Page 1 of The Pakhan’s Bride (Mafia Bosses #3)

ZOYA

T he Present Day

Many years ago, Mama told me that every Russian girl is born with a frost demon slumbering beneath her skin, only to awake if a girl's heart breaks the right way—clean, final, and with no mercy. If it wakes, it never sleeps again.

My breath fogs the glass panel of the car window as I recall her words on a day just like this one, snow flurrying against the windowpane while her fingers deftly smoothed my braid, with the samovar whistling merrily in the corner.

She spoke in half-whispers, the way most women do when the story hits too close to home.

There was always a tale within a tale, always a warning wrapped in warmth.

Snow falls thickly outside, clinging to the gutters in thick, muddy sheets, and the river coils black through the underbelly of the city like a drunkard's whisper.

Moscow wears its winter like a bruise beneath powder.

From the window of the car, I watch the skyline emerge through the mist. Even with all the newness, some things remain unchanged.

The southern district still keeps its distance from the spires of state.

The harbor cranes still pivot above the ghost of my family's name.

The new guards wear thicker coats, carry newer guns.

They stand where ours once did before they knelt to a man who came from nowhere and claimed everything.

I shift slightly in the backseat, my fingers tightening inside my gloves, and the leather groans softly. The driver doesn't glance at me. He has been paid for his silence. Once the job is done, we will go our separate ways and no one will speak of this again.

The car is registered to a woman who does not exist. Her passport says she is Lithuanian, her job a translator, her purpose in Moscow a reunion. She is fluent in six languages and bears no known ties to any crime syndicate. She has no child, no history, and therefore no reason to be watched.

She is not Zoya Baranov.

Zoya Baranov is missing, presumed dead. Buried beneath six years of ash, secrecy, and the curious questions of a five-year-old boy with two different-colored eyes.

With a little sigh, I close my eyes and lean back against the seat, allowing myself a rare moment of introspection.

For years, I've studied the rise of the Pakhan with something closer to religious discipline than curiosity, tracing his ascent like scripture.

If the stories are true—and in Russia, they often are—then the Bratva was born not in parliament halls or prison blocs but in blood.

The thieves-in-law, the Vory , came first. The old men, the zakonniki of the true Vory , used to speak of a singular code, a brotherhood forged in the gulags that answered to no state, no earthly master.

Their word was law, their traditions iron.

But the union shattered, and with it, the chains that bound their world.

The 1990s bled across the landscape, a flood of new money, new weapons, and new hungers.

With their rigid codes against honest work or overt business, the old Vory found themselves outmaneuvered by younger, hungrier wolves who saw opportunity not just in theft, but in controlling the very mechanisms of the emerging state, including the factories, the ports, the burgeoning markets.

The Four Families— the Belvinis, Saranovs, Molchanis, Baranovs— were born from this crucible.

The Belvinis claimed the northeast, their foundries churning out iron and arms, the ceaseless hum of their factories indicative of their industrial might.

In the west, the Saranovs draped their illicit dealings in glamor, their empire built on nightclubs, beautiful faces, and towering high-rises that scraped the sky, a glittering facade over deep-seated rot.

To the far north, the Molchanis ruled with icy certainty, their tendrils deeply entwined with the state police, their power invisible and absolute.

The Baranovs, my own blood, held the south—the lifeblood of the ports, the chokehold on customs, and the shadowed underbelly of the Caspian pipeline.

Konstantin Markov was forged in the crucible of that struggle.

An orphan, the product of a death deemed too insignificant for inquiry, he was initially taken in—less as a son, more as a tool—by the lower echelons of the Molchanis.

They saw a stray dog with teeth, nothing more.

He grew up in the back corridors of their underwatch, a place where loyalty was fleeting and survival was a daily catechism.

He was never meant to be more than what they molded him into—muscle, a disposable blade.

His rise was a silent insurgency against the fate prescribed for him.

He began as a courier, learning the city's arteries and the Molchanis’ network of informants and corrupt officials.

