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And yet, all I could think of, in amongst this madness, was who was going to take care of my father now I was gone.
Chapter Two – Maxim
I straightened my tie in the mirror, staring at myself in my reflection. I didn’t want to go to this fucking meeting, but I knew that Damyan wasn’t going to let me get away with resting in the apartment with a drink for the night. No, he had already decided that I needed to show my face, and he wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
And, as if on cue, he appeared in the doorway behind me, leaning against the frame.
"You ready?" he asked. I glanced at him in the mirror.
"Don’t see why we have to show our faces at all," I replied. "We own the place. That should be enough."
"You know why," Damyan murmured, sounding tired already.
"Remind me," I replied, turning to face him and crossing my arms over my chest. He rolled his eyes skyward, as though he could barely believe he was still stuck having the same conversation with me.
He didn’t need to repeat himself, not really. I knew how important maintaining the Antonov family name was to him—and to me, too. Both of us had inherited it from my father—me, by blood, and him, by adoption. After my mother had passed, his mother had married my father, and he had become a brother to me, as much family as anyone who had been born into the role.
And, when our father had passed a few years before, the two of us had sworn to do whatever it took to make sure his influence remained as strong and as powerful as it had when he was alive. He had dominated a large portion of the city of New Ruska, and I was intent on making sure we expanded that territory as far as we could.
This part of the city, this was already ours. Our club, The Flood, was a few stories down from our penthouse apartment and already served as the meeting spot for most of the Mafia bosses in town; they knew it was safe there, knew there was no chance of a police bust or any trouble. We ran that place with an iron fist, ensuring there were no issues, no reason for anyone to cause any problems.
And, tonight, we had a gathering of some of the most powerful bosses in the city. Most of them allies, though some tenuously so. All the more reason for me to show my face there tonight, even though the thought of having to put on the game face and play nice with people I didn’t like or respect didn’t exactly appeal to me.
I knew what some of them were involved with—drug smuggling, human trafficking, the shit that I would never have touched in a million years. The shit my father had always looked down on, spat on. Damyan didn’t like it any more than I did, but he knew that it was important to keep our options open and our allies as numerous as possible. The more people we had on our side, the easier it was going to be to keep our territory safe and untouched by the people who might have wanted to take it from us.
"I’m not repeating myself," Damyan told me, his voice dropping slightly. He would never have threatened me—he knew me better than to think I would put any stock in it—but he didn’t like having to go over anything he’d already said before. He was no-bullshit, one of the many reasons I liked it and knew I could trust him as my closest confidante.
"Fine," I muttered, and I flashed him a grin. "Let’s get this over with, then."
"Agreed," he replied. "I’m going to need a strong drink to get through this. You want one before we go down?”
"Sounds good to me," I agreed, and we headed to the living space of our shared penthouse to pour ourselves a glass each from the most expensive bottle of scotch in the place, the stuff that we didn’t even stock in our club downstairs. My father had cultivated an interest in the best booze in the world, and I had picked up right where he had left off, enjoying the simple pleasures of a good, strong drink after a long day of work.
Damyan leaned up against the window frame, looking down at the expanse of the city below. He knew as well as I did that almost everything we could see, we owned. My father had worked hard his whole life, beginning as nothing more than an immigrant from Russia with next to nothing to his name to build an empire for us to inherit, and I knew there was no way in hell I was going to let him down. No, I was going to ensure that both of us lived up to the reputation he had built, both of us dedicated ourselves to improving and expanding the business he had made.
"You alright?" I asked my stepbrother, and he nodded.
"Just thinking," he remarked. I eyed him for a moment. When something was on his mind, he usually told me about it, but I could tell his head was heavy with something he didn’t feel like sharing right now. It surprised me, sometimes, when I really looked at him, to see how old he had gotten. It shouldn’t have come as a shock to me, since both of us were well into our forties now, but I still thought of him as the young man I had grown up with, the man who had been ready and willing to take on the world—and anyone who looked at him sideways, too.
He never backed down from a fight, even now. Out of the two of us, he had always been the more violent, the more reckless. Sometimes, I wondered if he felt as though he had to prove himself like that, had to prove he was worthy of this life, but I never came out and asked him. I knew he would have denied it at once. He didn’t want anyone looking at him like he was any less than a full-fledged member of this family and, though I would never have thought of him as anything but that, I didn’t want to bring that to the front of his mind.
I took a long sip of the scotch in my glass, the sharp, peaty flavors spreading over my tongue; this one was shipped in from Scotland, aged by the barrel, and cost more than the weekly turnover at our club downstairs. Pretty good stuff.
"We should get going," Damyan remarked to me. "You know they don’t like to be kept waiting."
I sighed. I knew he was right. Any small sleight could easily be blown up into a major problem—shit, sometimes I felt like these guys were looking for a reason to cause trouble, looking for a reason to turn a solid business relationship into an issue. They were a couple of decades younger than us, for the most part, and they had that recklessness that came with youth, like they thought they would live forever. Once they had seen a little more of the world, that would start to change. But for now, we had to do our best to keep them on our side.
"Okay, let’s go," I replied, knocking back the last of the scotch and putting my glass down on the mantelpiece over the large fireplace. I would pick that up right where I had left off, once I was done with this meeting.
Damyan pushed the door open for me, and we stepped into the elevator together. He rolled his shoulders back and cracked his neck, his eyes darkening. I saw him go through this shift every time we had a meeting like this, as though he was making sure nobody forgot the reputation he had made for himself, nobody forgot what kind of man he was and what he was capable of.
As if they ever could have. The shit he’d gotten himself into when he was growing up, it would have been impossible to forget.
The doors to the elevator slid open into the back entrance to the club, the one that only we used. I could already hear the buzz of activity outside, the people filling out the dance floor and buying their overpriced drinks at the bar.
But we weren’t here to have fun. We were here to work. And I wasn’t going to forget that. I turned to lead us towards the meeting room, where the most powerful bosses in the city were waiting for us.
Chapter Three – Damyan
