Page 18 of The Pakhan's Bride
Antonov enters from the other side of the room. He's carrying a thick folder, untouched by mold or decay. "Boss. Found this at the bottom of the shred bin. Looks like it was meant to disappear."
I open it. Offshore ledgers. Cyprus. Malta. Four shelf companies masking the same set of accounts. Each one wires to a Batumi firm that doesn't exist. The last page is a list of cargo routes. Astra Line. Black Sea to Adriatic. Across the top is a printed clearance issued under a diplomatic seal. "Look at this," I mutter. "They're moving through state-protected lanes. No inspections, no taxes, no questions."
Sokolov leans closer. "That's how they're moving so cleanly."
"And we've been blind," I say.
I flip back to the Istanbul shipment. Baranov's signature stares up at me from the bottom corner, next to a printed customs number. "His children must be involved," I muse. "Valentin's been training his young."
"You sure about that?" Sokolov asks doubtfully. "They're girls."
"And?" I look askance at him, my brows knit in a frown. "Women can be far more dangerous than men, especially since they're not thinking with their cocks." That shuts him up. "Thismany routes, this many names, this much protection—no chance Valentin pulled this off alone."
When the Bratva fractured after the fall of the Soviet Union, the ones who survived were the ones who adapted. The old Vory codes meant nothing once the borders opened and the west came calling. Valentin clung to the idea that lineage was enough, that wealth and fear could hold ground indefinitely. But the new power structure needed liquidity, not just legacy. When the oil contracts passed him over, when his last three votes on regional control ended in abstentions, the message was clear. The others saw it too. The Baranovs still had money, yes, and silence bought with it, but they had no seat at the table, no sway in the corridors that mattered. Now they are relics propped up by offshore accounts and a few loyal captains too old to defect. And yet…
What's spread out in front of me isn't petty smuggling. It's structure. Port clearances, discreet holdings in three transit cities, flagged transfers that match the old Vory routes. It reeks of foundation, not improvisation. And if they're laying down roots again, then they're not just rebuilding influence but also declaring intent. A second power center cannot exist while I ascend. The old order thrived on fragmentation, but I intend to unify, to centralize. There is no room for nostalgia or parallel empires. If the Baranovs are moving beneath my feet, then I must answer before the council begins to whisper that the wolves are returning.
The path to becomingPakhanisn't granted by blood or strength alone. It's cleared by eliminating what came before.
8
KONSTANTIN
Over the next few hours, I go deeper. The folder markedAstra Lineis chock-full of maritime records. There are manifests stamped by half a dozen port states, all oddly clean for ships so battered they shouldn't still be in service. The registry shifts with every page. Lithuanian, then Panamanian, then Turkish. The captains change names. The crews are ghosts, hired through third-party brokers and always impossible to trace. Every sixth shipment is flagged for expedited diplomatic clearance. That's the first tell. The seals are inconsistent, the paperwork laughable—one is from a dead vice consul in Romania, another signed by a notary who hasn't practiced since the nineties. Different names, different dates, but the same trick. Someone's laundering freight through state immunity.
I turn to the next folder—Zvezda Route. Air manifests this time. The shipments are listed as donations, museum transfers, church heirlooms. All of them are declared fragile, all insured beyond reason, and all far heavier than the stated cargo. I tap my fingers on the surface, thinking to myself. This has to be a front, and a clever one at that, the kind that works because no one checks crates from the Orthodox diocese. I flag three entrieswith connections to Batumi and Varna, both old ports still loyal to the Baranovs.
This is bad news for me. Valentin is reactivating the old Vory shadow networks. He's piggybacking on relics of Soviet trade corridors, securing silent ports and dead channels long buried under legitimate business. The Astra Line is a sea route for arms and allies. The Zvezda Route handles air shipments, money, favors, maybe influence. Whatever Valentin is building, he wants it active soon. Antonov finally speaks. "Something is afoot under the codename U-PJKT. You want to escalate?"
I look at him. He's still as a hunting dog, waiting for the command. "Full trace on this," I say to him. "Find out who's moving the operation, where it's going, and who's funding the courier chain. I want names."
He nods, typing already.
To Orlov, I say, "double the satellite time over Varna, Batumi, and Odessa. Scramble the image analysis. If anyone moves at night, I want to know the make of their shoes before they hit customs."
He grins, teeth white and hungry. "Understood."
I stare at the pile. For a moment, I imagine lighting it on fire, watching the bureaucracy burn down to the steel frame. Instead, I take out a red pen, circle three names in the Zvezda Route folder, and draw a line connecting them. The pattern is obvious now, but only if you know where to look.
The men drift out, one by one. I remain, the hum of the server racks the only heartbeat in the room. I let the details settle in my head, every alias and code word slotted into place, every face mapped onto the board, before I finally see myself out.
The world does not stop for war. It just gets louder, faster, more efficient at hiding the bodies. My current office is a bunker beneath Moscow, thirty meters down, shielded by steel and boredom. The clocks are set to six time zones, but it's alwaysthe same hour. Now. We run it as a twenty-four-hour operation. No downtime, no holidays, no room for sentiment. Every desk is manned by someone with a specialty—translation, decryption, asset vetting, digital intrusion. The lights are always on. The coffee is always gone.
I like to stand at the glass wall and watch the motion. The techs never glance up, even when the servers whine or the lights flicker from another power surge. Data moves faster than thought. It's the only thing in Russia that does. Field ops come in and out, each one with a file or a lead. The room is a living organism, and I am its heart, brain, and soul.
The U-PJKT operation seems to be extensive. First, there are the satellite feeds. Orlov's boys tune into the back-channel comms of half the embassies in the Balkans. They monitor every car that leaves after midnight, every briefcase that never passes through X-ray, every child who goes to school with a new last name.
The next layer is the digital. Sokolov and his team run decryption on the latest batch of emails from the Isle of Man shell companies. At first, it's slow—nothing but "seasonal greetings" and "investment opportunities". But then the patterns emerge. Every third message is a code for a new transfer. Every password reset is a marker for an upcoming shipment. It's as predictable as spring rain.
We map it all. On the walls are whiteboards with tangles of arrows, digital screens filled with heat maps and facial composites, physical boards with strings and pins because despite all the tech, the old ways still work best.
The picture sharpens. The Baranovs aren't just running a forgery ring. They are rewriting the DNA of Europe. Every fake passport is a new citizen, a new voting bloc, a new whisper in the ear of power. Every shipping container is a safehouse or a bank or a weapons cache, placed exactly where it will matter threeyears from now, or thirty. Every marriage pact is a bullet fired into the next generation.
One name that keeps emerging is the Albani syndicate, a Slavic-Balkan hybrid, technically Albanian by name only. Their leadership fractured twice over the last decade, but what emerged was something harder to kill, tighter, nastier, and backed by Ricci capital, the worst of the old Italian rot dressed in globalist polish. They traffic everything from girls to plutonium and keep a payroll of men whose morals are sold hourly.
They were Valentin Baranov's enemies once. Cut off his funding in Kraków. Hijacked three of his trucks outside, split and returned them empty, but wrapped in wire. The cargo was found stripped and bleeding in a warehouse near Belgrade. Valentin retaliated, of course, quietly and lethally. For a time, the two operations orbited each other like stars in a dying binary system—too violent to co-exist, too entangled to escape.
Then, last year, everything shifted. A sealed meeting in Tirana. No audio, no surveillance. After that, Albani stopped skimming off the Baranov channels. The hijackings ceased. Valentin's ships began docking in ports previously under Albani control, and no one asked questions.
