Chapter 32 Daria
Daria
We barely slept.
Pyotr drove us back from the warehouse while Boris stayed behind to handle the prisoners and evidence.
By the time we walked through the apartment door, the sky had gone from black to gray, and my body felt hollowed out.
I showered, changed clothes, and made tea I didn’t drink. Pyotr sat at the kitchen table with his gun on the placemat beside him, fielding calls from Tony and Alexei while I stared at the wall and waited for something I couldn’t name.
By midmorning, Boris has arrived with a laptop full of files from the raid. He and Pyotr have been bent over it since, cross-referencing shipping manifests with Tony on speakerphone. All three of them go quiet when my phone vibrates against the counter.
No name. No number. Just the word BLOCKED in white letters against black.
That word would have made me nauseous six months ago. Three months ago, it would have made me cry. One month ago, it would have sent me running to the bathroom to hyperventilate behind a locked door.
Today, something different moves through me. Something I barely recognize because it’s been buried so deep for so long that I forgot it existed.
I’m angry.
“That’s him.” Pyotr moves toward me as I pick up the phone.
“I assume so,” I agree.
“Tony, start the trace,” Boris orders into the speaker.
“Running,” Tony confirms. “I’m connected to her phone virtually. Keep him on as long as you can.”
Pyotr puts his hand on my shoulder and lowers his mouth to my ear. “You don’t have to answer. I can do it.”
But I do. Not for Tony’s trace or for Boris or for the operation or any of the tactical reasons that make this call valuable.
I have to answer because I have six years of words locked behind my teeth, and this might be the last time I ever get the chance to tell Bogdan Lebedev what I think of him.
I tap the green button and bring the phone to my ear.
“Daria.” His voice sounds nothing like the man I married. The commanding baritone that used to pin me to the floor with a single syllable is gone. What’s left is thin, reedy, and almost breathless.
He has been running since yesterday. And the fact that he doesn’t call me “darling” the way he always does only makes it all the more satisfying.
“Bogdan.” I can’t hide the smile in my voice.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
I almost laugh. “What I’ve done?”
“My warehouse. My people. Six years of work, Daria. Six years of building something from nothing, and you handed it to the Kozlovs on a fucking silver platter.” His breathing is ragged, and I hear a car engine behind him. He’s still moving. Still running. “You destroyed everything.”
The old Daria would have apologized. She would have stammered some excuse, tried to calm him down, and made herself smaller to avoid what came next. That woman lived in survival mode, where the only strategy that kept her alive was appeasement.
That woman died somewhere between the kitchen floor with Pyotr and the armored car where I sat with a phone in my hand, ready to face this man down for the first time in my life.
“Good,” I spit out.
Silence.
“I’m sorry, what did you just say to me?”
“I said good. I’m glad it’s gone. Every cent, document, and pathetic little empire you built on my name without my permission.
” I squeeze the phone tighter, and Pyotr’s hand tightens on my shoulder.
“You used me, Bogdan. You forged my signatures on accounts I never opened and laundered money through shell companies while I changed diapers and packed lunches. Then you tried to let me take the fall while you hid behind your uncle like a child.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, I do. We’ve pulled every transaction, forged signature, and fake account. It’s all documented, and every single thread traces back to you.”
When he speaks again, his voice drops into the register he used to save for the worst nights. The voice that came before the backhand and a shove into the wall. Before the hours of silent treatment designed to make me question my sanity.
“You think you’re safe because of your fucking Kozlov’s guard dog?
You think that man gives a shit about you?
” He’s trying to find the crack he can wedge himself into.
“He’s using you, Daria. The same way they all do.
You’re a means to an end, and when he’s done, he’ll toss you aside the way I should have done years ago. ”
I close my eyes. I can see him so clearly. His leg bouncing on whatever back seat he’s crammed into, one hand on the phone, the other balled into a fist against his thigh. He was always fidgety when he was losing an argument.
Before Pyotr, those words would have landed. They would have burrowed into the part of my brain that Bogdan spent six years training to believe I was worthless without him. The part that whispered, Nobody stays. Nobody chooses you. You are only as valuable as your usefulness.
But Pyotr’s hand is on my shoulder, and I can hear Kira’s voice from two nights ago, chattering about Sofia’s cat and the garden at the compound, sounding like a little girl who hasn’t been broken by the man on the other end of this call.
I haven’t been broken, either. Not by him. Not anymore.
“Is that all you’ve got?” I ask. “I’ve heard better from you, Bogdan. At least when you used to threaten me in person, you had the spine to hit me where it hurts.”
Pyotr stares at me. Boris stares at me. Even Tony sucks in a breath on the other end of the line.
“You ungrateful—”
“Ungrateful?” The word comes out of me like a bullet.
“For what? For the cracked ribs I told the ER doctor I got from falling down the stairs? For the black eye I covered with foundation before Kira’s preschool dropoff?
