like me.
But that politeness has long since vanished.
Lately, he’s been nipping at the edges of my territory, violating years’ worth of fragile peace treaties in the process. The attack on the laundromat and drug production facility on the night of Dmitry’s murder was the most forward confrontation yet.
We paid him back in kind. Various crews of his, trussed up and kicked out of town. An equal strike, equal bodies on both sides. Fair is fair. An eye for an eye. That’s the law of my jungle, and Brahim himself had earned his men’s deaths with how he’d chosen to lash out at me.
But it didn’t seem to faze him much. A man of his caliber would recognize our retaliation for what it was—pawns taking each other out. No pieces of consequences have yet been exchanged.
The time for that might be coming soon.
One of my soldiers clears his throat and starts to say, “Do you really think—”
A small, shrill scream cuts through his sentence. It’s coming from somewhere else in the house.
“Goddammit,” I mutter. I push myself up from the seat and head downstairs.
In Nikolas’ bedroom, I find Yaroslav with his hands on his head. He’s pleading with the boy to stop crying.
I shove him out of the way and look down at Niko. “What’s wrong?” I ask the man behind me. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Yaroslav says, stuttering as he speaks. “I put him down for a nap and he was fine. Then he woke up screaming. He won’t talk to me.”
I reach out and touch Niko with my hand flat on his little back. I’m about ready to snap, but I know that won’t help things. It’s not his fault, what’s happening. He just doesn’t know how to process the grief, the trauma, the horror of all the things he witnessed, the things he lost.
I keep telling myself it’s like a fever that needs to break. One day, he’ll wake up and be a bright-eyed five-year-old boy again. He’ll outgrow this nightmare.
I just need that to happen soon.
“It’s okay,” I tell him stiffly. As I stroke his back, Nikolas begins to calm down. He’s reduced to sniffles and a hiccup every now and then. To Yaroslav, I say, “Get upstairs. Tell Timofei to continue the meeting without me.”
He nods and leaves the room.
When we’re alone, I kneel down, getting on eye level with Niko. “What’s wrong? Talk to me.”
“Bad dream,” he says, his eyes rimmed red from the tears. He clutches his teddy bear to his chest.
“You had a bad dream? What was it about?”
“Mommy and Daddy.”
It takes a few minutes to get it out of him completely, but he explains that in his dream, he was playing with his parents and they started to walk away. He ran after them, but they were too fast, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t catch them.
“Niko,” I sigh. Letting out a groan, I take a seat on the floor and pull him closer so that he stands in front of me. “I know you miss them. I know you do.”
I don’t know what I’m doing here. I was raised hard, tough. No one ever comforted me when I cried or came to caress my pain away.
But it doesn’t take a genius to see that Niko has suffered enough. He doesn’t need what I was given. He needs something else. A softer touch.
I don’t know the best way to explain to him that his parents aren’t coming back without sounding as cold-blooded as Timofei. Every way I try to phrase it, it sounds too cruel to tell a child. There’s no way to gently describe why it is that his parents will never come back for him. Why he was suddenly orphaned, left under the care of a man that frankly doesn’t have the first fucking clue how to be a parent.
I was born to lead the Bratva, not to coddle children. I am far, far out of my element. The only thing I can offer is a shoulder to cry on. He takes a seat in my lap and clings to me.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do, Niko,” I say to him. “I miss your mom and dad, too. But we are stuck together, you and me. You have to behave so I can work, and when I finish, we can play all the games you want. Do you think we can agree to something like that?”
I look down at him and it’s like staring at