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2
Dmitry
My mind wasn’t where it should be, and I knew it. I may have been getting out of the vehicle for the second time that evening, my feet touching Russian soil for the third, but my mind was still back at the hotel where I’d left her. She’d been so tired from the journey that she’d fallen into bed without bothering to undress, still too preoccupied to notice that her dress was on backwards, and I was amused by that.
Manya Koalistia, my wife.
I was starting to question the decision to bring her, with how easily she had distracted me. But I knew that I would have been even more distracted with her an entire country away. Tigrenok, I’d called her, and it had been an accident,but fuck if it wasn’t fitting.
I shoved my hands down into the pockets of my jacket, nodding to the two byki standing guard at the door, and didn’t so much as blink as it was opened on my approach. I figured this would happen. They’d have been alerted well before my plane even landed, but I’d been hoping for some element of surprise. Having them alerted, prepared, and waiting for me didn’t suit my plans.
I wanted them unprepared and struggling to keep up—that was how the truth would come out. The factions hadn’t been left behind in America. I just had to be fast.
As my father said, I was the next Pakhan.
“Dobriy vyecher, Comrade Koalistia,” a scratchy voice greeted as I stepped through the second set of doors within.
It looked like any other meeting space, with a long table in the center and a handful of office chairs gathered around it. Several of the bodies within those chairs looked as if they belonged in a high-end office as well, their suits so fine and well pressed that they screamed of money. Only two of the five men seated there did not fit the image, and both of them were heavily tattooed and obviously wearing clothing to show it.
“Dobriy vyecher,” I returned evenly, shrugging out of my overcoat and ignoring the air conditioning that they ran despite the cold temperatures outside. “I was expecting to have to call you here. How lucky you were already gathered.” The sarcasm in my voice was only thinly veiled by my politeness. A few eyebrows raised.
“Pah. And you, a torpedo, think you can call us to come and go as you please?” asked the scratchy voice that had greeted me before. The man that it belonged to was easily the oldest man in the room. His gray hair was beginning to grow sparse, but his cutting gray eyes seemed all the sharper for it.
“Me, a Koalistia Two Spy and your future Pakhan,” I responded evenly.
A hacking cough interspersed by laughter came from the man seated on the far left. I recognized the heavy gold chains around his neck clinking with each heave of his chest. It was Roger Kovacs. “Two Spy?” he asked. “Nyet. I do not see the marks for you to be Two Spy, boy. Nor do I remember you being named next in line. Or did I miss the new law that would make you so just by fortuity of bloodline?” He wiped the back of his wrist across his mouth, staring at me with black eyes glittering with amusement.
I didn’t react to the derision in his tone, nor to the glare behind his smile.I had been expecting as much upon coming here. Instead, I carefully hung my coat on the chair at the opposite head of the table and slowly sat down. “Da, you missed it,” I muttered. “I have no marks yet, because I came home to the motherland in order to get them. And it hasn’t been announced yet because it has always been the plan, as you, my father’s right-hand men here on the ground, would know.”
“And what makes you fit to be my Pakhan, Koalistia-now-Two-Spy who has chosen to followyourselfthese last few years, shirking your duties as your father’s heir?” the scratchy voice asked me. Neil Angeloff’s gray eyes watched my movements as if weighing them.But this line of argument I had anticipated.
My last name meant a lot, even in this circle, but it would not be enough to secure my position as Pakhan only because my father deemed it such.
“Does my record not speak for itself?”
The cough that met those words didn’t come from Angeloff or Kovacs, but from Gregory. Meeting his eyes was easier. The tattoos interlaced over his features were stark against the pretty face that they covered, but then that had been his intention. Baby-face, little one: He’d carried as many demeaning names as there had been bodies laid at his feet. And now he’d chosen to publicly advertise his rise up the ranks over his fine features for obvious reasons.
“Your record?” he asked, his eyebrows raised. “As Comrade Angeloff says, your record is spotty at best. Nyet, Koalistia, it is us you need to court while you are here. You want our vote for support when you go up for Pakhan, you earn it. Just as you did the rank before. This is how this works, you know that, da?”
“Nyet,” the other heavily tattooed body spoke up suddenly, his voice quiet. Ace had no last name, and didn’t need one, even after all of these years. He’d dropped it months after achieving his last rank. “You need toproveyou’ve earned it,” he corrected.
I sat motionless as I looked over the five men in front of me. Only the fifth man, Noel Bychkov, had the grace to look even slightly ashamed of the commentary being lobbed at me, and only because he was the youngest. He cleared his throat and dropped his gaze, leaving me to level gazes with the other four.
“It is standard precaution, Dmitry, da?” Noel chimed in finally, adjusting his heavily jeweled wrists on top of the table. “You follow same rules we all do. You have good bones, you make good Two Spy, as you should have been already.” He paused, his glittering blue eyes moving up and down as if to assess me. The scar that stretched from the top of his head down to the left corner of his lip seemed to twitch. “You come here to Russia for reason—to us, your ‘generals’ on ground. So tell us, what reason do you come home for? Other than to be marked the rank you should already have. . .”
Never one to bandy words, he stared frankly back at me, steepling his fingers in front of him and leaning his chin down on top of them.
“I’ve come home to secure my rank as your next Pakhan,” I replied honestly. My shoulders rose in a small shrug as I watched the emotions shift across their faces. I idly lifted a pen from the table, pushing it between my fingers. “That is the long and the short of it. Nyet . . . that is all of it.”
My gaze dropped, watching the pen twist for a moment before looking solely back up at Bychkov. “Da, all of it. So you will discuss. Amongst yourselves. I will bring my wife round. I will see The Artist. We will do our song and dance, and I will show you.” I stood and placed the pen down on the table.
“That is it?” Ace asked, incredulity bleeding into his tone.
My gaze swung to him. “Da, that is it.” It was all I had to offer. I grabbed the jacket I had just deposited off the back of the chair and walking from the room without a word of explanation or goodbye. I owed it to none of them. They owed to me, as one who outranked them, and then some. I didn’t have time to go back and forth with words that wouldn’t mean shit to them anyways.
I could hear the outbreak of Russian behind me, two or three voices rising above the others, and I ignored those as well. It had been a tactical error, coming here first, and I should have known that. Going marked so visibly as a torpedo instead of the Two Spy that I now was had been sloppy. Going ahead of the news that my father would have sent concerning the change in rank was even sloppier.
I would need to see The Artist next, and then make good on all the other promises I had made. They would either agree, or they wouldn’t, and I would have a house to clean. It was as simple and as complicated as that, no more and no less.
It was the questions that they were asking that I didn’t want to face.
The questions concerning my right to lead—and my reluctance. At the time, I’d answered with a facade of easiness, as if they weren’t the same questions, I’d been asking my damn self this whole time.Did I even want to lead? Wasn’t becoming Pakhan exactly what I had been avoiding these past four years by trying to stay as a torpedo against my father’s wishes?
My chest tightened as I stepped into the front seat of the car and threw my coat across the passenger seat. I would need to go without it for a short period at least, so as not to appear weak in front of those watching me. America’s warm air had made me soft. There couldn’t be goosebumps on my arm when I addressed a room full of murderers and thieves. There could be no shiver of cold that could be somehow misinterpreted by the eyes now fixed upon me.
I was Dmitry Koalistia, and it was time that I made them remember that name.
