Page 46 of The Pakhan’s Bride (Mafia Bosses #3)

ZOYA

A Few Months Later

The command room is a hemisphere of screens, arranged to blue-wash the faces of everyone inside.

The old desk is buried under power strips, energy drink cans, a tangle of data cables.

A printer in the corner ticks and hums like an insect colony.

On the largest screen, the Berlin summit plays in silent close-up—the patriarch's white head, the Albanis’ sea-glass eyes, the line of brothers flanking their father like chess pieces.

Months ago, Orlov had installed a piggyback relay on a German security node during a diplomatic gala.

No one noticed. Now, every time the building goes into conference lockdown, a ghost copy of the CCTV routes itself to a cold server back in the Moscow suburbs.

From there, it's just a few keyboard taps and the entire summit unfolds like a stage play.

The patriarch sits with his back to the river, a line of frost-haired power drawn from the nape of his skull to the set of his shoulders.

The last of the old Vory, a man who once crowned Mob bosses in three countries and made syndicates kneel just to hold territory west of the Dnieper.

They call him Dedushka now, but there's nothing grandfatherly about him.

He's shed his old title for a German export license and a villa in the suburbs, but he keeps the scars as a kind of armor.

His two sons bracket him—blond, blocky, twin mirages of ambition with hands twice the size of mine.

One checks his phone every minute. The other just stares at the city as if daring it to blink.

Across from them, the Albani team—three men, three suits, three smiles as thin as cigarette paper.

The one in the middle does the talking. He's olive-skinned, with a face that could pass for a banker until he laughs.

His English is flawless, but his accent is thicker than the smoke in a Balkan nightclub. He slides a folder across the table.

"Old friends," he says, "let us not waste each other's time."

The patriarch lifts the folder. His hands are rough, but the nails are still buffed to a shine. He doesn't open it, just thumbs the cover, as if expecting it to be boobytrapped. "What is this?"

The Albanian leans in. "Opportunity. With the Russians in chaos, there is vacuum. We offer partnership, not subordination."

One son grunts. The other checks his watch. "Speak plainly," says the patriarch, eyes locked on the man opposite.

The Albani rep smiles, shows more gum than tooth. "You have the ships. We have the clients. You want stability. We want respect."

He nods at the folder. "Inside—proposed routes. New margins. And for your sons, autonomy. No more Moscow micromanagement. Baltic to Benelux, you call the shots."

This is the part where old loyalty is supposed to assert itself, where the patriarch laughs and asks if they take him for a fool. Instead, he opens the folder. He reads the first page. His pupils dilate, just a little.

The Albani man sips water, waiting for the offer to land. One son breaks the silence. "What's the split?"

The Albanian flicks to the second page. "Seventy-thirty. First year. Adjusted after proof of delivery."

"Adjusted how?"

The rep shrugs. "Depends on who is still standing."

The patriarch looks up. "You understand, if I do this, there is no going back."

The Albanian folds his hands. "We are men of the present, not the past."

He gestures at the view—the Spree, the city, the horizon. "History is dead. Let's bury it."

I catch the flicker in the patriarch's eye. He's not convinced, but he is tempted. More than that, he's tired. Tired of being called at odd hours to put out fires in cities he's never seen. Tired of waiting for Moscow to remember he exists. He leans back. "My loyalty has value."

The Albanian nods, respectful. "So does your time."

The two men sit, locked in a contest that predates the building by a century. The sons glance at each other, already doing the math. The patriarch taps the folder with a finger. "You think you can use us to break the Vetrov hold."

"I think we can build something new," the Albanian says softly.

It's a lie, but a beautiful one. A woman enters, iPad in hand, hair cropped to a helmet. She sets the tablet at the end of the table, flicks to a map with colored overlays. She's Swiss, by the badge. Neutral, but for sale.

She narrates the flow—containers from Klaipeda, trains to Düsseldorf, then across the Channel.

The Albanis have every step costed, every risk assigned a percentile.

On screen, red lines turn to green, then to gold.

The patriarch's sons are hooked since they see their names in each new branch, their future in each data point.

The Albanian pushes the advantage. "You get out of the shadows. You own the vertical."

