Chapter 18 Daria
Daria
The laptop screen glows with numbers that turn my stomach.
“That’s four-point-two million in the past eighteen months alone.” Tony’s voice crackles through the secure video call. “All routed through shell companies registered in your name, then funneled to organizations on Yevgeny’s blacklist.”
I stare at the spreadsheet he’s shared with us, which displays rows and rows of transactions I never authorized or knew about, and never would have agreed to even if Bogdan had put a gun to my head.
“How is that possible?” I ask. “Wouldn’t Yevgeny’s people have flagged this?”
“Bogdan was careful,” Tony explains. “He used legitimate businesses as intermediaries. Import companies, art dealers, even a few restaurants. Everything looks like normal commerce on paper. You have to dig through three or four layers before you see where the money ends up.”
Pyotr leans forward in his chair with his shoulder brushing mine. “Can you trace the endpoints? We need to prove the final recipients are hostile to Lebedev interests.”
“Already working on it. I should have confirmation within forty-eight hours.” Tony pauses, and I hear him typing.
“The bigger issue is documentation. We need something that proves Bogdan orchestrated this independently. Right now, a good lawyer could argue Daria was the mastermind, and Bogdan was just the muscle.”
My throat tightens. “That’s insane. I didn’t even know these accounts existed until—”
“I know,” Tony assures me. “I’m not saying it’s true, I’m saying it’s what the opposition will argue. We need evidence that puts Bogdan in the driver’s seat. Communications, witnesses… something concrete.”
Pyotr glances at me. “You lived with him for years. You know how he operates. Is there anything we can use? Patterns, habits, people he trusts?”
I close my eyes and force myself back into the memories I’ve spent years trying to forget. The apartment in Moscow. The late-night phone calls Bogdan took in his study with the door locked. The men who came and went at odd hours, always greeted with backslaps and vodka.
“He keeps records,” I offer. “Physical ones. He doesn’t trust digital storage for anything sensitive.”
Tony perks up. “What kind of records?”
“Ledgers, mostly. They’re all handwritten.
He used to joke that computers could be hacked, but a safe couldn’t talk.
” I open my eyes. “He had one in our apartment, hidden behind a false panel in his closet. I found it once when I was looking for my passport. He’d taken it, of course.
Didn’t want me to have any way to leave. ”
“Do you know what was in the ledgers?”
“Names. Dates. Amounts. I only saw a few pages before he caught me, but it looked like a record of every transaction he’d made outside his uncle’s knowledge.
” I swallow hard. “He beat me for finding it. Told me if I ever mentioned it to anyone, he’d make sure I disappeared, and Kira would grow up thinking I abandoned her. ”
Pyotr’s hand finds my knee under the table. He doesn’t say anything, just applies steady pressure, grounding me.
“If those ledgers still exist,” Tony begins, “and if we can get our hands on them, that’s the kind of evidence we need. Handwritten records in Bogdan’s writing, proving he was running operations that his uncle never sanctioned.”
“He wouldn’t keep them in the old apartment,” I tell them. “He’s too paranoid for that. After I left, he would have moved everything to a more secure location.”
“Any idea where?”
I chew on my bottom lip and think. Bogdan was a creature of habit in ways he never realized. He thought he was unpredictable, but I learned to read him the way prey learns to read predators.
“His mother’s dacha,” I suggest. “Outside Vyborg. She died six years ago, but he kept the property. He used to go there when he needed to think, or when he was planning something big. He called it his ‘retreat,’ but it was really just a place where no one could watch him.”
Tony starts typing again. “I can pull property records and satellite imagery. If he’s using it as a base of operations, we might be able to track patterns.”
“I thought of something last night. When Bogdan’s about to make a major move, he gets generous. Sends gifts, makes promises, acts like the charming man I thought I married. It’s how he lulls people into complacency before he strikes.”
“Has he done that recently?” Pyotr asks.
“No. He’s been all threats and pressure, which means either he’s too desperate to play the long game, or…” I trail off as the realization hits me.
“Or what?”
“Or he’s already made his move, and we just haven’t seen it.”
The call continues for another hour. Tony walks us through the financial web Bogdan has constructed, and I fill in gaps where I can.
I provide names of associates I remember from dinner parties and businesses Bogdan mentioned in passing.
The way he categorized people as either useful or disposable, with no middle ground.
By the time we disconnect, my head is pounding, and my eyes ache from staring at the screen. But underneath the exhaustion, something else comes to life.
For years, my knowledge of Bogdan was just another way he controlled me. I knew his moods, triggers, and cruelties, because survival demanded it. That knowledge felt like chains, binding me to a man I hated.
Now, it’s becoming my weapon.
I helped build something today. Not much, maybe, but more than I’ve contributed to anything useful in years. And for the first time since I married Bogdan Lebedev, I feel like I’m fighting back instead of just running.
***
Kira goes to bed at eight, worn out from a day of dinosaur battles and the chicken soup I made for dinner. She insisted Pyotr read her bedtime story—something about a rabbit who outsmarts a fox—and I listened from the hallway as his deep voice softened into something so gentle.
Now the apartment is quiet, and the balcony doors are cracked open to let in the cool night air. I’m curled up on one of the plastic chairs with a blanket around my shoulders, watching the lights of St. Petersburg glitter in the distance.
Pyotr joins me with two cups of tea. He hands me one and settles into the chair beside mine.
