Page 98 of Boardroom Mask

I cross through the park at Seventieth, cut east on Lexington, then loop south again aimlessly. By the time I reach my building,it’s nearly midnight. The doorman nods. The elevator climbs thirty-two floors in silence.

I unlock the penthouse door and know immediately that I’m not alone.

Afon Satyrin, my father’s lead henchman, is sitting on my couch.

He’s got a glass of my vodka in one hand and his boots on my coffee table, right across the crack in the marble. He was simply sitting in the dark, waiting, the way a spider waits.

“Kirill,” he greets.

“Afon.” I close the door behind me. “Help yourself, by all means.”

He takes a slow, unapologetic sip and sets the glass down. “Your father sent me.”

“Thanks,” I tell him, “but no thanks.” I jerk my chin toward the door. “No need to waste your time.”

Afon pulls his boots off the table and stands. He’s shorter than me by a few inches but twice as wide, built like a shipping container that someone gave arms and legs. His nephew Mat got the family looks; Afon got the blunt force brutality. “We have an errand.”

I wrinkle my nose. “What kind of errand?”

“The Bratva kind.”

I don’t move from the doorway. “Then I’m definitely out.”

“Your old man thinks you’ve gone soft,” Afon says emotionlessly. “He wants you to come along tonight. Prove him wrong.”

“I don’t?—”

“You and I both know it wasn’t a question, son.” He drains the glass and politely sets it back on my kitchen counter, then trudges over, brushing past me on his way out of the apartment.

Afon drives. I sit in the passenger seat with my hands on my knees and watch the city as we go, a haze of sodium yellow streetlights and blackened windows.

We cross the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn. Afon turns south on Bedford, then east, and parks in front of a laundromat with a handwritten sign taped to the door:DRYERS BROKE SORRY.

He kills the engine but leaves the headlights on. Their glow illuminates a narrow gap between the laundromat and a boarded-up nail salon. At the far end of the gap, visible only because the headlights reach just far enough, a man is zip-tied to a folding chair.

The man’s head is down. He’s wearing a gray hoodie, dark jeans, and sneakers with the laces removed. Nobody I recognize, which I’m sure is exactly the point. This isn’t a high-value target or a rival or someone who wronged the family in any meaningful way. This is a test with a pulse. A pop quiz Lukas put together over dinner to see if his son still has the stomach for the family business.

It’s two-question multiple choice.

(A) Kill him.

(B) Fail.

Afon pops the glove compartment and hands me a Makarov with the serial number filed smooth. I check the magazine out of habit and chamber a round.

“Who is he?” I ask needlessly.

“A rat. Fed some names to a detective in the sixty-eighth precinct.” Afon picks something from under his thumbnail. “Your father wants it handled tonight.”

“Anyone could’ve done this.”

“Yeah.” Afon looks at me for the first time since we left Manhattan. His eyes are flat, bovine, incurious. “But your father wantedyouto do it.”

With a grimace, I get out of the car.

The alley reeks of piss. My shoes squelch in the liquid leaking from a nearby dumpster. The man hears me coming and lifts his head, and his face is so ordinary it makes my chest hurt. He looks like someone’s accountant. He looks like someone’s father. He starts to cry before I’m within ten feet.

With no hesitation, I raise the Makarov and shoot him once in the center of the forehead. The sound is a dull, silencer-suppressedpop. His head snaps back, then drops forward, chin to chest. A thin, dark trickle runs from the hole down the bridge of his nose.