Chapter 1

Viktor

Twenty minutes from Hollywood Boulevard, the rain hit, spattering down from clouds that reflected the city lights with a grayish glow. Real rain, for once. Rare in LA, especially in early summer, unless one of those new, crazy storms swept up from Mexico. I welcomed it, even if every damned Californian seemed to have forgotten how to drive on wet streets.

The inside of my black Mercedes coupe was a cool, slightly mint-smelling cave lined with leather. The car slid through traffic, streetlights and neon gleaming off its hood and the wet asphalt in multicolored ripples.

I passed three fender-benders in the span of two minutes. Commuters and pleasure-seekers out shouting at each other in the rain. Fine, let them. Just as long as they didn’t block traffic between here and Club Nebesa. I had meetings to get to.

My phone buzzed. I poked the screen and put it on speaker. I could hear faint jazz music in the background, a call from the club. “Tolya! Have the men arrived?”

“Alexei just showed up,” Anatoly rumbled, sounding amused for some reason. “He looks like he swam here. Must have ridden his motorcycle back from Santa Monica. I’ll get a hot drink into him. But that’s not why I’m calling.”

“What is it?”

“It won’t just be us. Dimitri’s agreed to the meet tonight.”

I flashed a smile. “That’s good news.” Dimitri was a legend in this city—above all the different Bratva squabbles, admired and whispered about by all of us. He had stepped aside from any leadership positions, because that would have forced him to stop doing business with the other groups. Now, when he wasn’t brokering art, jewels, and antiques from all over the world for his rich clients, he was brokering information for us. And that was what I was hoping to get from him tonight.

“Break out the Maker’s Mark, Tolya, but make sure the seal is still on when you bring it out. Old habits die hard, after all.” I couldn’t help but smile even as I fought traffic. “I’ll be there as soon as I am able.”

Club Nebesa was my favorite place in the city. Ever since I was a little kid growing up in the shadows of Dimitri and my uncle, I had dreamed of owning such a club. Big, popular, with a large neon sign out front—and inside, nothing but opulence. Now I had it, it was the crown jewel among my Los Angeles properties, and also the primary location for my business meetings.

“You got it, boss. Did you eat before you left?”

I snorted. “You sound like my uncle. No. I’ll grab something when we’re done. I need to focus on whatever Dimitri has for me. See you there.” I hung up on his distressed noise.

Tolya was a forbidding giant who looked like he could tie a car bumper in a knot, but his favorite hobbies were cooking and hosting. He had been raised and fed by a grandmother who could make porridge taste like ambrosia, and now that she was gone, all his pride that did not come from his work for me, came from his ability to keep everyone fed. It was for this reason that I had given him partial control of my beloved club. He kept the business of security and hospitality flowing while I accepted my guests and made my deals.

Deals I couldn’t make nearly as smoothly with his borscht on my tie.

I checked my look in my rear-view mirror when I was stopped in traffic. Not a hair out of place. These days I caught myself checking my hair and beard for gray hairs shining against the black, but there was no sign of them yet. I still looked like I was in my thirties. I wasn’t. But I was still the youngest Pakhanthat Los Angeles had ever had—and also the one who had made the greatest strides in the shortest amount of time. But that wasn’t enough to impress Dimitri or keep my men looking at me in the right way.

A man in my position had to meet certain expectations when it came to appearances. That included things like the cars I drove, the clothes I wore—even the guns I used. Older men in my organization still saw me as new and perhaps too young, despite being pledged to me. Their skepticism was tempered by playing the part they expected. That included the look and the car brand. Old Russian men and their Mercedes-Benzes. The fact that I had gotten a coupe was a bit against type, but I wasn’t ready to transition to a sedan limousine with a chauffeur like the past-sixty crowd.

As for my peers and younger followers, they loved the coupe. Most of them were still getting used to the idea of real wealth and showed it off in awkward ways. Like silly Alexei with his custom black-and-gold motorcycle with the science-fiction wheel and frame lights. It looked wicked cool, even to a guy my age, but it also stood out ridiculously in traffic.

More than my looks, mannerisms, and political choices, though, the young ones lived on my legends. Who I had fought. Who I had bested. How many of us I had saved. How many of my enemies I had buried. Where the veterans and old men and most of my peers wanted a shrewd businessman who was just hard enough to keep the wolves from our door, the boys wanted to work for a hero, and I did my best to live up to that.

