Page 18 of Claimed By the Bratva Brothers

“Doesn’t the Bureau have money set aside for stuff like this?”

“Forget Bowman for a second,” Phelps says. “I’ll deal with him and Smith. They’re not the issue here, my campaign is. I need you, honey.”

To my surprise and genuine admiration, Lyric holds his gaze and shakes her head once more. “No, Dad. I’m not going to come work for you. And I will not use my algorithms to help you advance your political agenda. You’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way, like every other politician before you. Fundraising, televised debates, phone banks, the whole shebang.”

“Wow,” he shakes his head in disappointment. “My own daughter.”

“I don’t owe you anything,” Lyric says. “Just because you’re my father doesn’t mean you’re entitled to any of my intellectual property.”

“I helped you get here!”

“No, I got myself here. You wanted me to go to Harvard and get into politics, like you did. In case you forgot, and it seems you have, I’m the one decided to go to MIT, instead. I’m the one who designed the algorithm and I’m the one who’s building a tool for the next generation. You did nothing, Dad. Hell, even my college tuition was fully covered by the trust fund that Mom left for me.”

“Now is not the time to split hairs,” Phelps hisses, and I can’t help but smile.

Lyric hit a soft spot. She hit it so hard, in fact, that her old man mutters something about her lack of empathy and gratitude before stomping away and bursting through the front doors of the library. I remain behind the bookshelf, analyzing my next steps.

She has a strained relationship with her father, that much is clear, but it doesn’t change who Matthew Phelps is. He’s one of our most dangerous and influential enemies, one of whom we’re looking to crush in order to protect and grow our legacy into the new era of the Bratva. He is one who forces us to remain in the old ways.

Lyric is his daughter. She’s fucking nuclear at this point.

It changes everything.

5

Max

“Idid not see that coming,” Ivan declares as soon as Artur comes into the office sharing news of Lyric’s parentage.

“We never asked her last name,” Artur sighs, taking a seat in one of the guest chairs while I walk over to the minibar and pour him a double shot of whiskey. “We saw her, we wanted her, that was that.”

“Animals,” I mutter as I bring him the drink. “She reduced us to animals. Mindless beasts.”

Ivan gives me a cold grin. “And we loved every second of it.”

“What the fuck do we do now?” Artur asks.

I sit behind my desk with a drink of my own, watching the amber liquid as I swirl the Bohemian crystal tumbler. It is an unexpected situation, and we do need to figure out a way through it. We are about to begin negotiations and tense conversations with the other Bratva families. We have leverage with Bowman in our possession—the kind of leverage our own father only dreamed of. If we get the others behind us, it’ll push Smith into a corner.

“What’s the current hierarchy in the Chicago field office?” I ask Artur.

“What does that have to do with anything?” he replies with a furrowed brow.

“Let’s take it one step at a time. It’ll make sense, I promise.”

Ivan grunts and downs the rest of his drink, then helps himself to another while Artur goes through all the known information that we’ve gathered so far from our meetings and interactions, including our covert research and city-based spies.

“Smith is the supposed ringleader,” Artur says. “The minute he took over the Chicago field office, his roaches and underlings got bolder and louder. Bowman is the cash cow, and Phelps is the PR guy, so to speak.”

“We took their cash cow away and we made our demands clear,” I reply.

“But they haven’t responded,” Artur points out.

Ivan scoffs, adding ice to his whiskey. “It wasn’t an easy demand. They have to close off all of their investigations into our Northshore and Grimm offices and pull the staties away from our Langdon and Massey properties. That’s a lot of manpower that won’t be paid overtime for investigating us. Not that they had much to investigate in the first place.”

“Northshore and Grimm still need a proper scrub,” I remind Ivan. “Let’s send some forensic accountants over there to make sure the IRS will never have reason to connect the new companies to the old ones. We’re trying to build something clean here.”

“Those fuckers won’t let us,” Artur sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose.

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