Chapter 2 - The Back Bay Fortress
The brownstone on Commonwealth Avenue did not look like a home; it looked like a bank that had decided to withdraw from society. The exterior was five stories of dark, rain-streaked sandstone, the windows protected by wrought-iron grilles that had been forged in the late nineteenth century and reinforced with ballistics-grade polycarbonate liners from the inside.
The Escalade pulled into the subterranean carriage house beneath the building with a heavy, low rumble that vibrated through the floorboards of the vehicle. The iron garage door, four inches of solid steel covered in decorative oak veneer, slid shut behind them, cutting off the cold Boston sleet with the finality of a tomb door.
Milo did not get out of the car until Nikolai opened the door himself. The boy remained in the middle of the leather bench seat, his duffel bag clutched between his knees, his eyes darting across the gray concrete walls of the garage, the racks of spare tires, the three other identical black SUVs parked in perfect, military alignment.
"Out," Nikolai said, extending a hand.
Milo looked at the hand. It was broad, the back of it covered in a fine layer of dark hair, the knuckles thick and white. He didn't take it. Instead, he slid forward on his own, his sneakers making a soft hiss against the rubber floor mat as he landed on the concrete.
"The book," Nikolai said, noticing the boy had left Treasure Island on the seat.
"You can keep it," Milo said, his voice small but hard. "If I bring it inside, someone will take it. That's what happens in the big houses."
Nikolai looked at the small, battered paperback. He reached into the car, picked it up, and slid it into the interior breast pocket of his bespoke overcoat, right next to the two-million-dollar check he had never had to hand over to Mrs. Callahan. "Nobody takes anything from you in this house. If they try, I kill them. Do you understand?"
Milo blinked, his dark green eyes reflecting the harsh fluorescent glare of the garage ceiling. "That’s what the red-bearded man said about the other men. Before he left me by the car shop."
Nikolai’s jaw tightened. He didn't answer. He turned and led the boy toward the stainless-steel elevator that rose directly into the private quarters of the brownstone.
The third floor was a single expanse of dark walnut floors and minimalist furniture that looked as though it had been purchased by an interior designer who had been told to prepare a space for an executioner. There were no photographs on the walls. No silver frames on the side tables. The only art was a large, seventeenth-century oil painting above the cold fireplace depicting the siege of a fortress in Flanders—all gray smoke, dying horses, and iron-clad men whose faces were obscured by their visors.
Dr. Emil Borso was already waiting in the library. He was seventy years old, with a fringe of white hair that made him look like an aging monk, his fingers yellowed from forty years of unfiltered Turkish cigarettes and the chemicals used in the illicit clinics of South Boston. He sat on the edge of a leather sofa, his leather medical bag between his feet, a glass of Nikolai’s twenty-year-old rye whiskey untouched on the table beside him.
When the elevator doors parted and Nikolai walked out followed by the small, gap-toothed boy, Borso did not rise. He simply stopped breathing for three seconds, his old eyes widening as he looked from Milo’s face to Nikolai’s profile.
"My God," Borso whispered in Bulgarian. "Nikolai... tova e nevazmozhno. This is not possible."
"Everything is possible when you pay enough people to lie," Nikolai said. He walked to the wet bar, poured himself three fingers of vodka from a crystal decanter, and drank it in a single, sharp tilt of his head. "Do the test, Emil. I want the results before the sun comes up tomorrow."
Borso stood up, his knees creaking. He approached Milo with a gentleness that seemed entirely foreign to the cold, hard lines of the room. He knelt down so he was at eye level with the child. "Hello, little one. I am not going to hurt you. I need to take a little bit of your saliva with this cotton stick. Like a lollipop, yes? But without the sugar."
Milo looked at Nikolai.
"Do what he says," Nikolai said.
The boy opened his mouth without a word. He allowed Borso to rub the sterile swab against the inside of his cheek, his dark eyes fixed on the older man’s face with that same terrifying, unblinking intensity he had shown in the convent. He didn't flinch when Borso took a small lancet from his bag to prick his finger for a blood standard, merely watching the single drop of dark red oil form on his fingertip before the doctor pressed a piece of gauze against it.
