Köhler (Book 9 of the Köhler Series)

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"Dad, I was going over the surveillance.... Fuck don't you have your own fucking house to fuck in?" Xerxes stopped at his office door, thinking he was about to find his father and mother. Instead, it was his sister and Takahiro making out on the couch. Both quickly moved apart like two teenagers and like he actually cared about what they were doing.

"Didn't you have just have twins some months back? If you're trying to get pregnant again, do it in your own damn house. Keep this up, and you'll catch up with Lucas and me... I thought dad and mom were in here. What happened to them?"

"Don't know. Hiro and I came here looking for you and took advantage of the situation." Kamaria shrugged. "Where is my sister-in-law? I haven't seen her in two days." She continued as Xerxes stared for a moment moving over to the side and revealing Riley with a wide smile.

"She was in Berlin following a lead on Lia, and we found something. Tanaka, take a look at this. Have you seen this tattoo before? I feel we should know it, but I'm not sure." X showed Takahiro a picture of a male arm with a strange tattoo. Like him, Hiro had never seen it; if he had, he didn't remember it. Hopefully, one of the old heads knew something about it, but it was a long shot.

"Is that one of the men that grabbed Talia?" Mar asked as Xerxes nodded with a sigh. "Stop worrying yourself over this X. Talia's alive; we all know this, and we'll find her. We need to do something and have some fun as a family. Lia would want that. Looking for her day in and day out, he getting stressful. Plus, why would she go out... way to Berlin without Dominick or one of the guards? She knew better, and it feels like she was doing some dirty shit she didn't want us to know about. I hate to say this, but we have been doing this wrong. Listening to our parents isn't helping. X, we need to find out why Talia went to Berlin and then go from there."

It was the same thing Xerxes had been trying to tell their parents for a long time, but they were stubborn and set in their ways. Everything they did was wrong, but if you asked them, they would say everything they did was right. What made it difficult was that they continued to behave as Don of the mafia and were overwriting all that X or the others had done. Although going behind their backs was the smart move, he couldn't shake the feeling that he was doing something wrong.

"Kamaria's right, Baby...."

"I know... I know. What we need to do is have dinner between one but us. Leave our parents out, find a way to figure out what Talia was up to and if our parents are hiding something they don't want us to know about. I'm with Reese on this one, and Dominick coming to be the other day makes me believe it more. The Russians are behind this. If not, this is Dominick's mess or his dad's." Xerxes spoke as someone walked into the room. For a moment, he thought it was his father but was relieved to see Leah standing there with a wide smile.

"I need you to say that I am the best fucking cousin you got in the muthafucking world!"

"Why? Did you find something you would like to share with the class?" Xerxes asked as Leah handed him a sheet of paper with a single name on it... Antonina Novikov. Nothing about the name stood out to Xerxes, and he didn't understand why in the fuck she was so happy about a name he knew nothing about.

"Do I suppose to know who that is, idiot? I never heard of this name a day in my fucking life...."

"I know, jackass! Antonina isn't someone we would know, nor would anyone in our family. She isn't real. The name is an alias... but the Nigerians. They had this little thing with the Novikov family. An alliance, if you must call it...."

"That tells me shit, Leah!" Xerxes says as she rolls her eyes.

"If you would let me finish, my dear cousin. Antonina Novikov isn't Antonina Novikov because she is your grandmother. Your dead grandmother.... Obioma Köhler was the woman they were searching for. The thing was, Alexei Novikov, her so-called husband, never knew who Obi was. He never knew that her father had given him a fake name. Everything was fake to take his mafia from underneath him, and when he found out, he tried his best to kill her. Only she ran, and since he didn't know her real name...."