“Italian?”

“Half.”

“My cousin wasn’t picky,” I mutter to myself.

Ravil certainly had the numbers, but in the last few days, I’ve begun to realize just how superficial those numbers are. He’d flooded his Bratva with the dregs of the underworld. Men with anger and adrenaline in spades, but not the skill to harness it.

It’s been easy to pick them off. Easy—and completely unrewarding. None of them have been able to give me what I want.

“If I were to give you orders, would you follow them?” I ask conversationally.

Despite my best efforts, I hear my father’s tone in my voice. Hard and calculated. Completely devoid of mercy. I’d seen his face when he murdered enough times to know I don’t want to become what he was.

And yet here I am… becoming exactly that.

Another pitch of thunder rolls across the sky. A few of the doomed men flinch. “I will follow your orders, sir,” one of the men pipes up from the left side of the line. “I will pledge my loyalty to you.”

The veterans hiss their disgust. I ignore them and keep my attention on the one who’d spoken. “And who am I?”

The man hesitates. He’s young, but already graying at the temples. “K-Kolya Uvarov.”

I nod. “That’s right. There was only ever one don of the Uvarov Bratva, and it was always me.”

A ripple of unease surges through the bound men. They know that it never ends well for poor bastards like them when the men with real power have to remind them of who we are.

I pick out two of the grizzled ones and amble over to them, hands clutched behind my back. As with the rest, I don’t recognize their faces. But I can tell from the looks in their eyes that they recognize mine.

“What are your names?”

The huskier one lifts his eyes to me. “What’s it to you? You’re gonna kill us anyway.”

“Am I?”

He shrugs and spits on the concrete at my feet. “Those fuckers down the end are useless. You won’t get loyalty from them even if you paid for it,” he growls, his dark eyes glinting with resignation. “As for me and my brothers here, we are true Bratva.”

“If that were true, you would never have abandoned your don,” I snarl at him. “You were foolish enough to leave in the first place.”

His jaw twitches. “What did you expect?” he demands. “You cut off our lifeblood. No working girls on the streets meant no money coming in, and when you went around cutting off hands and castrating any man who kept trying to earn a living… Well, did you expect us to be happy?”

“I expected you to follow my fucking orders.”

He pulls back his lips to reveal yellowing teeth. “I chose to follow the orders of a don with vision. A don who wasn’t a father killer.”

“Fair enough. And now—you’ll die for it.”

I make eye contact with Knox and nod once. Eleven gunshots sound out in unison. Eleven bodies hit the ground.