My uncle, Nikolai, was pakhan. He had inherited the title legitimately — through legitimate bloodlines. I was his brother’s bastard. The son born in the wrong bed, at the wrong time, to the wrong woman.
Titles weren’t handed to men like me. We had to conquer them, prove ourselves and earn everything we wanted through violence and restraint.
By the time he’dallowedme to break out, I’d already earned enough loyalty to make ignoring me inconvenient. I didn’t ask for my rank. I merely made myself indispensable enough to earn it.
Now, standing in a shady office overlooking a marina we technically controlled but had not yet fully asserted our authority over, I was reminded how indifferent territory was to bloodlines.
It cared about who had the most power.
“They’re testing the perimeter,” Kyrill informed me from the window, watching the docks with a seemingly careless but actually attentive gaze. “Small shipments. Nothing dramatic.”
“They want a reaction from us.”
Kyrill nodded. “They want to see if you’ll react like your uncle.”
I didn’t look at him, contemplating my options. “And if I don’t?”
“Then they will assume you are weak.”
Even though they knew I wasn’t in charge of the entire operation, they were looking for any weaknesses in our defenses. They wanted to see how far they could push it before the possibility of an all-out war arose. This was about more than just dock access.
It was about whether the men here believed I could protect what I had claimed.
You asked for this territory. Prove it belongs to you.
I could still hear my uncle’s voice echoing through my head from our last call.
Prove myself I would. At least this was familiar territory; proving myself is what I’d been doing for a decade in Blackwood.
Nikolai didn’t need to say more.
If I mishandled this, I wouldn’t embarrass myself — I’d embarrasshim.
And that was not survivable.
Kyrill crossed the room and leaned against the desk with his arms folded. “We could escalate.”
“Yes.”
“You’re hesitating.”
“No.”
He watched me, a faint hint of amusement in his eyes. “You are.”
Kyrill was used to being my voice of reason, my sounding board. Having grown up in Russia, he understood the Bratva’s internal workings better than most. About unspoken expectations and customs.
He was invaluable to me for this reason alone and had become my best friend during our years together at Blackwood. Aside from Addy, he was the one person in the world who knew me inside out.
He was my right-hand man, my enforcer, the fist executing my orders.
I finally looked at him. “I’m calculating.”
Kyrill shrugged one massive shoulder. “Same thing.”
I chose to ignore that.
Escalation would have been easy. Direct. Clean. A show of force sharp enough to end speculation. It would also have dragged attention toward the marina, toward the villa, toward everything I was trying to stabilize before it deteriorated further.