Page 19 of Kings of Violence

Sierra does not, of course, try to sit. She bends down to get her lips closer to mine, her eyes furious.

I smile at her. “Come on. Just a few centimeters left between our lips.”

“Not enough,” she mutters, but she leans in and kisses me. It’s a chaste kiss, not nearly enough, but it stokes hungers I have mostly been able to ignore. I’m too busy to find a regular woman, and I wonder why I didn’t think of this particular solution before.

Normally when we share women, it is the kind who get paid, or the ones who think they can get a nice permanent arrangement with access to a nice house and endless gifts. None of us want that kind of trouble.

But keeping a woman like Sierra means we have constant access, and with the three of us, there’s always somebody to keep an eye on her or to keep her occupied.

Three of us.

Only two, right now, and it hasn’t been three of us for over two years. I keep forgetting that, because Yuri was such a constant in my life. I’d personally chosen him to come with me to the United States and be my right-hand man. He was the only person I could trust back then.

Now I have Nikolai, at least, but I am always reminded of Yuri’s absence.

I press my hand to Sierra’s stomach, and one of Yuri’s diatribes comes to mind. “Why shouldn’t you have heirs? Just because your old man said so? Fuck him.”

I shake that thought away.

“So, Sierra,” I say once she’s skittered away, “why don’t you tell us about yourself? You love your mamasha. You were studying computers at university.” I pause there. “Shouldn’t you be taking classes? Or are you doing them online, like all the students these days?”

“I’m on winter break,” she says warily, picking up a piece of bread with some cheese on it. She takes her time chewing — stalling, most likely — before she says, “I’ll need to return to my classes when they start again.” She eyes us warily. “That is, if my gracious and benevolent overlords allow it.”

Nikolai cracks up laughing. “Benevolent. That’s cute.”

I enjoy the salty caviar while I watch Sierra. “Go back to classes? Why would we let you do that?”

“You don’t want anyone getting suspicious, do you?” she points out. “If I’m still attending classes, there’s no reason for the police to get involved. And…” She eyes us both for a moment. “You know the New Bristol police favors the Pavones and Crescis. Might be annoying.”

I scoff at that. “If they were real criminals, they wouldn’t associate with law enforcement.”

Of course, even at home in Russia, it’s gotten to the point where it’s better to lie low and bribe or blackmail the cops rather than have everybody arrested for daring to spite the wrong man. Corruption is everywhere—but the Americans sure like to sit on ahigh horse, when their government officials are just as corrupt as ours.

Sierra shrugs, but her words seem chosen carefully as she replies, “It doesn’t change the fact that they could be an inconvenience. This way, no one can report me missing.”

“I’ll think about it,” I say instead. My phone buzzes with a new text message, and I pull it out as I continue, “When do your classes start again?”

“In two weeks,” she says. “I’m learning a lot of the more advanced methods of hacking this final semester. It’ll help me, and I can ask a lot of questions I might not be able to get away with anywhere else, too.” She flashes me a smile.

“I don’t have time to babysit her,” Nikolai grumbles. “Maybe when Yura returns…”

“Yura likes learning,” I agree. I look down at my phone and frown. The text I received is from my brother in Russia, in cyrillic.

Papa wants update on P

Well, our dear old Papa can keep waiting. There is nothing to update regarding P—Petrov.

With the time difference between New Bristol and Moscow, this means that Roman is texting me on a Saturday night when he should have had much better things to do. Why isn’t he with one of his many mistresses?

I angrily text back,I’ll send word when there’s word to send.

That probably won’t satisfy Roman or our father, but it’s all I have for now.

I look back at Sierra. If she can get us access to her father’s accounts, if we can get his secret weapons stash—and the secret cash he’s sure to have stashed around too—that would be something concrete I can deliver to my father. It would be more than Petrov ever managed to do, whose English is so shaky he needed me to interpret most of the deals he brokered.

Sierra eyes me right back. “Do I want to know why this… Yura is in prison, Kotya?”

Nikolai sits straight up, glaring at Sierra. “Wecall him Kotya.Youcall him Konstantin. Got it?”

---