Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 67553 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 338(@200wpm)___ 270(@250wpm)___ 225(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 67553 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 338(@200wpm)___ 270(@250wpm)___ 225(@300wpm)
Then my dad had died and left me as the Pakhan of the US arm of the Russian Bratva at the age of twenty-six, and I’d been faced with the reality of being the youngest Pakhan in history.
Truthfully, there were days when I asked myself why I did what I did.
Then I have a good laugh and remind myself that I never had a choice.
My father hadn’t given me one.
On the surface, my dad was a good dad. He was doting. Went to soccer games. Football practices. Violin recitals.
He spent the majority of my life being the perfect attentive parent. I also remember my dad having two faces.
The one that he put on in public—the one my sisters saw—and the one that he put on in private. Which just so happened to be the face that Dima and I saw, along with the rest of the criminal underworld.
My dad was devoted to my mother.
He was, in all reality, the best man that she could ever ask for.
He played the part really well.
Truthfully, when he died, I wasn’t sure how to feel.
There were two sides to every coin, and I unfortunately got to see both sides of that coin.
My dad was a hard man.
A killer.
An abuser.
But he was also fair and just. He expected perfection, but didn’t punish us if we didn’t give him that perfectness. But the silent warfare he would aim at you if you did wrong…
If I was being honest, my father had always struck me as having an undiagnosed mental illness.
The complete and utter disregard for life should’ve been my first clue.
My dad would kill anyone anywhere for any reason and expect everyone else to clean up his mess—i.e., me when I was old enough to do that and get away with it.
When my little sister, Maven, had gone missing while we were on a family vacation—we weren’t on a vacation, Dad had a business meeting that he disguised as a family vacation—he’d turned into this raging psychopath that couldn’t focus on anything but fixing a mistake that he’d inadvertently made.
Sure, my mom had been distraught and begged him to find her—we’d all been distraught—but Dad’s motivations were again two-sided.
Someone had pulled one over on the Pakhan of the Russian Bratva. That was a slight that he couldn’t allow to ever pass.
He’d spent the next twenty-five years of his life ‘searching.’
In reality, he’d been killing everyone and anyone that might or might not have an answer to his questions.
My phone rang, pulling me out of the contemplation of my father, and I stopped next to Brecken’s car.
I pulled the phone out of one pocket and placed it to my ear as I went into the other pocket with my free hand and pulled out a GPS tracker.
“Yes?” I said distractedly.
“Your boy is in my territory.”
I sighed. “Cayden.”
“Why is he here?” he drawled.
“You know why he’s there.” I sighed. “Three dead, all in your territory. You should be happy that I’m only nosing around asking questions and not beating the hell out of you for allowing that to happen to my men.”
“Your men shouldn’t be in Houston, Semyonov,” he stated carefully. Too carefully. “You have any way to get them home safely tonight?”
I frowned as I bent down and placed the tracker onto Brecken’s car.
“What’s good to eat there, Cayden?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t answer how I somehow expected him to answer. “I’m thinking about heading down there to give my friend a ride home.”
Years and years ago, during a closed-door meeting between our fathers, Cayden and I had made a childhood promise to always take care of the other.
We’d bonded over our psychopath fathers.
On our first visit as young children, we’d of course thought that we would be good friends. Then we’d both been informed separately that we should never trust the other.
Over time, that distrust had formed a bond of trust, and even still, as adults, we’d never called what we had together friendship.
Acknowledging our friendship would be seen as hostile.
We were powerful on our own. Together, we’d be seen as threats and be neutralized. So we maintained our distance, helped out where we could without appearing that we were, and ultimately pretended like we weren’t as good of friends as we were to protect ourselves and our family.
But during that closed-door meeting with our fathers when we were perhaps fourteen or fifteen, we’d realized that just because we weren’t allowed to be friends openly didn’t mean that we couldn’t be friends in private.
That day, we’d come up with a plan to always offer help when the other needed it.
“How will I know if you ever need anything?” I asked my childhood friend who I wasn’t actually allowed to be friends with.
“If you call, or I call, and ask you…” Cayden hesitated. “If I ask you if there’s anything good to eat, and you answer with, there’s never anything good to eat, we’ll know that the other is in trouble and needs help.”