Page 49 of The Mafia King's Baby

Leonid laughs from the driver’s seat. “He is the boss, but he’s also an idiot who would be dead five times over without proper supervision.”

Yefrem sounds annoyed but is grinning in the visor mirror. “I’m sitting right here.”

“Da, so you might consider being quiet while I’m telling her about Prague.”

Before Yefrem can respond, I ask, “What happened in Prague?”

“Nothing happened in Prague,” Yefrem says firmly.

“Everything happened in Prague,” Leonid counters with a grin. “Car chase, gunfight, exploding building, and a narrow escape across rooftops in the middle of winter?—”

Yefrem shakes his head. “It wasn’t that dramatic.”

Leonid rolls his eyes. “It was exactly that dramatic. Plus the part where you insisted on going back for the violin.”

“It was a Stradivarius.”

Leonid scoffs. “It was an unnecessary risk.”

Yefrem arches a brow, saying animatedly, “It was a three-million-dollar Stradivarius.”

Their argument has the comfortable rhythm of something they’ve had many times before, and I end up laughing despite the violent images their words conjure. The normal moment of two friends bickering about past adventures makes the reality of their criminal lives seem almost mundane.

“Did you get the violin?” I ask.

“Of course, we got the violin,” Leonid says, “And nearly died in the process, but yes, we got the violin.”

I giggle in spite of myself because of the way he says it. “What happened to it?”

“I sold it to a private collector in Monaco,” says Yefrem. “We used the proceeds to buy safer transportation and better equipment.”

“And medical attention,” Leonid adds. “So much medical attention.”

“You were shot,” I say with a small gasp of horror.

“Grazed,” Yefrem corrects dismissively. “Barely worth mentioning.”

“Through-and-through bullet wound in the shoulder, plus shrapnel from the explosion, plus hypothermia from the rooftop escape,” Leonid lists systematically. “But yes, barely worth mentioning for you, since you had a scrape on your forehead.” There’s heavy irony in the last part.

The casual discussion of serious injuries disturbs me more than the abstract violence we’ve talked about before. Thesearen’t hypothetical dangers but real wounds on real bodies, and consequences of the choices they make every day.

“How do you live like this?” The question escapes before I can stop it.

“Like what?” Yefrem turns to look at me directly.

“Knowing that every job could be the one that gets you killed? Never being safe and never being able to let your guard down completely.”

“How do you live any other way?” asks Leonid with a half-shrug. “Life is dangerous whether you acknowledge it or not. At least we’re honest about the risks.”

“But normal people don’t get shot at. They don’t have to worry about explosions or rooftop escapes or?—”

“Normal people get hit by drunk drivers, develop cancer, and have heart attacks at forty,” Yefrem interrupts. “They die in plane crashes and house fires and random accidents every day.”

“The only difference is that we know who our enemies are.” Leonid speaks with conviction.

The philosophy is both logical and deeply unsettling. I want to argue that there’s a meaningful distinction between random misfortune and actively courting danger, but something in Yefrem’s expression stops me. He’s not trying to convince me his lifestyle is safe or smart. He’s simply explaining how he’s learned to accept its risks.

“Besides,” Leonid adds, “Someone has to do the work we do. Someone has to exist in the spaces between legal and illegal and handle the problems that official channels can’t or won’t address.”

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