I pulled into the VIP section of our lot and parked in my space, waving to the two security guys on duty as I got out. They nodded back, one still new enough to look away shyly. I tended to intimidate people I hadn’t won over yet.

I used my umbrella just to keep the rain off my suit, which was deep charcoal gray with the subtlest of black pinstripes. I wore a band-collared shirt under it, its paler, gray silk smooth and cool against my skin. I hated dress shoes, opting instead for polished black calf-length boots and matching leather gloves. The suit was cut with gussets and panels that would let me fight in it, its jacket lined with Kevlar layers that also kept it smooth over the shoulder holster I wore under it. These days, I never went anywhere unarmed.

There was a crowd gathering under the signs out front, so I took the service door, avoiding them. Some days I didn’t want to deal with the mass of civilians who we pretended were our real clientele—not until I was inside and had a drink in hand, anyway.

The clubbers who packed the first two levels of my club were there to dance, but what they were to us was living camouflage. They were extras on the stage of our nights. We treated them well and made sure they kept coming in droves, but all the real business in this club was done at my private table upstairs. So I took the back elevator up, smoothing the front of my jacket unconsciously before stepping off into the plush-carpeted hallway.

The whole place screamed opulence, just like I’d dreamed of as a young man. White columns and gilded mirrors, seats and wall hangings of gold brocade and jewel-colored velvets, stained glass mirrors, and hidden speakers. The lights stayed low on every floor. But the third-floor club was quite different from downstairs.

The third-floor club was just for us, our guests, and the most distinguished jazz performers on the planet. It was neutral territory for the Bratva, and also gave Dimitri a chance to hold court when he chose to visit—which unfortunately for us, was rarely. I sometimes wondered if his health was declining, or if he was just tired of watching each and every organization in town squabble like we had forgotten we were part of a larger whole.

I had only been handling it for three years, and I was already tired of that part of my job. Ever since my men and I had come out on top after the power struggle surrounding my uncle’s death, we had tension between ourselves and the other crews in town. One or two were becoming increasingly hostile, and I always had to keep an eye on them—or preferably, several eyes.

I walked into the third-floor club, where Anatoly was lumbering around already in his white-jacketed suit, the gel lights over the small stage gleaming off his bald head. He divided his time between instructing our discreet, darkly dressed staff and speaking with the handful of my men who had already arrived. They all turned as I walked in, handing off my umbrella to staff and raising a hand in greeting as I approached.

Alexei was indeed there, and did indeed look damp and rumpled, and as disgruntled as a freshly washed cat. He had been born in Moscow but had come here as a child and had forgotten about real weather too. He was young and blond and almost pretty and he was often mistaken for a wannabe actor fighting for his first break. Tolya thought he needed to be in a few more fistfights to ‘mature’ his face. Tolya’s own nose had been remodeled several times—not for our sake, but by his younger self’s love of bar brawls.

I loved them like brothers—even more, now that I had lost first my father, and then my uncle. They would have taken a bullet for me. As for me, I had sworn to build a Los Angeles underworld orderly and honor-bound enough that they would never have to.

“You made it in this madhouse!” Tolya came to greet me, the others trailing behind him like migrating geese. “The others are arriving soon, but tonight’s jazz quartet is delayed at the airport.”

“Mm.” It was a small hiccup, I’d hoped for a live performance to impress my most important guest with, but it would have to wait. “Good enough. That will give us some time to speak with Dimitri before the first performance.” And find out whatever it was that he had refused to tell me over the phone.

I walked to my table, a round marble-topped affair surrounded on three sides by a ring-shaped booth in royal blue, deep burgundy, and gold. In the absence of balconies, it offered the best view of the stage. And Dimitri was quietly waiting beside it.

He was a tall, lean older man, clean-shaven and sharp-faced, who outdressed me with the kind of skill that came from having decades more experience at the game of impressing others. The silk of his evening suit was an indigo so deep its color only showed when it caught the light. The emerald in his tie-tack was the exact shade of his eyes. We shook hands and nodded to each other before sliding into seats across from one another.

“Leadership looks like it’s done you good,” Dimitri commented.

I nodded and signaled for Tolya to bring over the bottle and a pair of glasses. “I have settled into the role.”

The last time we had spoken face to face had been three months after my uncle’s funeral. He had been a friend of both my father and uncle, and though he never would have admitted it directly, I had known he was checking on me. But since then, he had mostly kept a quiet distance. Not tonight, though.”

