"To be precise," Winnie said, setting down her glass, "it was a Frenchman. A senior advisor, apparently from some ancient noble family."
She curled her lip. The contempt was unmistakable.
Anthony closed the menu.
"I'll have the steak. Medium-rare, black pepper sauce."
"Same," Winnie said to the waiter. "Medium-rare."
The waiter withdrew. Soft jazz drifted from a piano somewhere at the back of the room. At the table beside them, a couple laughed in hushed tones, silver cutlery chiming gently against porcelain. It was the kind of quiet that money bought deliberately.
Anthony let the subject of Frenchmen drop. He didn't push for details. Instead he told Winnie about the training sessions at the PMC camp -- James running drills in the rain, Mike losing his temper over faulty radio equipment. Small things. Things that sounded like a completely different world from this restaurant.
Winnie laughed at the right moments and looked less tired for it.
Then the front door opened.
Enrico Pritzker walked in.
He didn't stop at the host's stand or scan the room for an open table. He came straight across the dining room to their window seat, wearing the look of a man who had been waiting to do this.
Winnie clocked him first. Something in her expression went flat.
Anthony turned.
What he noticed wasn't Enrico.
It was the two men behind him.
Both wore dark suits cut to fit, not bought off a rack. Their posture was the kind that wasn't trained into you at a finishing school. They moved through the restaurant with the relaxed economy of men who were always scanning and never appeared to be.
The one on the left was white, blond, with pale blue eyes and a pleasantly open expression that didn't quite reach those eyes. The one on the right had darker skin, Latin features, and a scar that ran from above his right brow to the top of his cheekbone -- the kind left by a blade, not shrapnel.
Soldiers, Anthony thought. Then he revised the assessment.
More professional than soldiers.
The blond man's left hand rested at his side. On his ring finger sat a silver ring shaped like a coiled snake, rubies set where the eyes should be. The stones caught the light from the window like two small embers.
Anthony recognized the design.
Gramont's personal attendants. All of them wear that ring.
So this was not a coincidence. Enrico hadn't wandered in for lunch.
He had been sent.
"Well, look who's here."
Enrico stopped beside the table and smiled down at Anthony with the deliberate leisure of someone who had rehearsed the moment.
"The Tarasov family's bastard, taking my sister out to dinner."
Winnie's voice dropped to a blade's edge. "Enrico. This is a restaurant. Lower your voice."
Enrico ignored her. His eyes stayed on Anthony, working through the usual routine -- contempt first, then the jab, then the exit line already prepared.
"If Father knew you were spending time with someone like this, his blood pressure would spike again." He put particular weight on someone like this. "You really ought to think about your family's reputation, dear sister."
Anthony did not stand. He did not look up.
His steak had just arrived. He picked up the knife and began to cut -- measured strokes, the blade drawing cleanly through the tender center. The sound it made was very quiet.
"Enrico," he said, eyes on the plate. "Walk out now and I'll forget you came in."
Enrico laughed. It was the performance of a man trying to fill a room he wasn't big enough for.
"You hear this?" He addressed no one in particular, loud enough for the nearest three tables to catch every word. "The gang's little bastard is threatening me. In a restaurant."
He spread his hands, as if appealing to the other diners.
"The Tarasovs are finished, Anthony. Your father was murdered. Your brother was murdered." He paused for the effect. "How are you still breathing? Honestly?"
Anthony placed that piece of steak in his mouth and chewed slowly.
He now understood the configuration. Gramont's men had not told Enrico who they were -- not their real allegiance, not their rank. To Enrico, they were well-connected European consultants. Useful contacts his sister's ridiculous boyfriend couldn't possibly match.
The blond man on the left had not laughed once. He stood back, watching Anthony with an appraiser's patience, and frowned fractionally at Enrico's performance -- the way a handler frowns at a dog that has started barking at the wrong thing.
The one with the scar hadn't moved at all.
Anthony set down his knife and fork.
"Winnie," he said, "would you mind giving me a moment with Enrico?"
Winnie looked from Anthony to her brother to the two men behind him. Her expression was the careful blank of someone deciding how much rope to extend.
"Enrico," she said. "That's enough. Either you leave right now, or I call the police. Or--" a beat -- "I call Grandfather and tell him exactly where that million in pocket money came from."
The change in Enrico was instant. The performance collapsed. His face cycled through astonishment, rage, and then something smaller and more honest: fear.
"You -- you investigated me?" The bravado had drained from his voice.
"I investigate anyone who could damage this family," Winnie said. "Now get out."
The blond man stepped forward before Enrico could gather himself.
"Miss Pritzker." His English was clean, with only a trace of an accent, his tone warm and unhurried. "I hope you'll forgive the intrusion. I'd very much like a word with this gentleman, if you're willing."
He was polished. His eyes shifted to something genuine-looking when he spoke to her -- the practiced openness of someone trained in rooms far more formal than this.
Winnie's expression flickered.
Anthony gave her a small nod. "I think it's worth hearing what he has to say. Let me treat you to lunch another time."
