Page 39 of Immaculate Deception (Romanoff Bratva)

I frown. “That’s not good news.”

“It’s new information. Which is good news. It means we’re one step closer to finding out how to put down this uprising.”

“Pretty shitty good news. What’s the bad?”

“We still don’t know how to put down this uprising.”

It takes everything in me not to reach across the table and throttle him. If I didn’t want to avoid a spectacle, I would. Gennady is cackling.

“Why the fuck did you come here if you don’t have anything to tell me?” I hiss.

Gennady runs a hand over his chin and sighs. “I came because I knew if I just called you instead of coming in person, you’d sprint back to the city. You’d be pissed and impatient, and you’d rush back and get yourself killed.”

“Bullshit. I’d never be that reckless.”

“Not anymore,” Gennady says mysteriously, echoing my own words back to me. He leans back in the booth with a knowing smile on his face. “The kid has changed the math for you, though, hasn’t he? And the woman.”

I want to roar in his face that he doesn’t know a fucking thing that’s happening in my head. But I can’t.

Because he’s right.

Before yesterday, I would have come roaring back into the city and tried to brute force my way through this hiccup. I would have killed as many people as it took. Might’ve gotten myself killed in the process.

Now, the risk calculus has changed. Those kinds of brash actions don’t seem worth it.

Measure twice, cut once,my father always told me. I always disregarded that kind of patient advice.

As of yesterday, I’m finally starting to see the wisdom in it.

When I look up, Gennady is shaking his head. “For a guy who never wanted to have kids, you sure have taken to it easily.”

I know what Gennady means, but I’m not sure if he knows what he’s saying. He doesn’t have a kid. Shit, I barely have one. A single day of fatherhood under my belt hasn’t exactly filled me with wisdom.

But it’s filled me with something.

I don’t have time for that shit, though. I have a Bratva to run. An enemy to fucking mutilate.

I’m going to get Arya and Lukas somewhere safe, far away from all this chaos.

Then I’m coming back to New York to finish what Zotov started.

The waitress is moving towards our table with our food, including a to-go box of breakfast burritos for Arya. I excuse myself to take a piss.

I hear people chattering as I step to the urinal. Slow-paced conversations that meander here and there and nowhere in particular. Makes me fucking uneasy.

People don’t talk like this in the city I come from. I’m Russian by blood, but I was born in New York. Shaped in New York. Until yesterday, I fucking ran New York.

I’ll be back where I belong soon enough.

And Zotov Stepanov will become nothing more than a bloodstain beneath my feet.

I finish my business in a hurry. On my way back to the table, I glance out the large front windows towards the parking lot to make sure Arya’s piece of shit car is still there. It is.

But so is another car. A black SUV.

In the city, it wouldn’t be anything. But here in the middle of nowhere, it’s far too nice to blend in.

I freeze and watch. The door opens and the driver steps out. A white guy, tall and skinny like a scarecrow, with braids in his hair and a chain around his neck.

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