“I heard about what happened and I wanted to come give you my condolences. I liked Marvin, even though he was a loud-mouthed moron and a mediocre earner at best.”
“Thank you, Pakhan.”
“Sit down. We need to talk.” He gestured at the couch.
I sat next to Cara. I tried to get her to look me in the eye, but she avoided my gaze. I put a hand on her knee and she brushed it off. I decided not to push her further.
Evgeni sat in the chair to my left. My living room felt crowded and I wanted to take a shower to clean off all the residual blood still caked in the wrinkles of my fingers, but whatever the Pakhan wanted must’ve been serious. The man rarely, if ever, made house calls like this.
“What can I do for you?” I asked, leaning forward with my elbows on my knees.
Evgeni gave me a shrewd look. “I heard rumors. Nasty rumors about the Lionettis and one of their clients.”
I tensed and glanced at Cara. She still wouldn’t look at me.
“What did you hear, Pakhan?”
“One of their reliable washers decided to step back away from the game. A businessman named Jeff, some real estate developer. Apparently, the Lionettis were blackmailing him into cleaning money for them, but he suddenly decided to refuse their shipments of cash and skipped town this morning. I was wondering why a man being blackmailed would suddenly decide to take off, and I thought of you, Luke.”
I took a deep breath. I expected to have more time before the Pakhan found out about this. Selling the dossier, or at least pretending to sell it, that was one thing. But taking the fight to the Lionettis so directly was another matter entirely.
That was an act of war, and it would pull the whole family into it.
“We approached him, Pakhan,” I said, and heard Yuri suck in a surprised breath. Poor guy didn’t have any clue what we were doing—none of them did, except for German. “It was my idea. I thought, since we have the dossier, we could use it to do exactly what the Lionettis were doing, only in the reverse. They wanted to blackmail people to do their bidding, while I wanted to blackmail people into hurting them.”
Evgeni let out a grunt and tilted his head. “It’s an interesting idea.”
“I understand the dangers of this game, but it was my idea and mine alone, nobody else should be to blame.” I felt Cara tense next to me, and I was about to tell her to be quiet if she decided to speak up—but she kept silent.
I could protect her. The Pakhan would hesitate to kill me at least, since I was still valuable to him. But Cara was nothing more than a minor annoyance, only alive at my behest, and if he understood that she was the one who set this blackmail scheme into motion then I had a feeling he would take his frustration out on her.
I had to do my best to keep her safe, even if that meant taking the punishment myself.
“You did a serious thing, Luke,” Evgeni said very slowly, enunciating each word. “The Lionettis do not take this sort of provocation lightly. They will realize it was you behind this developer’s sudden change of heart, and they will come to me for retribution. The Morozov family is strong at the moment, but I do not know if we’re strong enough to win a war against the Lionettis, should it come to that.”
“We will be,” I said, sitting up straight and staring into my Pakhan’s eyes. “Let me hurt the Lionettis further, and if they decide to start a war, we’ll have the upper hand.”
“You can’t possibly know that.” He frowned at me, head tilted to one side.
“Have you ever had a chance like this before?” I asked, but didn’t wait for him to answer. “In all your years as the Pakhan of the Morozov Bratva, have you ever had an opportunity like this? The Lionettis are strong, but we’re just as powerful, and even more so now that we have this dossier. They thought they created something that could shield them from harm, but in my hands, it’s a weapon they won’t be able to protect themselves against.”
Evgeni sat back in his chair and regarded me for a long moment. The air felt heavy, thick with tension and uncertainty, and Yuri looked like he might topple over at any second. The poor guy had no clue what was happening, and he was only now just realizing how much danger I’d put them all in. German knew, and he approved, but only because he felt it was a risk worth taking—the others might not agree so much.
Nobody wanted war, not even the most bloodthirsty among the Bratva. War wasn’t profitable, war led to bodies on the street, and bodies meant more police surveillance. The Bratva survived by keeping in the shadows away from the mainstream and far, far away from the cops. But once war broke out into the streets, there was no more hiding, no more running away, and we’d all be sucked into the dangerous spiral.