"Good," Borso said, his voice thick with an emotion he was trying desperately to hide from his employer. "Very good boy. Nikolai, I will take this to the lab in Cambridge myself. I have a cousin who runs the night shift at the genetic registry. It will be done cleanly."
"Mikhail will drive you," Nikolai said. "And Mikhail will stay in the room while the machine runs. If anyone else looks at the screen, Mikhail will remove their eyes."
Borso nodded once, heavy and slow. He packed his instruments into the leather bag, gave Milo a small, sad smile that the boy did not return, and walked toward the elevator.
When they were alone again, Nikolai walked over to the long velvet sofa and sat down. He looked at the boy, who was still standing by the edge of the silk Persian rug, his small duffel bag still held firmly in his right hand.
"You do not ask questions," Nikolai observed.
"Questions get you hit," Milo said. "Or they make people look at you like you're stupid. I know where I am."
"Do you?"
"This is a bad place," Milo said, looking around at the dark wood and the iron grilles on the windows. "Not like the home. The home is cheap bad. This is expensive bad. Like the house in the woods where the red-bearded man took me before he gave me to the auto shop. There were guns under the sink there too."
Nikolai’s lips curved into a thin, humorless smile. It was the first time in four years his face had made that movement, and it felt like dry leather splitting. "You have good eyes, Alexei."
"My name is Milo."
"For now," Nikolai said. "For the world outside that door, your name is whatever the state says it is. But in this room, you are Alexei Vulov. You are the son of Nikolai and Elena. You are the heir to everything I have built, and everything I am going to destroy before I die."
He stood up, walked to a hidden panel in the walnut wainscoting, and pressed a small brass rivet. The wood slid back with a soft, hydraulic whir, revealing a small, steel-lined safe. From inside, Nikolai took a small, velvet-lined box and brought it back to the table.
He opened it. Inside lay a heavy, gold signet ring, its face carved with the double-headed eagle of the old Bulgarian tsars, a small, raw emerald clutched in each talon. The gold was scratched, dull from decades of grease and skin contact.
"My father gave this to me when I was twelve," Nikolai said. "He told me that a man who does not protect his own blood is not a man; he is merely a dog that eats from his master’s table. I forgot that for four years. I let them convince me that you were gone. I let them make me weak."
He picked up the ring and held it out to the boy.
Milo looked at the gold. He didn't reach for it. "It’s too big for my finger. It will fall off."
"Then you will wear it around your neck," Nikolai said. He reached into his pocket, took out a thin, unbreakable titanium chain he used for his own security keys, slid the heavy gold ring onto it, and stepped toward the child.
Milo went rigid as Nikolai leaned down, but he didn't run. Nikolai looped the chain over the boy’s head, the heavy gold pendant dropping down against the coarse gray wool of the foster sweater, sinking out of sight beneath the collar.
"That stays with you," Nikolai said. "Under your clothes. If anyone tries to take it from you, you tell Mikhail. You tell me. You do not let anyone touch it."
The boy looked down at his chest, his small hand rising to feel the hard, heavy shape of the gold through the fabric. "Is my mother really dead?"
The question was so sudden, so devoid of the typical tears of a child asking about a lost parent, that Nikolai felt the old wound in his chest open up all over again, cold and black.
"Yes," Nikolai said. "She died in the car. She died because I was not smart enough to see the trap. But they did not kill you. And that means they failed."
The house phone on the side table gave a low, musical chirp. Nikolai walked over and picked it up.
"Speak."
It was Mikhail. His voice was coming through the scrambled satellite link of the vehicle’s communication suite. "Boss. We have a problem at the Charlestown terminal. The Leone people... they didn't wait. They’ve got forty men on the pier, and they’re unloading a shipment from Rotterdam that wasn't supposed to touch the dirt until Thursday. Matteo Leone himself is there."
Nikolai’s pale blue eyes turned the color of dry ice. He looked at the boy, who had sat down on the very edge of the leather sofa, his small fingers tracing the shape of the ring beneath his sweater.
"Mikhail," Nikolai said, his voice dropping into that terrifying, rhythmic cadence. "Turn the car around. Come back to the house. Bring the heavy cases from the basement locker."
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"Boss?"
"We are going to the docks," Nikolai said. "And we are going to show Matteo Leone what happens when you steal something from a Vulov and forget to bury the father."
