We’d ruled our corner of London with a brutal reputation once upon a time, Yannick’s appetite for power and blood had waned once he’d got over what the family had done to him. When the anger simmered down, I saw it, how he pretended to be the man everyone thought he was. For others to detect the slightest chink in his armour spelled danger, it would have opened up the entire business to exploitation. There were plenty cutthroat people who’d have loved to have seen our heads on pikes, then step in to take what our fathers had started and what we had painstakingly built since. Yannick may have been ready to walk a long time ago, I wasn’t, and I needed him until I could gather my own affiliations and stand without him at my side.
Stronger together, even if it meant together differently. Would he go for it? Some kind of association until I could put my hand on my heart and tell him I no longer needed him.
“I want the divorce - quiet and discreet. You can continue to build your empire, Irina, but it’ll be without me. It’s time for me to leave the bloody past behind, there’s no reason to be shackled to ghosts any longer.”
“You’re right, this was never for you,” I heaved out a sigh. Yannick had already decided, and no one was going to change his mind, especially not me.
“Cut your shit, I saw through you a long time ago and you don’t need to pretend. I won’t put up with it anymore. I swear, if you wrong foot me at any turn, I promise, I won’t hesitate to…” Yannick turned his head away, as if he couldn’t quite say the words I knew were on the tip of his tongue. He’d never threatened me before, not like this, had never needed to. He was telling me I wasn’t getting to stand in his way, not this time, not over this.
“We can discuss this another time,” I conceded, tired, and wanting these last few hours with Yannick by my side. I was going soft in my old age, but I was also about to lose the most prominent man in my life, loathed or not, and I wasn’t ready to relinquish the bed.
“All right. Lie down and get some sleep. It’s late, or early, whatever.”
Jostling down into a comfortable spot, I rolled onto my side to face him. Yan switched off the bedroom lamp and for the first time in fifteen years, he slung his arm across my waist and pulled me closer to him.
“Don’t make me regret this, I’ve got far too many of those already.”
Yannick
The following week was a mind fuck of contracts, ledgers, meetings and closed-door engagements. Irina reluctantly indulged me, and we hauled every single venture - illegal or otherwise - out onto the massive dining room table and poured through everything. If the police had raided us, they’d have found enough to put us all away for more than a few life sentences, the shredder worked overtime getting rid of anything incriminating which should have been destroyed long ago.
I was taking stock, something I’d never thought to do before, and putting all our business cards on the table so I could see exactly what was what, seemed important. It wasn’t quite dividing the assets like a normal divorce because a lot of the shit was under LLC’s or some affiliate that belonged to Lev, Irina’s grandfather. The more we laid out on the table, the more irritated I became. Once all was said and done, there appeared to be precious little belonging to either myself or Irina. We’d seriously overlooked the hold Lev had on the businesses we ran until everything was laid out in stark black and white clarity for us to see.
By day four, I was tired of it all, looking at all the effort I’d put in for not very much in the way of assets. Yeah, I had a shitload of money tucked away here and there and I had my club. But that was it. All the property belonged to Lev - the Yard, the loan business, the drug clubs, the accounts. Everything, including the house we lived in, where Irina had grown up, she didn’t even own her parent’s home. Why had we never questioned it?
Pushing a pile of paperwork off the end of the dining table, I thumped my head down on the wood a couple of times. If I was pissed, Irina had to be positively seething.
“You all right there, Yan?”
No, I really fucking wasn’t. Whilst lamenting my blinkered vision for days on end, it had never occurred to me I’d never asked my men if they were set, if they had nest eggs squirrelled away. Not a single thing laid out on this table belonged to them either and that must have been a kick in the teeth after everything they’d done for me and Irina. I didn’t even know what their plans would be when I gave Lev and Irina the middle finger for good because this was all we knew, all we had, and hardly any of it was ours.
“How much money you got stashed, Andrey?” Discussing personal finances was not something we did, so his eyebrow movement was a perfectly valid response.
“Why?”
“Humour me, huh?”
“Ball park or exact?”
“Whatever, I don’t need the details.”
“Roughly four mill, more with what I’ve got wrapped up in investments. Got my pad, bought and paid for, and the house with Sandy.” He
