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“A body in the morgue and a shipment missing sounds like a fucking problem to me.”

All eyes in the room turned to me: piercing green eyes belonging to Egor Yezhov, the Pakhan of the Bratva; the dark, intense eyes of my cousin, Rafayel Yezhov; and the light blue, murderous eyes attributed to my other cousin, Miron Yezhov.

Every man in this room shared something in common beyond our last name and our connection to the dark underworld; we were all here to mourn the same man.

But not in the way his family and friends, if he had any, would. One thing about men in the Bratva was that we had no friends. Trust was fickle, and love was a vulnerability—everything the mafia was against.

We only needed our fucking wits and brutality to survive, but even that wasn’t enough sometimes.

Peter Rae was one of the best men we’d had, and he was dead.

Not just dead—he was fucking murdered . But that wasn’t the real problem, at least not for me. The problem was that he’d hidden something very valuable, something we couldn’t find on our own, and you know what they say about dead men not telling any tales.

The man had taken a secret that cost blood and money to his grave.

“We’ll find whoever is responsible for this, and we’ll take them down,” Miron said. “We’ll burn the world if we have to.”

Miron was a cruel bastard. He didn’t care that Peter died; he couldn’t give a fuck which one of our men was gutted by our enemies. He only cared that he could use it as an excuse for extreme violence. He was the most sadistic of all four of us, and I liked that about him.

Everyone in this room aside from him would be worried about the motive behind Peter’s murder and why, but not Miron. He never asked questions. He wanted a name. A target. Someone to put a bullet in.

He and I shared certain similarities; however, he was volatile, while I preferred to be practical.

I leaned back in my chair, flicking my lighter open and closed, the metallic snick echoing through the room as I put my brain to work.

Smoke curled in the air from Egor’s cigar, mixing with the scent of aged whiskey none of us had touched. The Pakhan sat at the head of the table, leaning back with his legs crossed and his expression unreadable. His fingers tapped against the glass in front of him in a foreboding way, and his eyes were fixed on one thing—the phone on the table.

It was Peter’s phone. Miron had retrieved it from Peter’s body before it was taken to the morgue.

“Peter’s dead,” Egor said, his voice heavy with rage and the need for vengeance, despite his calm exterior. “Except he isn’t just dead; he was murdered. Someone openly declared a war against us.”

“Now I’m curious about who would be brave enough to do something like that,” Rafayel chipped in for the first time. “No one would be stupid enough to declare war unless it was someone powerful enough to do so.”

It didn’t take much mental gymnastics for me to figure out what the killer was after. I was surprised they hadn’t figured it out yet. “Isn’t it obvious?”

Rafayel shot me a sharp look. “Isn’t what obvious?”

“What they’re after.” I let the lighter snap shut and met his gaze. “They’re after the Tyfun-1.”

My cousins exchanged glances.

The Tyfun-1 was a massive shipment of high-grade, synthetic drugs we’d shipped in from Mexico only two days ago. We’d kept it confidential, but I guess secrets leak very easily around here.

“The Tyfun-1 was a secret. There’s no way anyone else would have known about it,” Miron said, shooting up to his feet and pacing the room.

“Well, I guess we weren’t careful enough. Someone knew about it, and whoever it was went after it. The timing makes sense,” I explained as calmly as I could. “Peter took the shipment during a raid yesterday. He hid it God knows where, and today, he’s dead.”

The leather cushion creaked under Rafayel’s weight as he shifted on it. “So, you’re saying someone killed him in order to take the shipment.”

I nodded.

“How do we know he didn’t give them the information before he died?” Egor asked. He’d finally stopped tapping against the glass. It looked like I’d piqued his interest.

“Peter would never give up that information even to save his own life.” I smiled, taking a sip of my whiskey and reveling in the way it burned down my throat. “That’s where trust comes in.”

“We still need to find whoever is after the Tyfun-1 before they do more damage,” Rafayel suggested, his face contorting with rage.

I shook my head, my lips curling with a smirk. “That won’t be necessary. All we have to do is find the Tyfun-1. Whoever is behind Peter’s death will come to us himself. He can’t hide in the shadows for long.”

Miron finally stopped pacing and leaned against the wall. “How do we find it?”

Egor’s eyes and mine shot to the phone in the middle of the table at the same time. I could tell he was thinking the same thing as I was.

“This phone has some of the answers we need,” Egor said, picking the device up and rotating it between his fingers. The screen was cracked and still had remnants of Peter’s blood on it.

“Let’s see what’s on it,” Rafayel said, straightening up.

Egor held the power button until the phone came on. The lock screen was a picture of a girl in her early twenties wearing a graduation gown and smiling at the camera.