The sons talk, voices low. One is already plotting expansion, the other asking about the old guard in St. Petersburg. The patriarch says nothing. I stand, walk to the window, watch the Albani men step into the elevator.

I sit in the captain's chair, leather cracked, the back still scarred from the day Konstantin threw it at Orlov for being too slow with a war game scenario. My fingers hover over the keys, not because I'm nervous but because timing is everything. Today is about tempo.

The techs—one with an anarchist's tattoo under his cuff, the other barely old enough to shave—monitor news wires, banking feeds, the encrypted group chats that pretend to be secure. They glance at me, then at their screens, then back to me. No one speaks unless asked.

At exactly 10:17, the first alert pings on the air. It's a forward from Berlin—Albani offer is live, they've pitched the sons. I read it in five seconds. One of the techs—Pasha—turns, waiting for orders.

I nod. "Wake the lieutenant."

He leaves at a run, steps thudding on the marble.

The other tech, Vera, taps her nails on the edge of the tablet.

It's the only sign she's breathing. I scan the feeds.

The patriarch is glancing at his sons, unsure, wounded by their eagerness.

The Albani men look relaxed, but I can see the way they never rest both elbows on the table, the way their eyes sweep exits every four minutes.

Pasha returns with the lieutenant. He's a slab of bone in a suit, tie crooked, hair still wet from the shower.

He doesn't waste time. "They took the offer? " he asks, eyes on me.

"They considered it," I say. "Same thing."

He grunts. "When do we move?"

I flip open my laptop, ancient by now, but the encryption is custom, legacy code inherited from my father's old KGB associates.

I enter the passphrase. The screen flickers, then displays the archive.

The old Baranov files. Hundreds of pages, a cross-hatch of scans and photos, all tagged with Ekaterina's hand.

She kept meticulous records, even when she was a ghost. I feel a pinch in my ribs, but I don't let it slow me.

I click through the folders. "The Albani play is soft. They're trying to absorb, not destroy."

The lieutenant frowns. "Weak?"

I shake my head. "No. Patient."

The techs are silent, watching the way my eyes track the file tree.

I select the "Maraschino" folder—Ekaterina's code for political bribery, a joke so dry only she ever laughed.

The documents are a mix—wire transfers, party invitations, a photograph of a German trade minister with a line of white powder on his desk.

I attach the lot to a draft email. The recipient list is already built—five journalists, three regulators, and the personal assistant of a Dutch MP who owes us a favor.

I glance at the clock. The second hand ticks to the top. I hit Send . "First wave is live," I say.

The old Baranov archive is a monster, but Ekaterina left it to me with a note in her voice—Use only as needed.

There's enough in here to burn a city. I queue up the second wave, this one uglier—laundering diagrams, shell corporations, names of diplomats in three countries who are on the take.

The files were meant to be insurance. I use them as a weapon.

Vera's hand trembles as she types. "It's live on Twitter," she says.

I nod. "Let it run."

For a breath, I let myself think about Ekaterina.

The way she annotated each file, how she'd assign nicknames to the targets.

The way she built the archive as a living weapon, knowing someday it would be aimed at her own allies.

She never intended to survive the final act.

She made herself the villain so I wouldn't have to.

The conference room hums with static. The patriarch sits stiffly, one son tapping his heel under the table, the other lost in emails.

The Albani reps have multiplied, six now, including the so-called legal team, whose only function is to nod and never blink.

There is bottled water everywhere, untouched.

A phone vibrates. Then another. Then the whole room trembles as if a drone passed overhead. The patriarch's phone is first. He reads the alert, lips compressed to a single wrinkle. His left hand trembles, just once, then steadies.

Across the table, the Albani man's phone goes off.

He glances, then turns chalk-white. His hand covers the screen.

He tries to keep talking—something about mid-market rates, or a price break on insurance—but the words are background noise now.

The sons look up, sensing a shift. One reaches for his own device, finds it already lit with unread messages.

The patriarch stares at the Albani team, then at the Swiss moderator. "We need a break," he says.

But the Albani man is already speaking into his sleeve, voice too low for the microphones.

The moderator, flustered, tries to impose order. "Perhaps we could?—"

"No," says the patriarch. "We're finished here."