Page 6 of Sapphire Tears

I nod. “That’s right. There was only ever one don of the Uvarov Bratva, and it was always me.”

A ripple of unease surges through the bound men. They know that it never ends well for poor bastards like them when the men with real power have to remind them of who we are.

I pick out two of the grizzled ones and amble over to them, hands clutched behind my back. As with the rest, I don’t recognize their faces. But I can tell from the looks in their eyes that they recognize mine.

“What are your names?”

The huskier one lifts his eyes to me. “What’s it to you? You’re gonna kill us anyway.”

“Am I?”

He shrugs and spits on the concrete at my feet. “Those fuckers down the end are useless. You won’t get loyalty from them even if you paid for it,” he growls, his dark eyes glinting with resignation. “As for me and my brothers here, we are true Bratva.”

“If that were true, you would never have abandoned your don,” I snarl at him. “You were foolish enough to leave in the first place.”

His jaw twitches. “What did you expect?” he demands. “You cut off our lifeblood. No working girls on the streets meant no money coming in, and when you went around cutting off hands and castrating any man who kept trying to earn a living… Well, did you expect us to be happy?”

“I expected you to follow my fucking orders.”

He pulls back his lips to reveal yellowing teeth. “I chose to follow the orders of a don with vision. A don who wasn’t a father killer.”

“Fair enough. And now—you’ll die for it.”

I make eye contact with Knox and nod once. Eleven gunshots sound out in unison. Eleven bodies hit the ground.

And the silence that follows burns like hellfire.

“Torch the corpses,” I instruct my men as Milana starts walking over towards me.

She doesn’t so much as glance at the still-warm bodies she steps over to get to me. “This was your fourth firing squad in three days,” she points out, as if I wasn’t already aware of that fact.

“I’m thinning the herd.”

“You’re lashing out.”

I ignore her. “Did you manage to track down Kulikov?”

“Does a bear shit in the woods?” she retorts. “Of course I got him. I had him brought to the east side warehouse. You won’t be disturbed there.”

“Good. Let’s go.”

I climb into my car. Milana gets into the passenger seat. Her eyes keep flitting over to my face as though she’s waiting for me to speak.

“Should you be doing this now?” Milana ventures when it becomes clear I’m not about to break the silence.

I stare out the window as we chew up the road, engine purring. “Why would I wait?”

“Because you’ve been working nonstop since—” She breaks off abruptly when I shoot her an impatient glare out of the corner of my eye. “Since Ravil died,” she amends. “It’s been five days, Kolya. Even you need to sleep at some point.”

“I sleep plenty.”

Twenty minutes here, twenty minutes there. Just enough to give me the energy to kill a few more of Ravil’s men the next day.

“We’re going to draw unnecessary attention if we keep going this way,” she continues in a soothing,don’t-freak-outvoice that she’s never used on me before. “It might be smart to take a step back and—”

“A step back?” I growl furiously. “A step back. A fuckingstep back?”

“Kol—”

---