“I’m doing you a service by coming here tonight,” he continued, looking not at all worried or concerned about the sudden change in direction of our relationship. “And telling you that no Krasnaya brigadier is going to follow you now.”
I tamped down the urge to kill him right where he sat, using all that I had been taught to keep my anger under control. It would be far too easy to be brutal right now, to slam his face into the table and gut him where he sat, but his death wasn’t going to solve anything if what he threatened was true.
If nothing else, it would ramp up whatever they were plotting against me, and I needed some time to prepare. And there were others to consider as well. If Konstantin really knew about Naomi, then she and our child were in danger.
“Nothing to say?” The contempt dripped with every word.
“Nothing I say can convince you, so get to the fucking point.”
“Consider this my formal declaration of war,” he finished, his smile gone. Surprisingly, he looked unruffled by the declaration, as if he wasn’t afraid to go against me. I knew the strength he commanded, and it would be bloody.
For both of us.
“You don’t have the numbers,” I answered harshly. War. I knew it was coming, but damn, I didn’t need this right now.
“Then we will die with honor.” Konstantin shrugged. “I swore a vow to my Pakhan—my real Pakhan—that I would follow him to the end. I am here to uphold my vow. I am not afraid of death. None of my men are.”
I stared at the man. It took balls to go up against a war you couldn’t win, and I could respect him for that. It would be the only time I would respect him. But he had given me the courtesy of a face-to-face declaration for the fight.
“Then you shall have your war.”
To his credit, he didn’t flinch. Instead, he offered his hand across the table.
“I look forward to it, Kirilenko.”
I took his hand and shook it firmly. Some wars were started by a staccato burst of fire in the streets, while others were done in an old-world way. This was a war in the old way. A declaration, a chance to prepare, and then pure unbridled violence.
“I will give you until sunrise,” I told him, knowing that only gave us both a few hours to prepare. “And then it will begin.”
“Sunrise.” He released my hand, stood, and nodded.
I remained silent as he walked away, slowly lowering the glass I still held in my other hand. Anatoly moved in a moment later and I stood, buttoning my suit coat.
“Call a meeting,” I said in a deadly calm voice though my mind was already racing with all the things I would need to prepare. “I want a count of able bodies and weapons on my desk in an hour.”
“You got it, boss,” he said, nodding to the other guard to escort me out. “Anything else?”
I looked at my best friend, my right-hand man who knew me better than I knew myself sometimes. “I want everything to be thrown his way,” I said in a soft voice. “When this is over, the Krasnaya Bratva will be nothing but a memory.”
Anatoly gave me a single nod and stepped aside, allowing me to exit the bar.
Once I was in the car, I loosened a breath and ran my hand through my hair. A war. I was about to take what was left of my Bratva and fight the even smaller numbers of the Krasnaya loyalists. I didn’t feel any sort of elation in thinking about destroying what was left of Stanislav’s former empire. I had wanted to draw them in, to preserve what they had, but it seemed it wasn’t enough.
Which brought my thoughts to the more important topic of how the hell they had found out about Naomi. I had taken many measures to ensure that only a few knew who she really was, and those few were some of my trusted inner circle.
That would only leave one other person that had recently come in contact with her.
Her stalker.
Jaw clenched, I looked out of the window at the passing city. Did the man have those sorts of connections to figure out what I had done? What sort of man was he?
The car was nearing the mansion when my cell vibrated and I pulled it out, seeing Anatoly’s number on the screen.
“What?” I barked into the phone. If he had more bad news to tell me, I was going to throw him off the balcony.
“I think I figured out how Konstantin found out about your wife,” he said quietly, almost too quietly.
My stomach clenched. “How?”
“You need to see this in person,” Anatoly added, only further driving up my anxiety. “I will be at the mansion in twenty minutes.”
Once my car reached the mansion, I climbed out of the car and ignored the hovering Vera as I walked through the doorway, going directly to the study for another drink. A thousand things needed to be done now that I was going to war. Anatoly would handle the brigadiers and the weapons, but there were alliances to be formed just in case.
Also, I needed a means to get Naomi the hell out of the city while I handled this matter. I couldn’t have her here distracting me, making me constantly worry about her safety. It would be best for her to be far enough away so that if something did happen to me, she could run.
Where I was going to send her, I didn’t know.
I had barely taken a sip of my drink when Anatoly strolled through the door, a folder in his hand and a grim look on his face.
“Christ be good,” I muttered, placing the drink on the desk. “You look like you saw a ghost.”
He placed the folder on the desk and stepped back. “You might want to finish that drink before you open it.”
“After the night I just had,” I countered as I flipped open the folder. “How can it get any worse?” I was on the brink of a war, and now the entire fucking world was about to learn that I hadn’t married Sveta Orlov at all.
“Trust me,” Anatoly replied softly as I read through the contents. “It can.”
I looked up at Anatoly. “What am I looking at?”
“I tried all the avenues to find shit on that man,” Anatoly explained, clearing his throat. “I had to pull deep into my contacts to even get this document. He is clean as a whistle. He has no record. He has no footprint in social media or anywhere else for that matter. Which is odd, right? I mean…what kind of person can just erase themselves from the internet?”
“Are you getting to a point?” I asked, arching a brow. “Or are you so mesmerized by this asshole that you need a moment?”
He shot me a look before pointing at the header where the details about the charges were listed. “I had one of my buddies pull this shit from deep on the dark web. Trust me when I say that it wasn’t easy or cheap.”
I looked closer, not recognizing the name of the person arrested. It wasn’t Jon Hampton by any means, unless he had an Arabic alias. “I’m not getting where you are going with this.”
“That,” Anatoly said. “Is a counterterrorism dossier. It’s the only document that wasn’t struck through or covered in black ink. Probably an oversight on their part, but at least it gave me somewhere else to look.”
“It’s been a long day.” I closed my eyes briefly. “Enough with these riddles and get to the point.”
Anatoly made a snort of frustration as he pointed his finger at the box below where I was reading. “You’re looking at the wrong box. He’s not the one being arrested. He made the fucking arrest.”
A shot of adrenaline went through my body, and suddenly I was very alert.