Filthy [The Boss]

 

Chapter 1

The Boss

 

 

Belgrade, Serbia.

Six years ago.

 

Russia had the Bratva.

Italy had la Cosa Nostra.

However, the Balkans belonged to Poskok—ruler of the Serbian Mafia.

Most people couldn't point out the Balkans on a map. It was a knot of mountains and old blood at the bottom of Europe—Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Romania all pressed together like a fist that had never fully unclenched.

Where the Orthodox East met the Ottoman South.

Where empires had planted their flags and left their graves.

Centuries of bloodied occupation, partition, and war had carved this region into pieces so many times that its borders looked like a wound that kept reopening.

And it had produced men who understood, at a cellular level, that power belonged to whoever was willing to brutally take it.

Serbia sat at the center of it. A country that had survived the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, two World Wars, a NATO bombing campaign, and the slow administrative violence of international sanctions.

The Black Karst Brotherhood ran it all—named for the limestone caves that cut through the Balkan mountains. Smugglers had used those caves for centuries. Now they moved other things through them.

The Black Karst had expanded into twelve nations, absorbed three rival organizations in a decade, and earned a net worth that certain governments found inconvenient to calculate.

Interpol had a file on them that was four hundred pages thick. The file had not grown in five years because people stopped talking when they understood what talking cost.

And the man who led the Black Karst was Poskok. Named after the most venomous snake in Europe. Elders claimed that if a poskok looked at you, the venom had already entered your blood.

His real name was Lazar Vukić.

And Lazar was exactly that—a man who struck without warning and was three steps away before you understood what had entered your blood.

At only 38, he had built an empire on the bones of men who had underestimated him and ruled twelve nations with no mercy.

Still. . .he slept in a cold, empty bed.

Power, he had learned, was the loneliest currency in existence. It required two things—absolute power and absolute solitude.

He had mastered the first.

The second was mastering him.

The bigger the empire, the smaller the list of people who could survive knowing him completely.

Even more. . .trust was the only luxury Lazar could not afford.

He had tried it once, with a woman who smelled like jasmine and knew how to look at him like he was worth looking at. She had sold that access to his enemies for a seat at a table she never got to sit at.

Three in the morning, Lazar stepped into his dark office, shut the door, and turned on the desk lamp. His night security men waited in the hallway and stood guard.

Outside, Belgrade hummed its ugly beautiful hum—sirens, bass from the club two streets over, the particular silence of men standing in the cold pretending they weren't there.

Lazar knew that silence.

He'd built it.

He loosened his tie. Then he pulled it off entirely and dropped it on the desk beside the untouched bottle of rakija and the gold-framed photograph of his traitorous wife that he'd turned face-down three years ago and hadn't turned back. There was a mark on the lower corner of the gold frame—his partial thumbprint, dark and oxidized, pressed into the metal so long it had become part of it.

Still. . .he couldn’t throw the picture away just yet.

Lazar put up his guns next.

The first was a Zastava M57—Yugoslav military iron, worn to a deep gunmetal that had stopped being blue a decade ago. He'd taken it off a general who didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut.

The grips had been replaced with carved human bone etched in the shape of a poskok mid-strike. The snake's body coiled up toward the trigger guard.

He named her Majka— Mother.

The second gun was custom—a Glock 19 rebuilt from the frame up, finished in a matte black so dark it ate light, the slide engraved with Cyrillic, Bog čuva zmiju—God protects the serpent.

Gold-inlaid.

This one he named Ikona—the Icon.

Once both guns were placed on his desk, he rolled his shoulders.

This day was too long.

Lazar unbuttoned his shirt, took it off, and draped it over the arm of his favorite leather chair. His muscles ached from today’s battle.

Finally, he sat down.

Now there was just the dark, the lamp, and the body that had survived every terrible thing he'd asked it to survive.

People always noticed his hands first—then the ink. The Orthodox cross climbing his throat, the Cyrillic script wrapping his left forearm, the black thorns coiling up his right shoulder and across the broad shelf of his chest. Then, finally, his sheer size registered—6'6" of a body that had been used as a weapon so many times it had forgotten what else it was for.

Sighing, Lazar looked around him.

The icon of Saint Michael watched from the wall above the desk, sword raised, wings spread. Lazar wondered sometimes if saints understood men like him.

They probably don’t.

Lazar was thirty-eight years old and he hadn't touched a woman since his wife, Katarina.

He didn't think about her every hour anymore. That felt like progress and also like a betrayal he couldn't fully examine. The grief had changed texture over three years—less sharp, more structural, the way scar tissue changed the body it grew on.

Plus, it wasn't the grief that kept him awake. It was the other thing.

She chose your enemies over your son and you. Never forget that.

His hand—large enough to close around a man's throat without strain—curled into a fist against the wood.

She chose the Albanians. She gave them three months of routes and names. She gave them our son’s school name. She was ready to get rid of us.  

He'd built this mansion for Katarina and filled it with furs, diamonds, and every luxury a woman could dream of and several she hadn't thought to want.

His wife had worn some of the furs twice, accepted the diamonds without once saying thank you, looked at everything he laid at her feet, and decided it wasn't enough.

In the end, she had never wanted his love or money.

She'd wanted his throne.

Lazar thought back to five years ago.

 

He had known about her ultimate betrayal for six days, before he decided to kill her. Six days of watching her move through the mansion. Six days of sleeping beside her and eating across from her, yet saying nothing.

