Page 75 of Dance of Devils

I’m practically twice her age. This should have stopped long before I took her over my fucking knee the other night and spanked her ass raw. Before I sank my fingers into her molten pussy and fingered her until she came all over my hand.

…Which I then licked off.

After Brooklyn left that night, I went right to the men’s room and stroked my cock, tasting her sweetness on my fingers until my cum exploded into the toilet.

Then I went home and did it all again.

This is a problem on several levels.

With a scowl, I rise from my desk and cross the office to the bar cart by the window. I pour myself a whiskey, put on Nirvana’sInUtero, and then glance out the huge old window at the grounds and the Manhattan skyline beyond.

This house—a vast, elegant thing built by the Vanderbilts—was one of my first “extravagant” purchases when I ascended to the level of power I hold today. I also keep a much more modern penthouse in Midtown, overlooking Central Park, but it’s here that I enjoy spending most of my time.

Not in the thick of things, but just outside the madness, with a view of it all.

I pick up the old photograph of my father on the bar cart, thinking how different it all used to be. My father's organization was worlds away from the empire I helm today. Back then, in Moscow, we were one of a hundred little fiefdoms all fighting for scraps after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Moskovic Bratva, which was run at the time by Dimitri’s father, was another.

But that was before some of the stronger families consolidated power, looked down their noses at the hordes of small, would-be empires, and tried to snuff us all out at once.

One night, the authorities, on the payroll of a larger family, raided our home and dragged my whole family into the streets.

My mother was shot and killed when she tried to come to the aid of my crying sister, Polina, and bolted away from the men holding her down. Her brother—my uncle—was shot next when he fought back.

I wanted to fight, too. I wanted take as many of them with me as I could when I died.

But my father forcibly stopped me. He told me my time would come, but it would not be that night.

After that, my father went to work for the Vitevsky Bratva—one of the larger families that rose to dominate Moscow after the fall of the Soviet Union. He gave them his money, his contacts, his connections, his routes…everything.

And me? At the age of eight, I was sent to Zavolzhsky Penal Camp Eighteen, in Siberia.

For six long years.

Ihatedmy father for it. I spent ages thinking he’d sold me out, that he’d allowed his son to rot in hell while he served the men who destroyed our family.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized what he’d done for me.

He traded all of it—his businesses, his money, his power, even his freedom—to keep me alive. Yes, I was in hell on earth. But I wasn’t shot in the streets or thrown in a Moscow prison to be gutted in the showers.

It can't have been an easy choice. But it was the only one he had.

He was dead by the time I got out of Zavolzhsky, but he’d used the last of his money and connections to get me out of Moscow, away from the Vitevsky Bratva, and to a boarding school near Volgograd.

That’s what led me to Oxford. And it’s the connections I made there, together with the power I slowly and carefully built, that eventually got me back to Russia.

Thatwas the lesson my father left me with when he grabbed me that horrible night and stopped me from trying to fight a platoon of armed police.

Don’t react impetuously. Wait. Plan. And then, when your enemies least expect it, strike with the force of thunder and erase them from history.

That's what I did when I returned to Moscow. Through a series of faked emails, manipulations, bribes, and determination, I arranged for the entire upper echelon of the Vitevsky Bratva to meet for a sit-down at Pyotr Vitevsky’s mansion.

Pyotr himself, both his sons, all hisavtoritetsand under-captains, his advisors, and the heads of his security wings were there. Also present were four corrupt police captains and three national ministers.

I had every window welded shut. Every door locked and chained.

Then I burned the place to the ground.

I don’t think anyone in the Bratva world will soon forget the night of the “Ashen Purge,” as it's become called.