Chapter 32 Anna
ANNA
Alexei wants pancakes.
Not the ones my mother makes, which are thin and slightly sweet and perfectly fine. He wants the thick ones. The ones Luca taught him to make on Sunday mornings, standing on his step stool at the estate kitchen with his tongue pressed between his teeth in concentration.
He doesn’t say this out loud. He just sits at my mother’s kitchen table and looks at the plate in front of him with an expression that is entirely his father’s, that particular brand of polite disappointment that doesn’t complain but makes its feelings known.
Mila eats three pancakes without comment.
She’s been more settled the past few days, mostly because my mother has been bribing her with the garden.
They go out every morning and come back with dirt on their knees and handfuls of whatever is growing, and my mother lets her arrange it all in jam jars on the windowsill like a proper florist.
I watch them from across the table, drink my coffee, and think about the meeting I have arranged for this afternoon.
Four days.
That’s how long I’ve been sitting with this plan, turning it over, checking it from every angle the way you check a structure before you trust your weight to it.
Four days of watching my father move through this house like a man waiting for something to fall on him.
Four days of my mother pretending she isn’t watching the street from the front window.
Four days of the twins asking questions I can’t answer, and Luca’s calls going to voicemail, and the knowledge that something is circling this house that none of us have the tools to stop.
I can stop it.
That’s what I keep coming back to. I am Luca Volkov’s wife.
Legally, publicly, on every document that matters.
Whatever the Malikov network wants from this surveillance, whatever leverage they think they’re building, my position is the one thing they can’t ignore.
I can walk into a room and put that name on the table and negotiate something that keeps my family safe without dragging Luca back into my life to do it for me.
I’ve gone over the contact chain carefully. Gennady pointed me to Sorokin Freight. Sorokin Freight has a logistics office in the eastern district that anyone can walk into with a legitimate inquiry. I made a call through a routing that can’t be traced back to Luca’s network.
Asked for a meeting with whoever handles partnership discussions. The callback came yesterday from a man who called himself Renat, voice flat and businesslike, who gave me a time and an address without asking too many questions.
The address is a warehouse complex near the river. Busy during the day. Legitimate freight traffic in and out. Nothing that should feel dangerous in the middle of the afternoon.
I’ve told myself this approximately forty times in four days.
“Mama.” Mila is standing beside my chair with a jam jar full of marigolds. “Can we put these on the table?”
“Of course.”
She sets them down with great ceremony, adjusting the jar until it’s centered exactly, then steps back to assess her work. Alexei looks at the flowers and then at his half-eaten pancakes and then out the window with the expression of a child who has decided the morning is not going his way.
“We could call Papa,” he says. To the window, not to me.
“I’m seeing him tomorrow for your visit.”
“That’s not the same.”
“I know.”
He turns from the window and looks at me directly. “Are you still angry at him?”
I open my mouth. Close it.
“A little,” I say.
“Why?”
“Because he did something that hurt our family.”
“Did he say sorry?”
“He’s trying to.”
Alexei considers this with the gravity of a small person who takes apologies very seriously. “Then maybe you should stop being angry.”
“It’s more complicated than that, baby.”
“You always say that.”
Mila climbs back into her chair and reaches for the last pancake. “Grandma says when people say it’s complicated, it means they don’t want to explain.”
My mother, appearing in the doorway with a dish towel, has the grace to look slightly guilty.
“Grandma says a lot of things,” I tell them.
After breakfast, I help my mother with the dishes while the twins take over the living room with the building blocks my father found in the back of a closet.
Old ones, wooden, that used to be mine. Alexei is building something architectural.
Mila is building something she describes as a castle but which looks more like a very tall pile.
My mother washes. I dry. We don’t talk for a while.
“You seem like you’ve made a decision about something,” she says eventually.
“I’m always making decisions.”
“This one is different. You’ve had that face for days.”
“What face?”
“The one you had when you were sixteen and decided to take my car without asking. Very calm. Very certain.” She hands me a mug. “Very about to do something I won’t like.”
“I’m going to run some errands this afternoon. I need you to watch the twins.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “What kind of errands?”
“The kind that need doing.”
“Anna.”
“Mama, please.” I set down the mug. “I know what I’m doing. I just need a few hours.”
She looks at me the way she’s been looking at me my entire life, that particular combination of knowing and resignation that means she sees through me completely and has decided to let me make my own mistakes anyway. “Be careful.”
“I will.”
At two o’clock, I tell the twins I’ll be back before dinner. Mila barely looks up from her castle. Alexei watches me put on my coat with those careful eyes and says, “You look like Papa when he goes to work.”
“How so?”
“Like you’re thinking about something serious.”
“I’ll be back before dinner,” I say again. “Be good for Grandma.”
The drive to the eastern district takes twenty minutes.
I keep the radio off and run through what I’m going to say.
I am Anna Volkov. My husband’s operation and the Malikov network have a shared interest in stable territory.
Whatever surveillance has been conducted on my family’s home is creating unnecessary tension that benefits no one.
I want to discuss terms that allow both sides to move forward without escalation.
Clean. Reasonable. Businesslike.
Luca would laugh at me if he knew. Or he’d be furious. Probably both. But Luca isn’t here, and the whole point is that I stopped waiting for Luca to fix things that I can fix myself.
The warehouse complex sits at the end of a road that runs alongside the river.
During the day, it looks exactly like what it’s supposed to be.
Trucks moving in and out, workers in coveralls, the smell of diesel and river water.
I park on the street and walk to the entrance Renat specified.
A side door set into the main building, away from the loading bays.
I push it open and step inside.
The space beyond is dim. Crates stacked along one wall. A table with chairs in the center. Three men standing, not sitting, and none of them looks like anyone who handles partnership discussions.
Renat is there. I recognize the face from the description I’d been given. He’s younger than I expected, thirties, with the particular stillness of someone who is very comfortable in rooms that other people are afraid of.
He smiles when he sees me. “Mrs. Volkov,” he says. “We’ve been hoping you’d come to us.”
Behind me, the door clicks shut.
I turn. A fourth man is standing against it. Not blocking it casually. Blocking it deliberately.
The smile on Renat’s face doesn’t reach anywhere near his eyes.
And I understand, with a clarity that arrives too late to be useful, that I didn’t receive a callback and a time and an address because they wanted to negotiate.
I received these things because I had handed them exactly what they needed.
A way in.