Secrets Collide (Bluegrass Brothers)

the fact he was a psychopath. While he himself stood only five-feet-eight inches or so and probably weighed half of what Sergei did, there was no way Sergei would ever cross him. While he may not look physically intimidating, he was quite possibly the most powerful man on the planet.
    He could overthrow a dictator, a president, or even an entire royal family with a flick of his manicured hand. With one press of the button on his phone, a country could be bombed or a satellite shot down. Of course, people had to pay heavily for him to issue those orders.
    At any given time, he was orchestrating arms deals with rebels, pirates, and warlords while running a highly profitable sex-trafficking ring. His men ran the black market for guns, weapons, and stolen goods. He had just sold The Portrait of a Young Man by Raphael on the black market for $100,000,000 to a private art collector in France. The portrait, rumored to be a self-portrait of Raphael dating back to the sixteenth century, had been stolen from Poland by the Nazis during World War II. While the Polish ministry had been on a wild goose chase for decades all through Europe trying to locate it, he had broken into an old bank vault in Austria and had stolen it for himself.
    He had more money than many nations and more people of power in his pocket than all of the lobbyists in D.C. He had done it all by himself, too. The idea started when he was just a child, sitting in his room thinking, while his mother worked .
    His mother had been a prostitute. He realized it by the time he was five. Men had come in and out of their small row house in New Jersey day after day. She was beautiful and they gave her things. They even gave him things. Later his mother had told him her body was marketable and she was going to use that to her advantage. She had her eyes set on the governor of New Jersey and a better life for her family.
    She wasn’t shy about the fact that his father was her high school sweetheart who had died in Vietnam along with so many other men. She later told him that her heart had died that day and the only way to put food on the table was to use her body. She started off small, with city council members and influential merchants. They received free groceries and a bus pass that month.
    By the end of the year, she was the mistress to the governor and her son was starting first grade in the best private school in the state. But, she hadn’t stopped there. She moved on to senators and eventually the vice president of the United States. All the while, the boy had listened and learned. These men had real power and he learned by listening to them talk on the phone when they visited his mother. Sometimes they held meetings at his mother’s new condo, and he’d be able to stealthily observe, study, and discover the secrets of the game. For his eighth birthday, his mother gave him a camera and he had realized a new way to get the power he had been dreaming of.
    But soon it was over. By the time he finished his freshman year of high school, his mother had grown older and had been tossed aside. At the end of that year, the principal had approached him in the private school’s library and told him he wouldn't be able to continue in the fall. His scholarship was no longer being funded.
    His classmates had laughed as he ran out of the school that day. They all knew who he was and why he was there. But now that he no longer had the governor’s protection, he was fair game. They had cursed him and called his mother names as he packed up his locker.
    His mother had saved money for his college, which he thought he could use to finish high school. But before the next school year started, she became depressed. She felt weak and helpless. Her youth and beauty had been her identity and now it was gone. She slowly turned to drugs and by August, the money was gone and his mother was lost to heroin.
    He had begged the school for a scholarship, but they said no. They had admitted him as a favor in the first place, and now no money would be coming his way. It was then he decided to take the power away from those who had hurt his mother. He had hurried home and had opened the small suitcase he’d hidden under his bed. Opening it up, he’d stared at the pictures he had taken over the years. The first had been his most powerful—his mother and the vice president having sex.
    They hadn’t even known he was there. He was supposed to have been at chess practice but had skipped it. He