how he resolves things. We know that and accept it.
But clearly, thePakhandoesn’t know our girl.
All the money in the universe would not sway her convictions.
Ever.
So my brothers and I have to balance this, which could turn ugly because two strong-willed people won’t be getting what they want.
The bottom line, which thePakhanis going to find out, is that Charleigh can’t be bought. Problem is, he’s not used to negotiating with women. As in, he probably never has had to, not in his entire life. She’ll make the case, asking how safe will she really ever be with Dimitri still alive, but I doubt that will sway him, and if he feels he’s being challenged or disrespected, things will quickly go south.
