Page 47 of Kingmakers, Year Four

We’re quiet as we walk back through the woods in the direction of the school. I don’t think Nix is tired—I’m not sure what could possibly tire her. But she seems calm. Peaceful. Her red hair flares brightly every time we pass under a patch of late-afternoon sunlight. She tilts her face up into the sun, absorbing every last bit of it.

I can’t stop watching her.

11

Ivan Petrov

St. Petersburg

Twenty-nine Years Ago

Dominik asks me to meet him in the War Room of the monastery, which was once the chapel where the monks knelt in prayer—or whatever they were actually thinking about. The church is a power structure like any other, and the similarities between my brotherhood and theirs are no coincidence.

This monastery has been in our family for generations. The Petrov motto is carved in stone over the gates:

Fides Est In Sanguinem

Loyalty In Blood

My brother is the only blood left to me. Our mother has been dead a decade, our father passed last year. I might have killed him, indirectly, with the stress of my takeover. It wasn’t my father I had to subdue—it was his unruly and disloyal army of soldiers, who had no respect for him, and were just as much a danger to us as our enemies. Maybe even more so.

I killed Rurik Oblast the night I was released from prison.

He knew it was coming, and he tried to flee to Kotka. I cut off his hands, the old punishment for thieves, and drove a dagger through his spine at the base of his neck, the penalty for traitors. I sent a finger to his family so they’d have something to bury. The rest of him I burned.

Oblast’s friends tried to launch a mutiny amongst my men, but I expected that. Marko, Dominik, and I slaughtered everyone that dared to raise a hand against us.

Then we turned to my enemies.

Every family in St. Petersburg that was supposed to pay homage to the Petrovs was brought to heel. I rained down terror on their heads, forcing repayment of every last ruble that should have been turned over to my father’s accountants as our tariff on the whorehouses, the gambling rings, the drug dens, and the extortion rackets within our borders.

And then, I began to expand.

I took back the territory that had been stolen from us. Then I took more in reparation. I brought family after family under my boot: the Sidarovs, the Veronins, the Markovs.

My father ceded the position ofPakhanas soon as I was released from the prison camp. But he did not approve of my methods or my ambition. He particularly hated my alliance with Marko Moroz, a Ukrainian with no ties to the Petrovs, or anyone else we respected.

“Our allies stood by and did nothing while the vultures picked our bones,” I told my father.

“You ought to turn to your uncles, your cousins . . .” he pleaded with me.

I kept the best of my relatives: Efrem, Oleg, Maks, and Jasha.

But the others—those who stole from us, those who lied to us, those who conspired with our enemies—those I drove out into the winter snow like they were strangers to me.

“I’d rather have a true friend over false family,” I told my father.

Now the men that live in the monastery are my hand-picked soldiers. Those I know and can trust with my life. Whether I recruited them in the prison camp, on the streets, or from the ranks of distant relatives, it makes no difference. I promote off merit, not blood relation.

I was almost glad to lay my father in the ground. I grew tired of his ceaseless complaints.

He brought us to the edge of ruin, then bemoaned the measures necessary to haul us back again.

The bonds of family can be chains weighing you down.

My father wanted the love of his men. It made him weak.

I’m not interested in love—I’m interested in achievement. I want the whole of St. Petersburg under my control.

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