Page 130 of Bratva Menace

His mouth compressed into a hard line. He didn’t deny it, and I wondered if perhaps he agreed with me, yet refused to admit it.

“Do you want me to tell you where you went wrong? I’ll tell you where you went wrong,” I said quickly, answering my own question. “There were people lurking around when you conducted your deals. People you and your men ignored because you thought they weren’t a threat.”

He frowned. “No, there weren’t.”

I smiled broadly. “Yes, there were.” I knew because I’d placed them there. The moment my father told me his plan to kill Sergei, I’d decided to do a little…preemptive strike, as it were. My grandfather was a powerful man, with an almost infinite reach. It had been decades since he’d last been challenged, and that amount of time with no pushback tended to make people complacent.

There were homeless people on nearly every corner of every street, all up and down the major cities of Russia. These were people who had to fight to survive every single day. Who had to hustle day in and day out to find a place to sleep. To find something to eat. Homelessness was a serious problem not only there but everywhere around the world. Those were people who had been hard done by. Life had kicked them down, and they were struggling to find their feet again.

I’d been lucky enough to be born into a family that was able to provide for me. Provide a roof over my head, clothes on my back, and food in my belly. Some people weren’t so lucky, and I felt for them. Always tried my hardest to give back by helping them whenever I saw them.

A lot of others overlooked them. Ignored them. Pretended they didn’t even see them.

Which made them the perfect informants.

“I’ve been having you watched for six months, and you didn’t even know it.” I laughed. “Not only that, but I’ve been the one responsible for all those deals going wrong.”

His spine snapped straight. “You what?”

“Calm down, it’s not what you think. I didn’t betray the family. All those supplies that were stolen from you were just stolen by me, that’s all. No biggie.”

Steam might as well have been coming out of his ears, he was so angry. “You little—Everit!”

I looked around the room. “Oh, is that the name of the dude you have monitoring us next door? Yeah, he’s dead.”

Sergei blinked, his face a mask of shock.

My father told me about how Sergei would always have someone watching his meetings, his office, just in case one of his own people tried to kill him. Everit, as I’d just come to discover, was that man. Before coming into Sergei’s office, I’d made a little pit stop and sliced his throat so he would be unable to raise any alarm.

I didn’t want to be rushed. I was going to take my time with it.

Savor it.

“Now, where was I?” I clicked my fingers. “Ah, that’s right. My plan. Silly me. So, I thought to myself, how do you take down someone so evil, so conniving they would try to murder their own family? You have to do it in stages, you see. Break them down, piece by piece. First, I fucked with your business. I had people watching you every time you left the house, monitoring where you went. Who you saw. What you did.” I ticked off each thing with my fingers, one by one. “When a delivery was set, I orchestrated for it to be taken. This, of course, set you on edge.”

Which was exactly what I wanted. One couldn’t just take down a man of Sergei’s caliber with brute force. It had to be done meticulously.

His jaw clenched. I could almost swear a flicker of worry streaked across his face.

“With you on edge, you became more erratic. More unstable. More volatile. You remember what you did during those first few months when deliveries were going missing, right?”

He didn’t answer, not that I really expected him to. That was fine. Months and months of planning had led to this moment, and I was more than happy to continue with my reveal without his input. I felt like one of those villains in an action movie when they give a big, long speech about how they’d thwarted the hero with their grand master plan.

And I didn’t care.

It was my time to motherfucking shine. To show him and everyone else just how much they’d all underestimated me and the geniusness that was my brain.

“You killed half your people, Sergei!” I exhaled, shaking my head. “You thought you had a snitch in your ranks. You were so adamant about it that when people told you they had nothing to do with it, you didn’t believe them. You went a little cuckoo, and coming from me, that’s saying something.”

I stood, stretching out my body. Sergei watched me with the eyes of a predator. Finally. He was finally seeing me for who I was—a fucking wolf in sheep’s clothing.

“Because you had so many deals go wrong, your clients were starting to doubt you. Doubt your business. And that drove you maddddd. Sent you spiraling even further down into that paranoid abyss. Your deal with the Tarasovs was made before I’d started implementing my plan. Something I assumed you looked into to help stretch your reach even further. But as time went on, and your shit just kept getting taken, it ended up becoming the most important deal for you because it provided you a new means to get the merchandise to your clients.—one you thought was not compromised. It was going to right everything for you. Fix everything for you. But the damage was done, wasn’t it?”

I spotted a drink cart in the corner. I poured myself a drink and took a sip, swirling the liquid in my mouth before swallowing it. I deposited the empty glass back down onto the cart and continued.

“You lost numerous contracts because of your inability to fulfill them. With your business and your reputation damaged, the first half of my plan was a smashing success.” I didn’t just want to kill Sergei. I wanted to ruin him. Nothing was more important to that man than his legacy. How people saw him. I wanted to take that away from him before he died. I wanted Sergei to fucking suffer for everything he’d done to my family. “The second part of my plan, well, I think it’s even more devious than the first.”

For the first time, Sergei spoke. For the entire time I’d known him, he’d been an unmovable force. Strong. Powerful. Stoic. Suddenly, he looked his age. Fragile and weak.