Until now.
“Is that why you agreed to meet me?” Ivan asked as he took a seat. “Curiosity?”
Anton’s lips curled into a small, secret smile. “Curiosity is one word for it. I’ve heard a lot of interesting rumors about your organization lately.”
Ivan was sure he had. In the last year, his group had been surrounded by nothing but rumors. The frantic cries about monsters under his yolk had calmed somewhat in these last months, but whispers surrounding his family still abounded.
As they were meant to.
“I came here for something more concrete than rumors.”
Anton hummed thoughtfully. “Your property at the docks.”
“Just so.”
Ivan had begun, ever so slowly, to rid himself of those aspects of his business that were less than legal, or at least the ones that were overtly so. The biggest hurdle by far was the control his family held over the docks. Quite a few other families relied on someone to look the other way for their less legitimate shipments,and they wouldn’t take kindly to a change of ownership that wasn’t…amenable to such things.
Someone had to be willing to take over. Someone already enmeshed in their world. And somehow, Ivan had found himself promising Sascha it would be someone who’d put a foot down when it came to shipments of people.
Enter Anton Petrov.
“It would be quite an extensive investment for us,” Anton mused, as if it was his first time considering it and not something he’d surely gone over already with his accountant. “Not all of us have your ready funds.”
“I’m well aware.”
“But the returns…” Anton rubbed at the short beard on his chin, raising his brows at Ivan. “Why are you giving it up?”
There were a hundred ways Ivan could answer. A number of ways heshouldanswer. Every one of them left him with a certain tightness in his chest, vestiges of panic left over from his father’s many years of instruction.
In the end, he went with the simplest. “I’m getting out.”
Anton’s eyes widened in surprise even as he nodded. “Good for you.”
And that was it. Ivan kept his shock to himself, but it was a battle. He’d been expecting some degree of pushback. Anton was closer to Ivan’s father in age, the younger end of an older generation.
Shouldn’t he be telling Ivan the only way out was death? Warn him that he was being cowardly and foolish and he’d end up with a bullet in his back?
Anton seemed to readsomethingon Ivan’s face. He leaned back in his chair, folding his hands over his stomach. “I’ve got a son,” he said easily. “He’s going to Stanford next year.” He cocked a brow. “It’s always a good thing when we can make a better life for ourkids, isn’t it? Give them choices we never had. That’s supposed to be the point of all this bullshit.”
Ivan took a moment to process the subtext. The idea that no one was actually required to pass on a blood-soaked inheritance to their unwilling sons. The fact that not all mobsters were like Ivan’s father.
It had never been a Mafia thing. It had always been an asshole thing.
The confirmation didn’t hurt as much as it could have. As much as it might have even a year ago.
They discussed business after that, agreeing to a meeting in the near future to sign all the necessary paperwork. It could be managed digitally, of course, but some things were still best left old school.
It was less than an hour before Ivan was back at his town car, opening the back door in a bit of a daze. Nix was leaned halfway over the partition, saying something that made Oleg laugh—a feat Ivan hadn’t been aware was possible until Nix had entered his life.
Ivan slid in beside him, tugging Nix onto his lap and burying his head in his neck.
Nix was pliant, amenable to his manhandling. “That bad?”
“No,” Ivan answered, his voice muffled against Nix’s skin. “It went very well.”
Nix hummed, the sound reverberating under Ivan’s ear against his throat. “Back to the office, then?”
“No.” Ivan raised his head. “Oleg, take us home.”
