The Gromovs
MEET THE GROMOVS 🖤
Welcome to the House of Gromov.
Four brothers. One family. One empire built on blood, loyalty and the understanding that nobody touches a Gromov without consequences.
Each brother will have his own story.
This one belongs to Artyom.
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ARTYOM “TYOMA” GROMOV
Age: 39
Role: Pakhan. Head of the Gromov Brotherhood.
The eldest Gromov brother and the man everyone else answers to.
Artyom is tall, broad-shouldered and quietly intimidating, with dark brown hair touched by silver at the temples, blue-grey eyes, a slightly crooked nose and a faint scar through one eyebrow. He rarely needs to raise his voice. People generally understand him the first time.
Cultured, strategic and ruthlessly competent, Tyoma enjoys expensive liquor, excellent food, beautiful hotels and having things exactly where he left them.
Unfortunately for everyone around him, this includes people.
He is arrogant, controlling, possessive, naturally dominant and accustomed to making decisions that other people live with.
With his family, however, another version exists beneath the Pakhan. He teases his brothers, indulges his grandmothers, swears freely and possesses a dry sense of humour that usually appears when somebody else is suffering.
He has been married before.
He has no intention of falling in love the second time.
That becomes inconvenient.
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RUSLAN “RUSIK” GROMOV
Age: 36
Role: Second-in-command.
If Artyom is the authority people fear, Ruslan is the man who makes them comfortable enough to forget they should be afraid.
Dark-haired, handsome and effortlessly charming, Rusik is the most openly social of the brothers. He flirts because it entertains him, talks his way into rooms other men would have to threaten their way inside, and possesses the deeply irritating ability to look relaxed while knowing considerably more than everyone around him.
He is witty, observant and dangerously intelligent.
Ruslan handles diplomacy, negotiation and many of the Brotherhood’s more delicate relationships, but nobody should confuse charm with softness. He grew up beside Artyom and survived the same world.
The smile simply makes him harder to read.
Around his brothers, he is an enthusiastic source of unsolicited opinions, inappropriate jokes and information nobody asked him to notice.
He notices anyway.
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ILYA “ILYUKHA” GROMOV
Age: 33
Occupation: Paediatric neurosurgeon specialising in emergency neurotrauma.
Ilya is the only Gromov brother without a rank in the Brotherhood.
That does not make him separate from the family.
Dark-haired, composed and quietly handsome, Ilyukha carries himself with the particular exhaustion of a man who spends his working life making decisions nobody should ever have to make about children.
He built a career entirely outside the Gromov organisation and guards that independence carefully.
Where his brothers are accustomed to controlling outcomes through money, violence or influence, Ilya works in a world where none of those things can guarantee that someone survives.
It has made him patient.
It has also made him extremely difficult to impress.
He is intelligent, observant, compassionate without being sentimental and entirely capable of standing in a room full of dangerous men and telling all three of his brothers that they are behaving like idiots.
Usually, he is correct.
They hate that.
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TIKHON “TISHA” GROMOV
Age: 30
Role: Head of Enforcement.
Tikhon is what happens when excellent manners are given terrible hobbies.
The youngest Gromov brother wears his dark hair in a severe buzz cut and carries extensive blackwork tattoos across his arms, chest and parts of his neck. He is lean, powerful and unnervingly composed, with the kind of face that might have looked merely handsome if he did not so often appear to be considering somebody’s survival.
Tisha is refined, courteous and perfectly capable of holding a polite conversation over dinner.
He is also the brother Artyom sends when conversation has stopped being useful.
Unlike men who become violent because they lose control, Tikhon rarely loses anything.
He enjoys the hunt.
He enjoys the work.
That distinction matters.
With his family, he is loyal, unexpectedly funny and considerably easier to live with than his professional reputation suggests.
Provided nobody asks where he has been.
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THE GROMOV BROTHERS
Artyom is the power.
Ruslan is the strategy.
Ilya is the one who chose another life.
Tikhon is what happens when the Brotherhood requires an answer nobody wants to hear.
They fight.
They interfere.
They insult each other recreationally.
They would also burn cities before allowing someone outside the family to destroy one of their own.
Welcome to the House of Gromov.
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BOOK ONE
THE SECOND MRS. GROMOV
Artyom Gromov × Zoya Vetrova
He has already buried one wife.
Now her younger stepsister is being asked to become the second.
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