For the anniversary dinner, when you smiled at the waiter and held my hand across the table while the bruises on my wrist turned yellow under my sleeve?
” I’m breathing hard, but my voice doesn’t waver.
“For the three years I spent running from city to city with our daughter, sleeping on borrowed couches because the man who was supposed to protect us was the one we needed protection from?”
My voice is climbing, and I don’t care. Every word I swallowed during our marriage is clawing its way up my throat, and for once in my goddamn life, I’m letting it come.
“You want to talk about destruction? Let’s talk about it.
You destroyed our marriage the first time you put your hands on me.
You destroyed our family the night Kira watched you throw me into a bookshelf and stood there screaming while you walked away.
You destroyed any chance of being a father when you used our daughter as leverage to keep me under your thumb.
” I’m pacing the kitchen now. Pyotr tracks me with his eyes, but he doesn’t move to stop me.
“I didn’t destroy your empire, Bogdan. You did.
The second you decided to forge my name on those accounts, you signed your death warrant. I just delivered it.”
“You think this is over?” His voice is shaking now, and God help me, I revel in it.
“This isn’t over, Daria. Not by a long shot.
I will find you. I don’t care how many Kozlov soldiers you surround yourself with or how far you run or who you hide behind.
You belong to me. You have always belonged to me, and no amount of—”
“I don’t belong to you.” I say it calmly. “I never did. You just convinced me otherwise because that’s the only way a man like you knows how to keep a woman. Not through love or respect. Through fear.”
“Daria—”
“I’m not afraid of you anymore.”
He’s panting on the other end, and behind the sound is the faint mumble of another voice, probably one of the men who fled the warehouse beside him. A year ago, this silence would have terrified me.
But this isn’t his silence. It’s mine.
“You should be,” he whispers.
“No. I shouldn’t. Because here’s what you don’t understand.
Yesterday, your people sat in your warehouse cleaning their guns and counting your money while you told yourself you were untouchable.
This morning, they’re in zip-ties, giving up every secret you ever trusted them with.
Your uncle cut you loose. Your accounts are frozen.
You’re driving somewhere with two men and whatever cash you grabbed on the way out, and you’re calling me because I’m the only person left on earth who you assumed would be scared enough to listen. ”
I stop pacing and plant my feet. “I’m not listening anymore.”
“Daria, I swear to God—”
“Swear all you want. Threaten all you want. It doesn’t change anything.
You’re alone, Bogdan. Maybe for the first time in your life.
” I pull the phone from my ear for a second.
Pyotr nods once. Keep going. “You called because you needed to hear my voice break. To know you still had power. But my voice isn’t breaking.
Can you hear that? Can you hear how steady I am right now? ”
Nothing. Just breathing.
“Run,” I tell him. “Run as far and as fast as you can. Because the men who took your warehouse apart this morning are coming for you. This time, they won’t leave empty-handed.”
“You’ll regret this,” he snaps.
“I regret a lot of things, Bogdan. Marrying you tops the list. But this conversation is the first thing I’ve done in six years that I won’t regret.”
I pull the phone from my ear, hit the end button, and hurl it across the room with a scream.
When I walk over to where it landed, my reflection stares back at me from the black glass, and the woman looking back is someone I don’t recognize.
I’m no longer the terrified girl who used to answer Bogdan’s calls in the bathroom with the faucet running so Kira wouldn’t hear her cry. I’m someone else. Someone new.
My hands are shaking now. For a moment, the old panic comes to life in my stomach, the instinct to curl inward and make myself small and wait for the aftermath.
But the shaking isn’t from fear this time. I know the difference because my body has spent three years teaching me the vocabulary of terror, and this isn’t it.
This is rage. Pure and clean and mine.
“Tony?” Boris’ voice cuts through the kitchen.
“Still running. Got a partial. Give me another minute.” Keys click on his end, rapid and steady. Then: “Cell tower ping puts him north of Vyborg. He’s headed toward the border.”
“Finnish border,” Boris grumbles, and he runs one hand across the back of his neck before glancing at Pyotr.
Pyotr is already pulling his phone from his pocket. “I need to call Dmitri.”
He heads for the hallway, and Boris follows, leaving me alone in the kitchen with my trembling hands and a dead phone and six years of words still ringing in my ears.
I said them. Every single one. The words I swallowed through the slaps and the silence and the middle-of-the-night phone calls that used to leave me curled on the bathroom floor. I said them out loud, to his face, while he listened.
And I didn’t apologize.
I never thought I’d say any of it.
The tears come then. Not from sadness or fear, but from something so enormous I don’t have a name for it. Relief, maybe. Or grief for the years I spent carrying those words like stones in my pockets, too afraid to set them down in case the sound gave me away.
And so, I breathe out and let myself cry just long enough to feel the weight leave my body.
Then I wipe my face with the back of my hand, pick up my phone, and walk toward the hallway where Pyotr’s voice is already rising.
Bogdan is running toward Finland, and we’re not done yet.