“She made me promise to do the voices again tomorrow.” He chuckles. “Apparently, the fox needs to sound meaner.”
“You’re spoiling her.”
“She’s easy to spoil.” He sips his tea and stares out at the city. “When I was her age, I would have killed for someone to read to me like that.”
The admission gets my attention. It’s the most personal thing he’s offered without me having to pry.
“No one read to you?”
“My mother did, before she got sick. After that…” He shrugs. “My father wasn’t the type.”
I wrap my hands around the warm cup. The burn gives me something to focus on besides the fear that’s been gnawing at me all day.
“My uncle filled that gap,” he continues. “He lived in a village about two hours outside Moscow, in the middle of nowhere. After my mother died, my father sent me to stay with him every summer because he didn’t know what else to do with me.”
“How old were you?”
“Eight, the first time. My father was military, so he was always deployed somewhere. He loved me in his way, but he had no idea how to raise a kid on his own.” Pyotr takes another sip of his tea.
“Uncle Vasily was different. He taught me to track deer, to clean a rifle, to sit still in the forest for hours without making a sound. He said the woods would teach me everything I needed to know about life if I just learned to listen.”
“Do you still see him?”
“He died when I was seventeen. Heart attack. One day he was there, and the next… he wasn’t. I enlisted the year after. Didn’t know what else to do with myself.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.” He glances at me. “What about you? Your parents?”
The question doesn’t surprise me. We’ve been circling each other for days, trading small pieces of ourselves. It was only a matter of time before we got to the bigger ones.
“They died when I was twelve,” I tell him. “Car accident. Black ice on the highway outside Moscow.”
“Both of them?”
“Both of them. Just like you, one minute I had a family, and the next, I was an orphan being passed around among relatives who didn’t want me.
The official report said my father lost control of the car, but my sister Polina never believed it.
She used to say our father could drive through anything, that he’d grown up on roads worse than that.
She was convinced there was more to the story. ”
“Was there?”
“I don’t know. I was twelve. I just wanted my parents back.
I didn’t have the energy to question how I lost them.
Polina did, though. She dug through police reports, talked to witnesses, and drove our relatives crazy with questions.
Eventually, they told her to stop, that she was only hurting herself.
She dropped it after that. At least, I think she did. ”
“You think?”
“Polina keeps things close. Always has.” I stare at the steam rising from my cup. “She was sixteen when it happened. Old enough to take care of herself, apparently, but not old enough to take care of me.”
“Where is she now?”
“Moscow. She’s a trauma surgeon. Threw herself into school after our parents died and never came back up for air. We used to be close. She was my best friend when we were kids. But after the accident, she just… shut down. Built walls so high I couldn’t climb them.”
“Do you talk to her?”
“I’ve been calling her for months, but she barely answers. The last time I tried, her voicemail had changed. It used to be her voice. You know, one of those personalized outgoing messages. Now, it’s just the automated one. Like she erased herself.”
Saying it out loud makes my stomach ache. Polina is the only family I have left besides Kira, and sometimes, it feels like I’ve already lost her.
“Maybe she’s going through something,” Pyotr offers.
“Maybe. But she won’t let me in to find out.” I shake my head. “That’s the thing about the Kozlov family. We’re very good at protecting ourselves. We’re terrible at letting anyone help.”
“You let me help.”
“You didn’t give me much choice.”
“True.” He sets his tea on the small table between us. “You could have kept fighting me. Kept lying. You didn’t.”
“I was tired of carrying it alone.”
“I know the feeling.”
We sit in silence for a while, watching the city lights and listening to the distant sounds of traffic. It’s strange how comfortable quiet can feel with the right person. Silence was always a threat with Bogdan. A void waiting to be filled with criticism or cruelty.
With Pyotr, it feels like rest.
“This doesn’t fix anything,” I say after a moment. “Talking about our dead parents and broken families. It doesn’t change what we’re up against.”
“No, it doesn’t. But it helps.” He turns to look at me, and something in his face makes my breath catch.
“Because now I know you. Not just the woman Bogdan tried to destroy. The one who survived him. The one who’s still here, fighting for her daughter, even when everything inside her is screaming to run. ”
“You see all that in me?”
“I see what’s there.”
“My grandmother used to say that the people who survive the worst things are the ones who learn to carry them instead of being carried by them. I never understood what she meant until Kira was born. Suddenly, I had a reason to carry it all instead of drowning in it. I’m starting to think I don’t have to carry it alone.
That’s terrifying, by the way. Trusting someone after everything. … It scares me more than Bogdan does.”
Pyotr rises from his chair and comes closer, stopping a breath away. His eyes drop to my mouth for half a second before he catches himself.
“Good,” he says, his voice low. “That means it matters.”
I watch his hands flex at his sides like he’s fighting an urge. The muscle in his neck jumps. He doesn’t kiss me or reach for me. He just stands there, letting me decide what happens next.
I hold his gaze for a long moment. Then I reach up and press my palm flat against his chest, right over his heart. I feel it beating under my hand, faster than I expected.
His throat works once.
Then he steps back, slowly and deliberately. His breath changes, just barely. But I notice.
“Don’t make me regret this,” I tell him.
His hand covers mine. He drags his thumb slowly across my knuckles. “I won’t.”
It’s not a promise of forever or a declaration of love. It’s just two people standing on a cold balcony in St. Petersburg, deciding to bet on each other when the odds say they shouldn’t.
I’ve made worse bets.