Heavy Crown by Sophie Lark
Yelena
When Sebastian drops me off at my house, it’s fully dark outside. Rodion Abdulov opens the door for me. He’s silent, as always. Rodion had his tongue cut out by his former Bratva boss for reasons unknown. My brother says that Abdulov used to be jovial and sarcastic—until he made a joke at the wrong time, and his boss punished him so he could never speak again. But my brother can’t be trusted when it comes to letting truth get in the way of a good story.
I certainly can’t imagine Rodion ever making a joke. I’ve never seen him smile, and in executing my father’s orders, he’s not just obedient—he’s zealous. I think he enjoys cruelty.
Tonight his silence seems particularly judgmental. I always feel like I’m in trouble when I come home, no matter what I was doing while I was out.
My father is working in his office, a tumbler of whiskey sitting at his right hand. He’s puffing on one of those fat cream cigars that smell like vanilla and coffee. It’s not an unpleasant scent, but it sets me on edge, as does every familiar element of this office: the heavy leather chairs, the dark ebony desk, and the portrait of Generalissimo Alexander Suvorov on the wall. Suvorov is my father’s hero—he never lost a single major battle in the whole of his military career. Even Napoleon admired him.
My father’s pale eyes peer at me through a haze of blue smoke.
“How was your date?” he asks.
“Fine,” I say shortly.
“Anything of note?”
“No.” I shake my head. “We just went to a street fair.”
Just a street fair. Just the most enjoyable afternoon of my life.
I felt so free and happy, walking through all that color and noise, seeing all those strange and unusual things I’d never seen before.
I’m used to having big men walk beside me as my guard. But with Sebastian, it was different—he wasn’t there next to me. He was there with me. Showing me any pretty or intriguing thing I missed, explaining anything I didn’t understand. Entertaining me with jokes and conversation.
I misjudged Sebastian. I assumed he’d be a spoiled American mafioso—arrogant and presumptuous, but ultimately soft. The more time I spend with him, the more I see that Sebastian isn’t arrogant or presumptuous at all. Actually, he’s perceptive and quite respectful.
And I don’t think he’s soft, either. Iov wasn’t holding back when they fought—Sebastian beat the shit out of him. Plus, the way he bid for me at the auction . . . he wasn’t doing it to show off. He saw what he wanted, and he went after it.
Of course, I’m not going to say any of this to my father.
I can feel him studying me, his eyes drilling into my face as if he can see through my skull to the thoughts swirling around within.
“You will continue to see him,” he orders.
That’s what I want to do anyway. But not because my father commands it. Not under his observation, as part of his plan.
I don’t know what his plan is, exactly. He doesn’t share details with me. In fact, he delights in withholding them. I’m not permitted in the room while he has his strategy sessions with his top lieutenants and my brother.
I know more about his business than he thinks, though. I’m smart, and I’m observant. I don’t skulk around spying like Rodion does, but I hear things all the same.
Adrian tells me things, too. Or at least, he used to. The closer my father pulls him into the business, the more Adrian drifts away from me. Sometimes things are just as they always were between us. But sometimes they’re not.
Whatever Papa has in store for the Gallos, it isn’t good.
I’ve seen his expression when he talks about the Italian and Irish mafia. He’s furious at how they’ve insulted the Bratva. How they’ve stolen our territory and crushed our businesses. How they’ve killed our men.
Fergus Griffin shot Kolya Kristoff at the Harris Theater, then used his political connections to walk away without a backward glance. That might have been forgiven—after all, Kristoff was an arrogant shit who thought he could take on the two most powerful families in the city, without properly securing his alliance with the Polish Mafia.
But then the Gallos stole the Winter Diamond.
That’s an insult that can never be forgotten.
That stone has an almost mythic quality for the Bratva. All sorts of rumors and legends center around it. It’s believed to bring luck to anyone who possesses it. Once lost, however, all that luck turns to ruin.
I don’t believe in curses. But it is true that shortly after the stone was stolen from Tsar Nicholas II, his entire family was executed by revolutionaries.
From then on, the diamond passed from owner to owner. From thief to collector, from collector to oligarch. Finally it was recovered by the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
It’s a near-flawless blue diamond, fifty carats, almost priceless—though of course, when people want to sell something, they’ll always agree on some price.
The Bratva knew that Kristoff had the stone. He stole it from the museum. He pretended he didn’t, but you can’t keep something like that a secret. He used one of his lieutenants in the robbery, without telling him what they were stealing. The timing of the theft was obvious, and the lieutenant kept his eyes open constantly, looking for where Kristoff had hidden it in his house. He glimpsed it once in Kristoff’s personal safe, as Kristoff was putting away a deposit of cash. Probably Kristoff knew it had been seen, because when he died shortly thereafter, and his lieutenants cleared out his safe, the diamond was nowhere to be found.
It took several more months to trace where he’d put it. Like a fool, he’d stored it with an outsider: Raymond Page, the man who operated the Alliance Bank in Chicago. He’d put it in his vault, which was supposed to be impenetrable. But of course, every vault has its weakness. In this case, that weakness was Nero Gallo.
It was my father who discovered the truth. He invited Page out onto an evening cruise on Lake Michigan. He acted as if he wanted to resume the Bratva’s business relationship with the Alliance Bank, now that he was replacing Kristoff as head of the Bratva.