Tolya brought the bottle, he opened it and I poured. Two fingers each, we saluted each other and savored a few sips before I got down to business. “So… what brings you to my club this evening?”

He hesitated for just a moment, green eyes tracking away from mine in a way I instantly didn’t like.

“It’s about Leon.”

I almost dropped my glass.

“You don’t say,” I responded, recovering my composure. My hand shook a little as I set the glass down. What did Dimitri have on Leon? Was it what I had been searching for?

Leon, my beloved younger brother, my best friend our whole lives. Or at least, for the whole of his life—which had been brutally shortened.

Leon, my brother with his smile like a summer day, dark and bearded like me but with dancing brown eyes. Always cheerful, especially in his younger years. I had been neck-deep in the Bratvaas soon as I had been old enough to run messages for them on my bike, but by the time Leon had come along, we had been established enough to send him off to college.

He could have lived his whole life in the ordinary world, well away from the organization that had been our father and uncle’s life and was becoming mine. But after my father’s death, he had been determined to help me. Become part of the family business.

And then it had killed him.

We had been at a family Christmas party, for pity’s sake, at his condo over in the Hollywood Hills. We had just brought out the eggnog, a whole punch bowl’s worth, another feat of Tolya’s, the crowd already swarming toward it with hopeful eyes. My brother had been standing at one of the large picture windows overlooking the city, empty punch glass in hand, back to me.

I had just turned away from him to have Tolya pour me a drink when I had heard the sound of something shattering behind me. A quiet sound, so quiet that I had thought he had simply dropped his glass. But when I had turned, the glass was just falling from his hand.

I had been a little drunk, a little dizzy from revelry and the chance to relax for the first time in a week. For a moment the anomaly didn’t register. But then he had sagged, and his head had drooped, and he had collapsed to the floor right in front of me—revealing the spreading cobweb of cracks in the window in front of him. The bullet hole in the center.

I had run for him, too late—too late. I had rolled him over to see his blank, startled face, one eye a pit full of blood and the other wide open and empty.

Screaming. Chaos. Every man shouting but me, kneeling there holding my brother. Every man stirred into action, going to hunt for the sniper, while I had held Leon, rocked him, and felt him go stiff and cold in my arms long before the paramedics could possibly have gotten to him.

We’d never caught the sniper. And Dimitri knew just how much I would give to get my hands on the man responsible. At my brother’s wake, surrounded by murmurs and quiet sobs from friends and family, I had told him as much.

And now, here was Dimitri, with news.

I pulled my head out of my memories and nodded distractedly, forcing my eyes to focus back on his. “Tell me.”

Dimitri reached inside his jacket and produced a thumb drive. “I have a paper trail that will be of interest to you. It indicates that a local billionaire was very likely involved in your brother’s murder.”

I accepted it mutely and looked over at Alexei, who hurried off to my office to fetch my laptop. “What’s the name?”

He shifted uncomfortably, probably having some idea of the Pandora’s box of vendetta he was unleashing by handing me this. “Charles Nathan Graves.”

My chest hitched uncomfortably. “Graves?” Easily the richest man in Los Angeles who wasn’t part of the movie business. Son of an old money billionaire, he had beaten the odds by not being completely useless. He had doubled his father’s estate in under five years and had his fingers in every pie from pharmaceuticals to diamond mining.

“The information will speak for itself.” He saw the look on my face and swallowed down half his glass suddenly, not pausing to savor it. “It won’t get you the name of the assassin, but it will make his involvement and current circumstances plain. I imagine you’ll be able to get the name of the sniper out of Graves directly.”

“But why the hell would he even want my brother dead?” It felt like I was on the top of a mountain suddenly, the air my lungs were taking in felt too cold and thin. My head swam. “What possible reason—”

“Who knows what motivates a person? You can look through the information yourself, if you ask me, your brother found out something he shouldn’t have. You know all billionaires are dirty in some way,” Dimitri pinched the bridge of his nose. “They always know a guy who knows a guy. They always owe money to people they shouldn’t or hop into bed with guys like us for help pushing a deal through, and then hop right out again when it’s time to keep up their end of the deal. But the difference between them and us, is that a spoiled, rich piece of trash like Graves doesn’t have any integrity. He’s never seen consequences for his actions so he just figures he can do whatever he wants, and never pay for it.”

“If you’re right,” I muttered, impatient for that laptop, desperate to see what Dimitri had gathered. “If you’re right, then Graves is going to see plenty of consequences.”

Plenty indeed. Dear God was that bastard going to pay.