Chapter 30 Anna
ANNA
On the fourth day, Mila asks if Papa is sad.
We’re in my mother’s kitchen. Mila is sitting on the counter the way I used to when I was her age, swinging her legs while my mother makes tea, and the question comes out of nowhere, the way her questions always do, slipped between two completely unrelated thoughts like it’s been sitting in her chest waiting for the right gap.
My mother’s hand stills on the kettle.
“I think he misses you,” I tell her.
“Then why doesn’t he come?”
“It’s complicated.”
“You always say that.” She picks up a biscuit from the plate beside her and examines it. “Alexei says Papa probably cried.”
“Alexei said that?”
“Last night. When we were in bed. He said big people cry too, they just do it where no one can see.”
My mother sets the kettle down and turns to look at me. I don’t meet her eyes.
“Can we call him?” Mila asks.
“Soon.”
“You said that yesterday.”
“I know.”
She eats her biscuit and says nothing else, and I stand there in my mother’s kitchen feeling like the worst person in any room I walk into.
Luca has called every day. Morning and evening, both times, without fail. I let every call ring out. He doesn’t leave voicemails, which is somehow worse than if he did. Just the missed call notifications stacking up on my screen like a quiet, patient argument I can’t win by ignoring it.
My father doesn’t talk about it. He moves through the house carefully, refilling his glass and avoiding rooms where I might be.
He’s ashamed, I think. Of what he did and what it caused, and the fact that his grandchildren are sleeping in a childhood bedroom, asking questions nobody can answer cleanly.
He looks older than he did four months ago. Smaller.
My mother is different. She doesn’t push, but she’s present.
She makes tea and lets me sit with it without filling the silence, and sometimes I catch her watching me with an expression I recognize because I wear it myself when I’m watching the twins and worrying about something I don’t know how to fix.
On the fifth day, she sits across from me at the kitchen table after the twins go to bed and says, “You’re not sleeping.”
“I’m sleeping.”
“Anna.”
“A few hours.”
She wraps both hands around her mug. “What are you thinking about?”
“Everything.” I look at the table. “The documents. The timeline. How long he was planning all of it while I was just living my life thinking I was keeping my family safe.”
“And?”
“And the restructuring documents. The dates.” I exhale. “They’re real, Mama. I know they’re real. I looked at them the night he came here, and the dates are genuine, and the legal language is exactly what it should be.”
“So he was telling the truth.”
“About that. Yes.”
“But you still can’t trust him.”
“How do I? How do I look at a man who spent three years engineering the destruction of our family and trust that the version of him I got in the last few months is the real one? How do I know that’s not also engineered?”
My mother is quiet for a moment. “You don’t. Not yet.” She sets down her mug. “But staying in this house indefinitely isn’t an answer either.”
“I know that.”
“Those children need their routine. Their rooms. Their father.”
“I know that too.”
“Then what are you waiting for?”
I don’t have an answer. So I go to bed, and I stare at the faded flower wallpaper, and I don’t sleep.
On the sixth day, I go through my father’s study.
Not looking for anything specific. Just restless, moving through the house while the twins nap and my parents are out, running my hands along the spines of old files and ledgers the way I used to as a child when I wanted to feel close to a version of my father I understood.
Back when Kestrel Maritime was just a name on the side of shipping containers and not the thing that sold me into marriage.
The files go back decades. Route maps. Client contracts. Correspondence with port authorities across six countries. My grandfather’s handwriting on folders from the early years was neat and slanted. My father’s handwriting taking over somewhere in the middle, broader strokes, less patience.
I pull out a folder from four years ago and flip through it. Partnership inquiries from companies I don’t recognize. Some declined. Some in negotiation. One name appears twice: Sorokin Freight. I’ve never heard of them.
I put the folder back. But the name sits with me.
That evening, I call one of my father’s former logistics managers. A man named Gennady, who worked for Kestrel Maritime for fifteen years before the company started bleeding money and the staff began leaving. He always liked me. Used to bring me chocolate from the ports when I was small.
He answers on the third ring and sounds genuinely happy to hear my voice. We talk for a few minutes about how the twins are, whether I’ve seen the city’s new waterfront development, and then I ask him, casually, if he has ever heard of Sorokin Freight.
The pause before he answers is just slightly too long.
“Where did you hear that name?” he asks.
“Old files in my father’s study. A partnership inquiry that didn’t go anywhere.”
“It didn’t go anywhere because your father had sense enough to say no.
” Another pause. “Anna, that company is a front. Has been for years. They operate out of the eastern district, mostly transport contracts on the surface, but the people behind it have fingers in things your father wanted nothing to do with.”
“What kind of things?”
“The type that involves the Malikov network.”
I know that name. Everyone in this city who’s ever been adjacent to organized money knows that name.
The Malikovs are one of three major Bratva factions operating in the region.
They’ve been in conflict with Luca’s network for years, low-grade and ongoing, the kind of territorial tension that flares and settles and flares again.
“They approached my father four years ago?” I ask.
“Tried to. He turned them down. They didn’t love that.” Gennady’s voice drops slightly. “Why are you asking about this? Are you still mixed up in—”
“I’m just going through old files. Clearing my head.” I keep my voice light. “Thank you, Gennady.”
I hang up and sit with it.
The next afternoon, my father gets a call from an old associate named Borin.
They used to share a trade contact in Riga, back when the Baltic routes were profitable.
My father takes the call in the garden, and I watch through the kitchen window without meaning to, and something about the way he’s standing makes me stay.
His shoulders drop halfway through the call. He turns away from the house. His free hand comes up and presses against the back of his neck.
When he comes inside, his face is wrong.
“Papa.”
“It’s nothing. Old business.”
“What kind of old business?”
“Anna, drop it.”
He walks past me toward the living room. I follow.
“What did Borin say?”
He stops. Doesn’t turn around. “He said there’s been movement. In the eastern networks. Someone putting pressure on contacts connected to Luca’s operation.”
“What kind of pressure?”
“The kind that involves identifying vulnerabilities.” He turns now and looks at me, and the shame in his face has been replaced by something I haven’t seen there in a long time. Fear. “He said they’ve been watching this house.”
The air in the room goes very still.
“For how long?” I ask.
“He didn’t know exactly. Weeks, maybe.”
“Who is watching it?”
He shakes his head. But he doesn’t have to say the name. I already have it.
Sorokin Freight. The Malikov network. The rival faction that’s been in low-grade conflict with Luca’s operation for years is now watching a house with no gates, no perimeter, no security, where Luca Volkov’s wife and children are sleeping.
Because of me. Because I left.
My father looks at me with those hollowed-out eyes. “Anna. What do we do?”
I look back at him, and I think about Luca’s missed calls stacking up on my phone. I think about the twins asleep upstairs. I think about Gennady’s voice going careful at the sound of a name from an old folder.
And I make a decision that I will spend a long time regretting.
“I’ll handle it,” I say.