On the seventh morning he waited for their thirteen-year-old son to go to school. Once Miloš left with the driver, he found her in the kitchen.

She stood by the marble counter in a silk gown, dark hair loose, humming under her breath, smelling like jasmine.

He crossed the kitchen without sound and set the knife on the counter beside her.

She didn't notice as he pressed his mouth to her neck. “Good morning, my love.”

“Good morning, my darling husband.” She leaned in.

“I want you.” He lifted her up onto the counter, slammed her back against the marble, and ripped the silk gown open at the front, exposing her breasts.

The silk tore away, and her full breasts spilled out. Those pink nipples hardened instantly in the chill kitchen air. The faint blue veins that traced under her pale skin were rivers on a map he'd conquered long ago.

“Oh, darling. What is this?” Her breasts heaved with her ragged breaths.

His blood surged hotter.

Groaning, he pulled out his cock and forced himself inside her in one brutal thrust.

“Oh!” She cried out, half pain, half reflex, her pussy clenched around him as he pinned her wrists above her head with one massive hand.

“Yes, take this cock, my dirty whore.”

She grabbed the counter edge, and her thighs shook as the silk gown bunched at her waist.

“Feel how I own you.”

“Oh!”

“Take it deep.” He fucked her like he was trying to break something inside her—deep, punishing strokes that made the counter rattle and her breath come in ragged, broken moans.

The marble counter groaned against the wall.

"Lazar—" His name died in her throat. Her nails raked his back, drawing fresh lines over old scars, but he didn’t flinch.

He only drove harder, grinding against her until she arched in a spasm that looked like pleasure but felt like surrender—her inner walls clenching desperately around him, milking him as if begging for mercy.

His cock jerked violently inside her, once, twice, then erupted in thick, hot pulses that filled her completely, spilling out around his shaft in sticky rivulets that dripped down her thighs.

The release hit him like venom uncoiling—sharp, inevitable, burning through his veins as he growled low in his throat, claiming her one last time.

Then, he stayed right there with her thighs wrapped around him, her breath still ragged, her gown ruined, the kitchen smelling of jasmine, sex, and everything he was about to end.

He let himself have that.

Ten seconds of her weight in his hands.

Ten seconds of the version of his life where none of the mathematics existed.

Then he stepped back and shoved his cock into his pants.

She licked her lips and smiled. “I love you.”

He zipped his pants up. "No, Katarina. You love my power."

She let out a nervous chuckle. “What do you mean, my darling husband?”

“I know about the information you gave to Kastrioti and that he promised to kill me, and let you rule by his side.”

“What is this, Lazar? You have no proof that I acted against you. Who has told you these lies? Who has dirtied my name—”

“Kastrioti’s head is now in a pool of blood in the torture room below. Shall I take you to his men and him to jog your memory?”

Her bottom lip quivered. “No.”

“Kastrioti didn’t even have to confirm it. I’d already heard the phone calls.” He leaned his head to the side. "Did you really think I would not know?”

The warmth left her face all at once.

"I knew about your little friendship with Kastrioti before you decided to trust him.”

She widened her eyes.

“I let it develop because I needed to know how far you would go." He tilted his head to the side. “The phone Kastrioti gave you. The one you kept in the lining of your black fur coat, I bugged it before you ever made the first call."

Her chin came up, yet her bottom lip quivered.

"There is no corner of this planet where you had a private conversation with anyone, Katarina. Not in this mansion here. Not in our summer house in the Maldives. Not in the hotel in Vienna where you met him in February. Not once."

Her eyes found the knife he'd set on the counter before he touched her—he'd wondered when she'd notice—and her hand moved fast.

He caught her wrist. "I watched you decide to trust him. I watched you decide to want more than you had. I watched every step of it and said nothing because a man in my position cannot afford to act on emotion."

His jaw tightened once. "I waited until it was mathematics."

She trembled.

He picked up the knife with his other hand. "You told him you loved him. Last Tuesday. 9:47 in the morning. You were sitting in the piano room."

One tear spilled from her eye.

He watched her face. "I was in the next room, listening."

The blade remained suspended between them.

"No one hands a person a throne, Katarina." He leaned in until his face was four inches from hers. "One must take it."

Her pupils widened. "You only say that because I am a woman—”

“No. I say it because you are weak—”

“You stupid man! You cannot kill me. I am the mother of your only son. Your heir. Your—”

He drove the knife into her chest just below her left breast, angling up under the ribs so it would pierce lung and heart in one motion.

The blade made a soft, wet pop as it went in.

Her mouth flew open in a silent scream. Her eyes bulged, and a thin thread of blood bubbled at the corner of her lips.

Her free hand came up and pressed flat against his chest, over his heart, the way she used to fall asleep. As if some part of her body had forgotten what the rest of it knew.

Blood bloomed through the silk. Dark, immediate, spreading in a shape that looked almost like a flower.

She looked at him.

He looked back.

"Lazar, p-please—"

He held the knife steady and watched all the life leave her eyes. Her jasmine scent reached him through the iron smell.

He hated that.

Her fingers slackened against his chest. Her body followed.

As she slid down the counter, her gown hiked up, legs splayed obscenely, a final trickle of his semen mixed with her blood ran down her inner thigh and dripped onto the imported Italian marble.

Later, in the mirror, he found her blood dried across his cheekbone.

He stood there a long time before he washed it off.

 

Back in the office, Lazar blinked.

Why do I still think about this?

He ran his fingers through his hair.

No. Not again. I know the best way to make this stop.