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AS I SAT IN THE CAR, listening to the sound of gunfire and the cries of suffering from inside the building, I wondered what my father would have made of all of this.
He had always done what needed to be done. That was what I was trying to see through right now; if the Serbs wanted a fight, then I would give it to them. My father was ruthless when he needed to be, even if he had tried to keep most of that from me. I was sure he would have responded to violence with violence of his own.
Mauro and I had put the plan together the night before, thrown everything into place so we could put it all into action today. We didn’t have long before the Serbians came looking for another piece of me, and we had to act fast. We had tracked down the building where Nikita ran most of his operations, and right now, a dozen or so of my men were working their way through it, clearing it of guards and allies so I had a clear run to the top.
I had no idea if Nikita was even there right now. That didn’t matter. Whoever it was who I got my hands on, they would understand the message I was trying to get across. It had been a long time since we’d had to use such violent tactics to get what we wanted, but I had to do what needed to be done. If I didn’t take them out, then they were going to come swinging for me, and there wasn’t a chance in hell that I was going to let them do that.
The bullet wound was still nagging in my side, but it had started to heal. The doctor had done a good job patching me up, much to my relief, and I knew I would make it out the other side in one piece. Which was more than could be said for most of the guys in that building.
A twinge of guilt nagged at the back of my mind. My father had wanted us to move to a more legitimate form of business, and here I was, committing a fucking massacre. But this was about protecting our territory, protecting my life. If we didn’t strike out, then there was no telling what might happen next, and we couldn’t take that risk. We needed to be able to stand up and fight, otherwise the Serbs would roll right over us and we would have nothing left at all.
I was protecting my father’s legacy. I wasn’t going to let anyone destroy what he had worked so hard to build. He might not have wanted this for me, but that wasn’t how it worked. Sometimes, you had to do shit you thought you would never have to do, and I was just taking care of what needed to be done.
Mauro had come with me today. I didn’t blame him. He wanted to be present for all of this. Even now, the sound of gunfire burned itself into my mind, a reminder of the chaos that had erupted at the club when I had been there, when the attack had come against me. I had been lucky to make it out of there alive, and I was certain they wouldn’t let me get away again so easily.
By the time things started to calm down and the noise began to dissipate, I climbed out of the car. The building we had attacked was nondescript, would have passed for any other warehouse in the business district, but I knew better. What happened inside there was bigger and more dangerous than almost anything else in this city, and that was saying something.
I had wanted to go in there to fight myself, but Mauro had told me in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t going to let that happen.
“It’s too dangerous,” he had told me. “We need you there to show them that they can’t fuck with your family. If your dead, that’s not exactly going to work.”
“I get it,” I muttered, but I hated being left out of the loop like this. I hated having to accept that I was too important to get hurt any more than I already had. I had been taking a huge risk going to that meeting in the first place, and look where it had gotten me – a bullet buried in my side.
I waited until the gunfire had dropped off, and there was a buzz on the radio that the guys had left me. They had told me that they were going to get in touch when they had cleared the building. It sounded to me like they had managed it, but of course, it was impossible to tell. I had no idea how it might have gone.
“We’re clear, boss,” a gruff voice came down the line. It sounded like Leon, the head of security, who had told me that he would get this under control in no time.
“I’m safe to come in?”
“I’m coming down to meet you at the entrance now.”
We headed to the door, and tried to steel myself for what I was about to see. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t seen plenty of shit in my time in this business, but that didn’t mean I was any more used to laying eyes on the kind of carnage that I knew my men would have had to leave behind.
Leon was waiting for me by the time I got to the door, and I could smell the thick, metallic scent of blood on the air before I so much as stepped inside. I followed him wordlessly into the building, and my eyes darted back and forth as I took in the piles of dead bodies around us. A dozen? More? I didn’t know how many guards and other personnel they kept around here, but the floors seemed to be piled high with them.
Bodies were sprawled everywhere, even as I continued up the stairs towards the top of the building. I knew I should have expected it, but still – this much bloodshed, this much violence, it was something I knew my father had wanted me to avoid.
But sometimes, you couldn’t. Sometimes, you had to be ready to fight for what you believed in. And I believed that our empire deserved to survive. Mauro didn’t seem bothered by any of it, but I was sure he had seen worse in his time working for my father. Something in him was steely, hardened, and he wasn’t going to let anything like this bother him.
By the time we reached the top of the stairs, facing the small office that two of my guards were standing outside, I prepared myself for what was inside. I had asked them to capture whoever they could find who seemed important – we needed some leverage, something to work with when it came to Nikita.
I pushed the door open, Mauro close behind me, and stepped inside. Bound and bloodied, but alive, on a chair in front of me was a man I recognized – his resemblance to Nikita was so strong that for a moment I thought we had managed to take the boss, but no. It was his brother, Mikhail, his head of security – the one they called the Butcher on the streets.
Not that he looked up to much now. His head was lolling down to his chest, his hands bound behind the chair that he was sitting on. I was glad they had left him alive – we might be able to get something out of him in this state. I had no idea where to start, but as long as we had him, we had something over Nikita. A foothold.
“You understand why we kept you alive?” I barked at him. He nodded, a grin spreading over his battered face.
“Of course I do,” he croaked back, his voice bubbling with blood as he tried to get the words out. Even though all the odds were against him, he seemed to be enjoying this on some level. I didn’t like that, not one little bit, but I brushed it off and stayed focused.
“Good, then you understand that we could turn you in to the cops any moment,” I warned him. “You know how much they have on you, right? How much you’re accused of?”
He nodded, slowly, blood dripping from his bottom lip and staining his white shirt. His eyes held that same cold, diffident expression as Nikita’s, the family resemblance impossible to ignore.
“Oh, I know,” he replied. “I’d tell them all about it myself, if I could.”
“How are you not ashamed of any of it?” I asked him. He shrugged.
“Nothing to be ashamed of.”
“You’re not scared of what’s going to happen to you?” I pressed. Even though he was putting on a good act, I was sure that something must be getting under his skin – but if it was, he was hiding it well, and I needed to know what he had to fall back on that he was so sure would protect him.
“Of course not,” he replied, spitting out a mouthful of blood on to the floor. “Why should I be?”
His eyes slid past me, and towards Mauro. That smile passed over his face again.
I turned, and saw that Mauro was holding a gun – pointing it straight at Mikhail. What the fuck was happening? He was never violent, he was my advisor—
I turned back to Mikhail just in time to watch his face drop as Mauro pulled the trigger, the bullet passing straight through Mikhail’s head and sending him crashing on to the floor. I spun around to face Mauro, panic shooting through me, but before I could say another word, he grabbed me and pushed me down.
“Duck!” he yelled, and I looked up just in time to see one of the guards – one of my guards – unloading a gun exactly where I had been standing a moment before. Mauro let off a shot at him, and made contact with his shoulder, but the guard got a shot off at Mauro, clipping him before he slid to the ground.
I felt a hand on the back of my neck, pulling me upright. I had no idea what was going on, the sound of the gunfire ringing in my ears as I was dragged out of the office, Mauro hot on my tail. What the fuck had just happened? Why was Mauro shooting? Why was one of my own guards firing at us? What the hell had gone down that I didn’t know about?
We stumbled back into the light again, and the smell of smoke choked my senses. I turned, to see a couple of my men setting fire to the building that we had just left behind. Mauro was with me, though his face was pale and he was carrying weight uncomfortably from where he had been clipped.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he rasped at me, and he pulled me towards the car – and, hopefully, towards a little more clarity. Because I was utterly out of the loop here, and if there was one thing I hated, it was feeling as though I didn’t have a clue what was going on.
