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“In a minute.” She doesn’t pull away from me. “I just need a minute out here first, that’s all.”
26
HARPER
Three days later…
I find Artem in the library instead of the study, an unusual enough shift that I almost comment on it before deciding just to sit down across from him instead.
The house has settled into something calmer since that night, like both of us finally standing on the same ground for once, no more careful footwork around each other’s rawest edges.
He looks up from whatever he’s reading, and something in his face softens slightly at the sight of me settling into the chair. He marks his page and sets the book aside without me having to ask, giving me his attention.
“Tell me about the Sokolovs.” I keep my voice easy, genuinely curious rather than bracing for another crisis. “I understand the danger part. I mean how it started. Why two families end up hating each other enough for any of this to happen.”
He sets his book down slowly, studying me for a moment like he’s deciding how much to spill. Whatever he decides, I watch him choose differently this time, more openly than usual.
“It started with my father.” He says it plainly without hesitation. “Territory dispute, decades ago now, over shipping routes through the port. Both families wanted the same corridor, and neither would concede it peacefully.”
“That’s it? A shipping route?”
“That’s how it started. It’s rarely how these things stay simple.” He leans back, and there’s something almost relieved in how easily the words come once he’s decided to actually give them to me. “My father and the elder Sokolov reached an agreement eventually to split the routes and kept the peace for nearly a decade. Then his son inherited the operation, and inheriting a peace treaty isn’t the same as believing in it.”
“So, the sons started it up again.”
“The sons always start it up again.” His mouth twists, something bitter underneath the words. “That’s the pattern more than any single event is. Fathers negotiate a truce out of exhaustion or practicality. Sons inherit the grievance without inheriting the reason for the peace, and they see restraint as weakness instead of wisdom.”
I turn that over, watching him more closely now than I have during any of our previous conversations about this world. There’s something almost gentle about the way he’s talking tonight, none of the clipped efficiency he usually uses when this subject comes up. “Is that what happened with you? Did you inherit the grievance too?”
“I inherited both.” He meets my eyes directly. “The peace, and the reasons it eventually broke. My father died before he could pass along the second part, and Viktor, the elder Sokolov’s son, decided that made the peace fair game to test.”
“Can I ask something stupid?” I tuck my feet under me. “The staff call you pakhan. I’ve heard it since the first week, and I never asked what it means.”
“It isn’t stupid.” The corner of his mouth lifts, barely. “Pakhan is the head of a Bratva. It’s the title my father held, and now it’s mine.”
“So you’re the boss.”
“A boss answers to someone.” He lets that settle before he goes on. “A pakhan doesn’t. Every man in this house, and a few hundred more in this city, answers to me, which means every mistake they make is mine to fix.”
“And Viktor?”
“Viktor is pakhan of the Sokolov Bratva.” He says the name flatly, like reading it off a gravestone. “Two pakhans, one corridor. Current head of the family. Younger than his father was when this started, hungrier for it too.” Something hardens in his expression, old and worn smooth by repetition, a familiar shape he’s clearly settled into more than once over the years. “He’s tested the boundary a dozen times over the years. Small provocations, mostly. Territory encroachment, a poached contact here and there. Nothing that justified full retaliation until now, until you came along.” He says it without trying to soften the weight of it. “You’re the first thing he’s found worth an actual move instead of just testing. Everything before this was posturing. This is the first time either of us has had something the other genuinely wants.”
I sit with that for a moment, letting it sink in slowly. This is the kind of rivalry I’ve only ever seen in movies, and now it’s real, and somehow, I’m standing right in the middle of it.
“Why does peace never hold, then? If everyone knows the pattern, why not just… stop it? Like, actually keep the peace this time.”
“Because peace requires both sides to want it more than they want the win.” He says it like something he’s turned over many times before. “Viktor doesn’t want peace. He wants the routes his father gave up, the territory he thinks was stolen from his family rather than negotiated away fairly. As long as he believes that, no truce holds longer than it takes him to rebuild enough strength to test it again.”
“That sounds exhausting. Fighting the exact same fight over and over again with no actual end in sight.”
“It is.” He rubs a hand along his jaw, something almost tired in the gesture, a weariness I don’t often get to see past his usual composure. “I used to think this could eventually settle for good, some negotiation good enough that both sides walk away satisfied. I stopped believing that a long time ago.”
“What would you do differently? If you could go back and actually end it instead of just managing it.”
He’s quiet for a long moment, considering the question seriously rather than deflecting it the way I half expect him to. “I don’t know how to end it without one family disappearing entirely. Some rivalries don’t get resolved. They get outlived.”
“That’s bleak.”