Winnie looked at the blond man. Then at the one with the scar. Then back at Anthony.
"Anthony--"
"He's polite, at least." Anthony smiled. "That already puts him ahead of Enrico."
Winnie stood. She glanced at her brother with the look she reserved for problems she had already solved and found exhausting.
Enrico grabbed her arm and steered her toward the exit, ego intact enough to make it look like his own idea. The man with the scar turned and followed them without a word.
The blond man sat down across from Anthony.
He settled into the chair with the ease of a man who had claimed rooms far more consequential than this one. His arms came to rest on the table. The snake ring caught the light deliberately, or perhaps just naturally -- it was hard to tell with men like this.
Anthony's gaze stayed level. He did not look down at the ring.
The blond man offered a slight, elegant shrug, like a card player who had just found the table more interesting than expected.
"New York is a city of remarkable opportunity," he said. "I'll admit -- I did not expect it to be you, of all people, who would take the reins of the Tarasov family."
Anthony cut another piece of steak and brought it to his mouth. "Then you haven't been paying attention. Otherwise you wouldn't be sitting here."
"You know who I am?" A small frown. "As I thought--"
"Aren't you with the Crips?" Anthony looked up. His eyes had gone sharp, slightly agitated -- a man who had just confirmed a suspicion he didn't want confirmed. "You came to negotiate with me. Then you went and dressed yourselves up as Bloods to cover your tracks."
He let the anger show at the edges, just enough to read as real.
"You want a war with the Tarasovs that badly?"
The blond man blinked. A pause. Then the quiet smile crept back -- a more genuine one this time, the smile of a man who had expected an argument and received something far more interesting.
"You are perceptive," he said. "If you already know it was us, why haven't you come looking?"
He leaned back, crossing one leg over the other.
"If Viggo were still here, I doubt he'd be thinking about lunch dates instead of recovering what he'd lost."
Anthony held his gaze for a moment -- letting the silence do the work -- then looked back down at his plate.
He noted the tell. The man had relaxed slightly, satisfied that his misdirection was holding. He believed Anthony thought this was a Crips operation, not a High Table power play.
That was the position Anthony needed him in.
He set down his cutlery.
"Do you think Tarasov has no friends?" he said, his voice going flat. "Return what you took and pay for the damage within three days. If not--" a pause -- "I don't care what rules I'd be breaking. We will come through what's left of the Crips like a wrecking ball."
His deliberate half-slip -- almost saying High Table rules before catching himself -- was calculated.
The blond man caught it. Something flickered in those pale eyes.
"Rules?" he said, pleasantly. "I wasn't aware the Tarasovs followed any."
He smiled, enjoying himself.
Anthony looked at him for one more moment, then turned back to his steak.
Good, he thought. Think I'm blind.
He now had enough to build the picture.
Gramont had found the Pritzker family for a reason. They were not the biggest name in New York's upper tier, but that was precisely the point. Their hotel and real estate portfolio touched every borough of the city -- hospitality, property management, event venues, private clubs. A network that moved people, money, and information without anyone looking too closely at the mechanism.
By slipping a proxy through Enrico's ambitions, Gramont didn't need to buy a powerful family. He needed a useful one. A foothold in New York's legitimate infrastructure, woven quietly into the city's fabric before anyone realized what was being built around them.
And Enrico was perfect for it -- hungry enough to accept help without asking questions.
Winnie was the obstacle. Her position in the family gave her oversight. So Tristan -- if that was his name -- had begun engineering her removal from the inside, cutting her authority at the board level, isolating her from the portfolio she ran.
The Crips and the Bloods had been different tools for the same hand. Street-level noise to pin the Tarasovs in place while the real work happened in boardrooms and restaurant booths.
New York is about to become his hunting ground.
Anthony understood the geometry of it now. The only way to fight Gramont was to fight him blind -- to let the man believe that Anthony was reacting to gang wars and property disputes, never seeing the French hand behind any of it.
The moment Gramont realized he'd been identified, the rules of engagement changed entirely.
For now, Anthony needed to look exactly like what the Marquis expected: a capable but limited Russian mafia boss punching above his weight, dangerous in a local alley, hopeless on a global board.
The blond man -- Tristan -- had grown bored of the silence. He straightened, smoothed his lapel, and spoke with the polished sting of someone delivering a gift.
"Anthony." He waited until Anthony looked up. "Whatever you've already lost -- you're capable of taking that back, if you've got the spine for it." A small pause for the turn. "But don't worry. Soon... you will lose far more."
Anthony's jaw tightened. His eyes went cold and direct.
He moved.
He grabbed the steak knife from the table and drove it across at the man's ribs.
The dining room fractured. A woman at the next table screamed. Chairs scraped. A glass went over.
The blond man's hand closed around Anthony's wrist like a vice -- the movement so fast and clean it had no wasted motion in it at all. The knife stopped an inch from his side.
Neither man made a sound.
In the same instant, the System fired.
[Compensatory Perception] -- Active.
[Rapid Calculation] -- Active.
The world slowed to fractions.
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