Under the harsh tutelage of a mid-level Molchani brigadier who saw a flicker of brutal potential in the quiet boy, Konstantin was blooded as an enforcer.

But Konstantin was a student of all power. He didn't just serve. He absorbed. He watched the Families, their ancient grudges and bloody feuds playing out like a grand, tragic opera, and he waited. He understood that their wars of attrition created vacuums.

His service to the Molchanis in the north taught him the mechanics of disciplined terror and the value of police complicity.

A subsequent prison stint, likely orchestrated or at least not prevented by his Molchani benefactors once he grew too useful, became an unlikely seminary.

There, among the incarcerated, he wasn't idle. He learned the Belvinis’ ledgers.

This wasn't just accounting. it was deciphering the flow of their wealth from iron and arms, identifying key figures, suppliers, and vulnerabilities within their northeastern stronghold.

Perhaps he did this by offering protection or services to a captured Belvini bookkeeper, extracting knowledge piece by piece.

Released, he didn't return solely to the Molchani fold.

He understood the need for diverse svyazi .

He fought bare-knuckled in illicit rings for the Saranovs, not just for money but for proximity.

He navigated their world of fleeting alliances and hedonistic power, observing how they laundered money through their glamorous ventures and controlled information through their extensive social networks in the west.

He built no true alliances, only a vast, internal ledger of debts owed and favors he could call upon.

His loyalty was to his own ambition, a hunger whetted by years of obscurity.

He collected information like a scavenger, piecing together the weaknesses of each Family—the Belvinis’ reliance on specific trade routes, the Saranovs' internal rivalries, the Molchanis’ rigid hierarchy that stifled initiative, and the Baranovs' complacency in the south.

And then, during the coldest winter Moscow had seen in a decade, Konstantin Markov disappeared.

Not vanished like a ghost. Wiped. His name was struck from the Molchani enforcer logs.

His prison contacts went silent. Even the tattooed thieves who remembered him from bloodier days called him dead.

But it wasn't a death. It was a molting.

During those missing months, the Markov boy became something else entirely.

From the back alleys and forgotten prison ties, he built his own power base—a leaner syndicate, cut from the fat of the others.

He didn't inherit blood. He forged loyalty in the dark from castoffs, soldiers of fortune, traffickers too disciplined for the Belvinis and too brutal for the Saranovs.

He gathered them, reshaped them, and when he gave them a name—Vetrov—they carved it into the city's bones.

This wasn't a Bratva family in the old mold.

It didn't rest on legacy or name or noble oaths.

It was militaristic in its efficiency. A krysha —a protection racket—built not on ceremony, but on ruthless results.

Every debt was collected, every shipment delivered, every betrayal punished with a clarity that frightened even the old guard, enough to give him a seat at the table.

And this seat was all that he needed to become the Pakhan of Moscow, the man who wiped out my family six years ago.

The driver slows. We pass a street lined with sleet-coated memorials, each one engraved with the names of men who once signed Baranov trade agreements, now listed as martyrs to "the southern realignment.

" I want to spit. Instead, I press two fingers to the necklace hidden beneath my scarf.

The car takes a turn near Zaryadye. I glimpse the old church in the distance, half-covered in scaffolding.

Below it, the underground routes used for contraband in the old days—our days—still pulse beneath the frost. I helped map them once.

My father said a woman should know the bones of her house before she wore its crown.

He dressed his daughters in silk and fed them bitter truths with their tea.

"You are not a princess," he told me once. "You are a weapon polished to shine."

But I know the other version of that story, whispered by my Nyanya Galina while folding linens at dusk.

The princess is taken into the woods, promised in marriage to the tsar of death.

She escapes by offering him a kiss, then another, until he forgets she was ever meant to die.

Fairy tales in Russia were always darker than the West made them.

In ours, Baba Yaga devours her guests. The firebird blinds those who chase her.

The bear turns into a man, then something worse.

