Chapter 28 Anna
ANNA
The twins take forever to settle.
Mila keeps asking for her rabbit, the stuffed one sitting on her bed at the estate, and there’s nothing I can do about that tonight except tell her I’ll get it soon.
She cries for a while, quiet and exhausted, the way she cries when she’s too tired to put real energy into it.
Alexei doesn’t cry. He lies beside his sister with his arm around her and stares at the ceiling with those green eyes that see too much for a four-year-old.
“Is Papa coming?” he asks.
“Not tonight.”
“Tomorrow?”
“I don’t know yet, baby.”
He doesn’t ask again. Just pulls Mila closer and closes his eyes, and eventually they both go under, tucked into a bed that’s too small for the two of them in a room that hasn’t changed since I was a child.
I leave the door open a crack and stand in the hallway for a moment, listening to them breathe. Then I go to my old room and sit on the edge of my old bed.
The wallpaper is the same as it was when I was twelve.
Pink flowers on a cream background, faded at the corners, peeling near the window.
I picked it out myself because I thought it was pretty.
I spent years in this room dreaming about leaving, building something, becoming someone who wasn’t just Viktor Kestrel’s daughter living under Viktor Kestrel’s roof.
And here I am.
Back in the same room. Same wallpaper. Same narrow bed. Except now I have two children asleep across the hall, a marriage falling apart, and a leather portfolio from my husband’s office sitting on the nightstand beside me.
I don’t open it.
I already know what’s in there. More documents. More explanations. More of Luca laying out his reasoning in clear, organized terms, because that’s what he does. He turns everything into a presentation. A strategy. A case he’s built and wants me to accept.
The problem is, I’ve already seen the case he built three years ago, and it was airtight too.
Downstairs, my father pours whiskey. I can hear the clink of the glass from up here.
My mother’s footsteps move between the kitchen and the living room.
They’re not talking. My parents go quiet when things get bad, the two of them retreating into separate silences that exist in the same space without touching.
I lie back on the bed and stare at the ceiling.
I’m not going to sleep. I know that already.
My mind won’t stop running the same loop it’s been running since I found those files.
The three-year plan. The annotated margins.
The clinical language describing my family’s destruction is a series of phases to be executed.
My name is in a column. Status: compliant.
I was so careful. I thought I was protecting myself by not asking questions, by keeping walls up, by refusing to let him in. But I let him in anyway, slowly and without noticing, and the whole time he was sitting on documents that proved none of it was real.
The front door opens. I hear my father’s voice. A pause. Then another voice, and I’m on my feet before I’ve decided to move.
I recognize his voice through floors and walls and the whole length of this house. That’s what four months does to you.
I go to the top of the stairs and listen.
“She doesn’t want to see you,” my father says.
“I’m not leaving until she does.” Luca’s voice is steady. Not loud. The kind of steady that means he’s already decided, and the conversation is just a formality. “Viktor. Please.”
A longer pause.
Then the sound of the door opening wider, and footsteps on the old hardwood floor.
I come downstairs.
He’s standing in the middle of the living room. Still in the same clothes from earlier, and he looks like a man who has been driving in circles for hours, trying to land on the right words and still hasn’t found them. His jaw is set. His hands are at his sides.
My father stands in the hallway with his glass. Not leaving but not sitting down either.
Luca looks at me, and something crosses his face that I don’t want to name. “I need you to listen to me,” he says.
“You said that this afternoon.”
“And I’m saying it again.”
I cross my arms and wait.
He doesn’t look away from me. “I engineered your father’s debt.
I bought it from smaller creditors over three years, consolidated it, and applied pressure at every stage.
I forced this marriage to get control of Kestrel Maritime.
Every part of that was calculated, and I’m not going to stand here and pretend it wasn’t. ”
My father makes a sound from the doorway.
“But I’m not doing that anymore.” Luca takes a step forward.