I was there that night, along with my brother—maybe to put Page at ease. To make it look like a social event.
Page was not at ease. He’d brought two bodyguards, both selected for size and intimidation, and both armed.
As we all enjoyed a dinner of poached halibut and fine, dry Riesling, Raymond Page began to relax. More importantly, his guards relaxed, too.
Rodion offered them cigarettes laced with opium. The drug took effect quickly. It wasn’t enough to kill them outright, but it slowed them down to the point that it was easy for Rodion and Iov to put bullets through their foreheads before they could pull their guns.
Their bodies dropped to the deck, and Page dropped his fork on his plate, his béchamel sauce splashing on my bare arm. I was seated right next to him, a position that had thoroughly annoyed me as it allowed him to peer down the front of my dress all night long.
Now he wasn’t looking anywhere but at my father, his face frozen in horror.
He started to sputter and beg, trying to explain himself.
“It wasn’t my fault! I didn’t give them any information, they broke into the vault! They stole the stone! I had nothing to do with it, I didn’t—”
My father stayed perfectly calm, and even kept eating his halibut in measured bites.
“Who stole it?” he asked.
“It was Nero Gallo!” Page cried. “I’m sure of it. He came to the vault a week before. He was looking at the layout, the cameras . . .”
“Where is the stone now?”
“I don’t know!” Page moaned. “I’ve been looking and listening. I have money out in a hundred places, bribes if anyone can tell me where it went . . .”
My father ignored this, since obviously Page’s efforts were yielding nothing.
“How did Nero Gallo find out about the stone?” he demanded.
That was where Raymond Page hesitated. He didn’t want to tell that particular piece of information. Maybe that’s when my father decided to torture him. Or maybe he planned to do that either way.
We had sailed far out on the lake by that point. Far away from shore or any other boats. If Page had been paying attention, he would have noticed that we weren’t following the usual cruise route.
The water was rough that far from shore. It rocked the boat hard, making my wine slosh over the rim of my glass. I hadn’t touched the wine, or my food. That was another thing Page might have noticed, had he not been so distracted by my chest instead.
Rodion tied Page to a chair. He stripped off his shoes and socks. He got a set of bolt cutters with wicked, curved blades, and he opened them around Page’s big toe.
“Noooo!” Page howled. “Please! I’ll tell you everything!”
“Yes. You will,” my father said, taking another bite of his fish.
He nodded to Rodion, and Rodion squeezed the handles of the bolt-cutters with a vicious snap. Page’s toe rolled away across the wooden deck.
In the end, Page confessed everything—that he’d told his daughter about the diamond, because she had a fascination with gemstones. That he’d even let her hold it once, after swearing her to secrecy. That Nero Gallo had seduced said daughter and convinced her to bring him down to the vault. That she had likely told him about the diamond concealed within.
“Please don’t hurt her,” he mumbled, through lips pale with shock and blood loss. He had lost every one of his toes by that point, and some of his fingers. “It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t know . . . she didn’t know anything . . .”
I was forced to watch the whole thing, and Adrian, too. He sat on the other side of me, holding my hand beneath the linen tablecloth.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. But I couldn’t do any of that with my father so close. I kept my eyes fixed on my plate, wishing I could stop my ears from hearing Page’s howls of pain.
Certain that he’d learned every piece of information Page knew, my father nodded to Rodion. Rodion put a bullet in the back of the banker’s head. Then he finished removing the rest of Page’s fingers, and pulled his teeth too, so it would be harder to identify the body if it were ever found. He stripped off Page’s clothes, as well as the bodyguards’. Then he weighed down the bodies and dumped them over the railing into the lake.
The deckhands started mopping the blood off the floor. My father bought the boat and hired the staff himself. That’s another thing Page might have noticed—that every one of the staff had Bratva tattoos on their arms or necks, beneath their crisp white polo shirts.
But most people aren’t very observant. Even in our world, where a momentary lapse can get you killed.
As the boat turned around to head back to shore, my stomach lurched. I had to stand up and walk to the railing, where I leaned over and vomited into the water.
“What’s wrong, malen’kiy?” my father asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just a little seasick.”
“Drink your wine,” he said. “That will help.”
I sat down again, picking up the slender stem of my glass between shaking fingers. When I lifted the glass to my lips, I saw a tiny droplet of blood suspended in the wine, dark as garnet against the amber-colored Riesling. My father was watching, so I had to drink it down.
These are all the things I’m remembering while my father watches me with his ice-chip eyes. Eyes that look very like Suvorov’s portrait hanging on the wall.
My father was in the KGB, in the OP Directorate—the division tasked with combatting organized crime. After being blocked for promotion by a rival, my father quit the agency and used what he learned to rise through the ranks of the Bratva instead. Within three years he was one of the biggest bosses in Moscow. He ordered his former antagonist to be murdered, along with his family.
Papa has a military mind. He’s a strategist. He makes plans and he executes them—ruthlessly and flawlessly. He’s no flashy gangster like Kristoff, egotistical and easily outwitted.
“You will keep seeing Sebastian Gallo,” he repeats. “But don’t give yourself to him. You have to keep him hungry. Leave him wanting.”
“Yes, father.” I nod.
My virginity is just one more tool in my father’s arsenal—something he’ll give away at a time of his choosing, to the man of his choice.
I won’t have any say in the matter.
* * *