The forest girl marries the frost king to save her home, only to learn she was meant to burn from the start.

There are hardly happy endings, only quiet ones.

Girls do not ride into the sunset. They vanish into the snow.

There are exceptions to this rule because I didn't vanish. And now, the frost demon is stirring lightly beneath my own skin. Tonight, I wake her fully. I have come back through that forest, through silence and sleet and ash-thick memory. And I haven't returned the same.

The car idles just beyond the industrial perimeter, tucked beneath the skeletal remains of a billboard that once advertised luxury watches.

I open the door and step into the snow. Cold air slashes across my face, immediate and sobering.

When I close the door, it sounds like a vault sealing shut.

The path is already mapped in my mind. I slip between the chain-link fence and the maintenance shack, my boots crunching through hard-packed ice as I climb the embankment behind the flyover.

There's a narrow access ladder bolted to the side of the underpass infrastructure, half-frozen but climbable.

I take it carefully, gloves scraping cold metal, until I reach the service ledge that runs parallel to the flyover—high enough to see, low enough to disappear.

This is the spot I chose three weeks ago.

From here, I see the world the way Konstantin likes it—neat lines, controlled entries, exit plans baked into concrete.

I crouch down, press my spine against the steel of the support beam, and reach inside my coat.

No one will be on the flyover. The traffic permits I forged rerouted every legal vehicle three hours ago.

Even the street sweepers have been reassigned.

There will be no witnesses or second chances for Konstantin Vetrov, the man who kissed me in a narrow street in Paris and later signed my family's death warrant in blood.

They call him the king of Moscow now. I only know him as the reason my son watches me too closely when I lie.

I remember Lev's face when I left. "Nyanya says winter always brings you home," he told me, pulling his blanket higher as I fastened the latch on the window. "But not always whole."

I told him it was a story, that Mama was just visiting old friends. He didn't argue, just nodded solemnly, like men do at funerals.

He looked too much like his father then.

A gust cuts through the silence. I rise slowly, pulling the scarf over my mouth as I slide back into position.

The detonator fits neatly inside my glove, pressure-sensitive.

The convoy appears as a glint first, headlights cutting through the gloom of the lower road, glimmering faintly like coins tossed into a riverbed.

I count the vehicles by sound before I ever see them.

Front scout. Rear buffer. Two decoys. Middle transport, armor-plated. The real one.

I press a finger to my temple and breathe. Four minutes.

The first car crosses beneath the flyover. The tires send up plumes of slush. I hear the scrape of chains. Then the second. The third. Then the one I've waited for.

The moment crystallizes. The world seems to hold its breath, as if even the snow knows what's coming. I press.

The sound is not an explosion, it's a rupture.

A tearing , like the world itself has cracked open from beneath.

The blast lifts the armored car with startling grace, like a child's toy hurled skyward by an unseen hand.

Fire devours the undercarriage. Metal peels away in molten curls.

The shockwave knocks me back against the guardrail, hard enough to make my teeth rattle.

Flames bloom below like some ancient flower. Black smoke billows up, curling toward the clouds. Debris rains down, hot and hissing, across the frozen asphalt. I stay low, breaths ragged, ears ringing.

It's done. It's?—

A shape moves through the fire. At first, I think it's a trick of the heat, a mirage born of adrenaline. But it moves again, and a man steps through the haze like a man walking through memory. His coat is burned at the shoulder. One arm hangs, twisted, blood soaking the cuff. But he's breathing.

Konstantin. His face is streaked with soot. There's a gash above his brow, blood running down past his jaw. But his eyes cut through the smoke and find me, exactly me . His gaze locks with mine across distance, across flame, across years.

The street begins to stir with movement. Shouting. Radios. Sirens in the far distance. I hear men barking into comms. Metal on concrete. A drone arcs low over the smoke, blinking red.

I slide back behind the barrier. My fingers are trembling now. My time in Moscow is over as quickly as it had begun.