She had an uncanny resemblance to Peter, but unlike him, her smile was filled with an innocence that made me shake my head. Such innocence had no business in a world like ours; she would only wither away and die.

Egor scrolled through the phone for a moment, and then he turned the cracked screen toward us. “This was the last call he made the night before he was murdered.”

I narrowed my eyes to see the number saved as My Cherry with a heart on fire and a kissy-face emoji on it.

Irritation crawled up my skin at the sight of it. Emotions like love were a vulnerability; it couldn’t be said enough times for anyone with ears to actually listen.

“That must be his daughter,” Miron noted. “What business would she have with the Tyfun-1?”

Egor pulled the phone closer to himself, scrolled through it, and turned the screen toward us again.

This time around, there was a message displayed on the screen, and the recipient was the same My Cherry with the heart on fire and kissy-face emojis.

I read the message out loud. “The typhoon’s eye holds the calm—Tyfun-1.”

Rafayel scoffed. “The fuck does that mean?”

“No idea,” Egor said. “But she clearly knows something.” He slid the phone toward me. “Find her. Find the shipment.”

I picked up the phone, rolling it between my fingers.

I didn’t know what Peter’s daughter was like, but if she indeed knew about the drugs, then it made sense she would be on the run right now. That was what anyone with common sense would do: run.

Miron huffed a laugh. “Look at that doe-eyed girl. Does she seem like the type to know stuff about hard drugs?”

“From what I heard, Peter stayed away from his family after divorcing his ex-wife. If he called her last night and sent a text, then he must’ve told her something.” I stopped spinning the phone and thought for a moment. “What time was Peter murdered?”

“His body was found near the bay at eight a.m. today,” Miron answered. “Considering rigor mortis had not begun to set in yet, chances are he was murdered between six and seven a.m.”

“Right.” I tapped the screen, waited for it to turn on, and scrolled back to the message. “The message was sent at eight-thirty a.m.” I flicked through the screen. “He scheduled the message.”

Rafayel grabbed the phone from me. His eyes widened enough to show his surprise. “That means he probably suspected this would happen. He knew someone was watching or following him.”

I nodded and turned to Miron. “Do you have any idea where he might’ve been coming from?”

“His daughter’s.”

I scoffed. “Looks like we have all the answers we need. Now all we have to do is find Peter’s little girl, and we’ll find out what she knows.”

“Easy, big guy,” Rafayel teased, his lips curling with a smirk. “We’re not so sure what she knows and doesn’t know. That could be a cryptic message with nothing more to it. He wouldn’t be stupid enough to drag his daughter into this mess.”

Rafayel was right.

Peter’s daughter had no ties to the mafia, at least not officially. Her mother made sure of it when she got a divorce from Peter. No one knew anything about her aside from the fact that her name started with the letter G, and he provided everything she needed, even from a distance.

But that changed now that we knew she was the last person he contacted before he died. We weren’t going to take any chances.

“She knows something,” Miron said with certainty. “Or she at least must’ve seen or heard something.”

Rafayel glanced at me, his cold, dark eyes filled with curiosity. “And if she doesn’t?”

I flashed a cocky smile. “You think I’ll kill her, too?”

“We don’t hurt women or children, remember? We don’t harm the innocent.”

“Tell me, Rafayel, have you ever seen me hurt a woman or a child before?” I kept my face blank, leaving it up to him to figure out if I found his concern offensive or not.

It was disrespect to the codes I live by for him to question my morality like that, and he knew it. The mafia world was so dark and bloody that those moral codes were the only thing that made us slightly human.

His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “You’re obsessed with the drugs.”

“Am I?” I finished the rest of my whiskey in one gulp, my brows knitting only a little at the taste. The whiskey burned, but I welcomed it, letting it settle like armor in my gut, and then I set the glass down with quiet finality. “I’m concerned about what would happen if those drugs got into the wrong hands, Rafayel.”

“Cut it out, both of you.” Egor’s gaze fleeted in my direction. “There’s a chance Peter’s murderers have the information we do. Make sure you find her before anyone else does and get what we need.”

That wasn’t a request from Egor; it was an order.

“She won’t just hand over information,” Miron muttered. “Want me to come with you? I could get the information out of her with just one torture session.”

“She’ll talk,” I answered simply, pushing up from the couch and pocketing the phone. “I’ll make sure she does.”

“What happens if she insists she doesn’t know anything?” Rafayel asked, still staring at me as if I were a seven-horned devil who was about to condemn an innocent soul to hell. He’d been the closest to Peter, so I wasn’t surprised he was trying to keep Peter’s daughter safe.

I couldn’t claim his concern was entirely unfounded because, at that moment, I was ready to do whatever it took to recover those drugs.

I smirked. “Then she’ll have to convince me.”

And I wasn’t very easy to convince.