“Six weeks ago, I started working with attorneys on a different structure. Partnership model. Real profit-sharing. Operational authority for your father, a leadership role for your mother. Not a takeover. A genuine merger where your family keeps a stake in what they built.”
“You told me this.”
“I’m telling you again because you didn’t believe me the first time.”
“I still don’t believe you.”
“Why not?”
I look at him. “Because the documents I found are official. Legally drafted. Dated. Everything you laid out in that plan holds up. It’s not forged, it’s not exaggerated, it’s exactly what it looks like.
Three years of you systematically dismantling my family’s business so you could walk in and take it.
” My voice stays even. I make sure of it.
“You can show me new documents with new dates and new terms, but you can’t make those old ones not exist.”
“I’m not trying to make them not exist. I’m telling you what I’m choosing now.”
“Choices made after you got caught.”
“Choices made before you found anything. The restructuring started six weeks ago. Look at the dates in that portfolio.”
“Maybe. But you still sat in that house with me every day, knowing what those files said. You let me believe we were building something while you were still holding all of that.”
He exhales slowly. “I was going to tell you. After the twins’ birthday.”
“On your timeline.”
“Yes. On my timeline. Because I was trying to get it right before I handed it to you. Because I knew that if I came to you half-finished, you’d do exactly this.” He gestures between us. “Walk away.”
“Or maybe I walked away because you earned it.”
My mother appears at the bottom of the stairs behind me. She came down quietly enough that I didn’t hear her. She looks between Luca and me, then at my father, and I can see her doing the same calculation she’s always done, weighing what’s true against what’s survivable.
“Luca.” My father sets down his glass. “You need to go.”
“Viktor, I’m asking for five more minutes.”
“You’ve had your five minutes.”
“She hasn’t answered me.”
“She doesn’t owe you an answer tonight.” My father’s voice is harder now.
The whiskey gives him edges he doesn’t always have.
“You came into this family like a wolf in a suit, and you’ve been running your plan ever since.
I’m not going to stand in my own living room and watch you try to talk my daughter back into trusting you in the same breath as admitting you destroyed us deliberately. ”
“I’m trying to fix it.”
“You can’t fix this tonight.”
Luca looks at my mother. Some silent question.
She glances at me. “Anna.” Her voice is careful. Measured. “Are you sure about this?”
I know what she’s asking. Not whether I’m sure Luca is a liar.
She already knows the answer to that. She’s asking whether I’m sure I can close this door.
Whether I’ve thought about what’s on the other side of it.
The twins. The life we’d started to have.
The version of Luca who read bedtime stories and wore flower crowns and said he wasn’t going anywhere.
I wait for something in me to crack. Some hesitation. Some small voice saying wait, or not yet, or think about this more.
It doesn’t come.
“I can’t trust him,” I say. “That’s the only answer I have.”
My mother holds my gaze for a moment, then looks away.
Luca doesn’t move right away. He’s watching me the way he watched me the night of the wedding when I walked down that aisle, like he’s cataloging something, filing it away. But there’s no calculation in it this time. It’s something else that I don’t let myself sit with.
Then he nods, once, and looks at my father. “I’ll call tomorrow about seeing the twins.”
My father says nothing.
Luca walks past me toward the door. I don’t turn to watch him go. I just stand there listening to his footsteps on the old hardwood and then the sound of the latch and then silence.
My mother puts her hand on my arm.
I don’t pull away. But I don’t say anything either.
The house settles back into itself. The same quiet it’s always had. Small and familiar and nothing like the life I’ve been living for the past four months.
I go back upstairs and check on the twins. They’re still asleep. Mila has her fist curled under her chin. Alexei’s arm is still around his sister.
I stand in their doorway for a long time.
The documents in my old room don’t lie. That’s what I told him, and it’s true. The plan he made three years ago is real, and official, and every word of it holds up. That’s not something new terms on a new paper can erase.
But my mother’s voice is still in my head.
Are you sure about this?