Page 27 of The Russian's Innocent Prey
“I have something urgent to take care of,” I said, my voice coming out rougher than intended. The words felt like gravel in my throat, each syllable scraping against the exhaustion that had settled into my bones. “I won’t be back until morning. You should sleep.”
Her hazel eyes flashed with something that might have been hurt or anger or both. “My entire life just got rearranged against my will. I think I’m exhausted enough without needing your permission to rest.”
The bite in her voice should have irritated me. Should have triggered the same cold fury that had been my constant companion since she’d called us a mistake. Instead, it did something complicated to my chest—made me want to cross the room and show her exactly how much permission she needed for anything that happened in my space.
But I didn’t. Because touching her again would be a mistake that made that night look like a moment of clarity, and because I had work to do, I couldn’t wait for my libido to remember its place.
So I simply turned and walked toward the door, letting my silence do what words couldn’t. I knew it would eat at her—the way I could just leave without explanation or apology or any of the emotional processing she probably expected after everything that had happened. Good. Let it eat at her the same way her casual dismissal had been gnawing at me all day.
The elevator ride down to the parking garage gave me time to compartmentalize, to lock away everything that had to do with soft skin and wounded eyes and focus on the kind of work that actually made sense. Violence, I understood. Revenge, I could plan and execute with surgical precision. Emotions were just liabilities that got people killed, and I’d already indulged in enough of those to last a lifetime.
The Bratva hospital sat on the outskirts of Chicago like a fortress disguised as a medical facility—all clean lines and sterile surfaces hiding examination rooms that had seen more bullet wounds than surgical procedures. It was where our people went when regular hospitals asked too many questions, where doctors had learned to treat trauma without filing reports or requesting insurance information.
It was also where they’d taken my father’s body after the attack, It was also where they’d taken my father’s body after the attack, where they’d tried to save him before he died from his injuries.
Where his clothes had been catalogued and stored in the secure disposal area that most people didn’t even know existed.
But I wasn’t most people. I’d grown up in this world, learned its systems and protocols and unspoken rules before I was old enough to understand what they really meant. I knewwhich guards could be bought, which doors stayed unlocked, and which surveillance cameras had convenient blind spots.
Getting into the disposal area was almost insultingly easy. A few key codes, a brief conversation with a security guard who owed me a favor, and I was standing in a sterile room filled with plastic bins containing the last remnants of violence. The smell hit me first—antiseptic trying to cover the metallic tang of dried blood and the lingering scent of whatever cologne my father had been wearing when he died.
His clothes were in bin #47B, sealed in clear plastic like evidence from a crime scene. Which, I supposed, they were. I pulled on latex gloves and carefully extracted each item, laying them out on a metal examination table under harsh fluorescent lights that made everything look like a crime scene photograph.
The button camera was still there, still attached to his coat like a guilty secret. I’d palmed the wrong one at the funeral—this was the real thing, small and sophisticated and potentially containing the last few hours of my father’s life. Including, if I was lucky, some clue about who had wanted him dead and why.
I pocketed the camera and moved on to the rest of his belongings, looking for anything that might have been missed during the initial investigation. That’s when I found it—wedged into the inner pocket of his jacket, so small it could have been overlooked as lint.
A piece of paper, folded into a tight square and stained with what looked like blood. My hands were steady as I unfolded it, revealing a single line of text written in Cyrillic script:The sins of the father shall be visited upon the sons.
Biblical. Old Testament. The kind of message that spoke of vengeance spanning generations rather than simple business disputes. Someone hadn’t just wanted my father dead—they’d wanted him to know why he was dying, wanted him to carry the weight of old sins into whatever came after.
I photographed the note and took the camera, then carefully returned everything to its original position. No point in alerting anyone else to what I’d found, not until I knew exactly what I was dealing with. This felt personal in a way that made my skin crawl, like whoever had orchestrated the hit knew secrets about my family that even I didn’t understand.
Back at the office, I plugged the camera into my computer and waited for the files to upload. The timestamp showed footage from the week leading up to the attack, hours of mundane conversations and routine meetings that painted a picture of a man who had no idea death was stalking him.
But as I scrubbed through the footage, patterns began to emerge. The same black sedan appearing in multiple locations, always maintaining a careful distance but never quite disappearing. Professional surveillance, the kind that required resources and patience and intimate knowledge of the target’s habits.
What bothered me was that my father hadn’t seemed to notice. Mike Antonov had survived thirty years in the Bratva by being paranoid about exactly this kind of thing, by assuming every shadow contained an enemy and every coincidence was a trap. For him to miss surveillance this obvious meant either he was slipping—which seemed unlikely—or he’d recognized the threat and chosen not to act on it.
The footage from the day of the attack was harder to watch. I saw my father leave his apartment building, saw him walk to his car with the kind of casual confidence that came from decades of believing he was untouchable. The black sedan was there, parked across the street, but he didn’t even glance in its direction.
The attack itself was brief and brutal. Two men approached from different angles, moving with military precision. One of them said something before firing, his mouthmoving in words the camera couldn’t capture, but his body language suggested this was more than a simple execution.
This was theater. A performance designed to send a message that went beyond simple death.
I enhanced the image quality and zoomed in on the shooter’s forearm, looking for the tattoo Drew had mentioned. There it was—Saint Michael slaying the devil, the ink dark against pale skin. Custom work, professionally done, the kind of thing that marked a man as belonging to a specific organization.
I’d seen that particular design before, years ago, in intelligence briefings about Ukrainian crime families. Cossack heritage, blood oaths, the kind of traditional symbolism that linked modern criminals to centuries-old codes of honor and vengeance.
Ukraine. The word sent ice through my veins, triggering memories I’d spent years trying to bury. Taras Kozak, the man who’d burned down my childhood home and murdered my family—or so I’d believed until yesterday. The man my father had killed in retaliation, whose death had supposedly ended a blood feud that had consumed both our families.
Apparently, blood feuds didn’t end as cleanly as I’d thought.
I pulled up archived files from the old network drives, digging through decades of intelligence reports and surveillance photographs. The Kozak family tree was complex, branches spreading across multiple countries and generations, but the pattern was clear enough. Traditional Ukrainian crime syndicate, rooted in Cossack military culture, with a particular emphasis on personal honor and blood debt.
Taras had been the eldest son, the heir apparent, who’d died young and violently at my father’s hands. But he’d had siblings, cousins, children who would have grown up hearing stories about the Russian who’d murdered their patriarch. Whowould have spent years planning the kind of revenge that honored both their dead and their traditions.
The biblical quote made sense now.The sins of the father shall be visited upon the sons.Not just a death threat, but a promise that Mike Antonov’s children would pay for his crimes. That the blood debt would be collected from the next generation, with interest.
