The Bratva Possession

Her brother has been dead seventy-two hours when Katya Ivanova buys a knockoff service uniform from a woman who smells of cheap vodka and cheaper regret. Alexei was three blocks from their mother's apartment when somebody put a bullet through his temple and left him in a drainage ditch off the Obvodny Canal. Katya identified the body at the morgue. So she pulls the polyester on in the alley behind the Kholod Nightclub, tapes a bug to her ribs, and lets herself into a second-floor office with a hotel key card she filed down with her mother's nail file. She has watched the club for three nights. She knows the shift change, the bouncer rotations, the stair with the broken third step. She is still in the room when two men walk in and begin discussing a loose end. *"The journalist. The one who's been asking questions about the Ivanova boy."* Mikhail Volkov became underboss when his father died two weeks ago, and he has his own reason to care about a dead reporter's brother. Alexei's notes mention a ledger: his father's record of dates, amounts and names, the one that proves Ivan Petrov skimmed the obshchak and paid off the coroner, the police and the dock foreman. Misha has been searching for it for six weeks. What he has instead is a dead father, no proof, and a five-year-old son Ivan has already made a point of standing close to in a public park. So one of them has a recorder and no protection, and the other has protection and no case. Neither trusts the other, and both say so out loud. *"You still trust me?" "No," she said. "But I'm in."* What that partnership costs runs through a safe at the Neva Trans warehouse, a will signed six months before a murder, a finger broken to get a ring off a hand, a mother on an operating table across the city, and a church on Bolshoy Prospekt where a woman who knows Ivan's weaknesses might still pick up the phone. It also runs through the thing Katya keeps circling and cannot yet prove: what was really on Alexei's phone in that warehouse, and who was standing where when the recording went black. This is a Bratva romance set in a rain-smeared St. Petersburg of canals, back corridors and bad fluorescents — about a grieving journalist who investigates instead of mourning, a man trying to hold a family together without becoming his father, and an alliance neither of them can afford to call anything else. The romance is closed-door.