Chapter 41 Luca
LUCA
Renat’s network takes eleven days to dismantle completely.
Not because it’s complicated. Because I want it done properly.
Every contact, every front company, every man who took a payment from the Malikov faction in the past three years identified and dealt with individually.
No loose ends. No one left standing who might decide six months from now that finishing what Renat started is worth the risk.
Maxim runs the eastern district operation himself.
I didn’t ask him to. He came to me on the third day with a map and a list of names and said he wanted to handle it personally, and the way he said it told me this wasn’t about proving something to me.
It was about the twins. About Mila spending hours on a warehouse floor and Alexei walking out of that building with his fists clenched and his jaw set and his four-year-old face doing things no four-year-old face should have to do.
Maxim took that personally.
Good.
We work through the list together over ten days. Some conversations. Some negotiations that go the way negotiations go when one party has nothing to offer and knows it. By the eleventh day, Pavel brings me the final confirmation, and I read it, sign off on it, and close the file.
On the twelfth day, my phone rings. A man named Ivanov, who runs a mid-level operation out of the northern district and has been carefully neutral in every conflict I’ve had for the past decade. He doesn’t call me. We have an understanding that doesn’t require phone calls.
He’s calling now.
“I heard about the Malikov situation,” he says.
“Did you?”
“I heard it was thorough.”
“It was.”
A pause. “I wanted to personally convey that no one in my network had any involvement.”
“I know that, Ivanov.”
“Good. I just wanted it said directly.”
“Appreciated.”
He hangs up.
Three more calls come in over the following two days. Different men, different operations, same essential message delivered in different words. I take each call and say very little and let the silence do the work. By the end of the week, the silence has said everything that needs saying.
No one touches my family.
That’s the message. It doesn’t need to be repeated.
Maxim comes to dinner on the Friday after the last call.
He sits across from the twins and lets Mila explain at length why the flower arrangement on the table is superior to last week’s flower arrangement and listens with the expression of a man genuinely trying to understand the difference between marigolds and dahlias.
Alexei waits until Mila finishes and then asks Maxim if he wants to see the new section of the train track he’s been building in the playroom.
“After dinner,” Maxim tells him.
“You said that last time, and then you had to leave.”
“I’m not leaving tonight.”
Alexei studies him. “Promise?”
“Promise.”
After dinner, Maxim spends forty minutes on the playroom floor with the train set while I stand in the doorway and watch.
He’s not performing interest. He’s actually interested, asking real questions, letting Alexei correct him when he gets the engineering logic wrong, which happens several times and which Alexei handles with the patience of someone who has accepted that not everyone immediately understands track gradients.
When the twins are in bed, Maxim finds me in my study.
He sits down and looks at me for a moment. “You’re different.”
“People keep saying that.”
“Because it keeps being true.” He leans back in his chair. “You’re not going to lose yourself in this, are you? The family. The domesticity. You’re still going to be able to run the operation.”
“I’ve been running the operation every day for the past two weeks. Simultaneously.”
“I know. I just needed to hear you say it.”
“The operation funds this family. This family gives the operation a reason beyond profit.” I look at him. “Those things don’t cancel each other out. They hold each other up.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then he nods once. “Alright.”
“Alright?”
“Alright, I believe you.”
He leaves.
I sit in the study for a while after he’s gone. Review the week’s shipping reports. Sign off on the two contracts Pavel has left on my desk. Routine work that feels different now than it did a year ago, not lighter exactly, but more grounded. Like it has somewhere to go beyond itself.
At ten o’clock I go upstairs.
The twins are asleep. I check both rooms the way I do every night. Mila’s rabbit is in place. Alexei’s train car on the nightstand. Doors open four inches exactly.
Anna is in our bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed in the dim light, still awake, hands folded in her lap. She looks up when I walk in.
“You said tonight,” she says.
I close the door. Cross the room and stand in front of her.
“Marry me,” I say. “Properly. Whatever that looks like to you. Whoever you want there, whatever you want to say. No contracts. No arrangements. No transactions.” I look at her. “Just you deciding you want this. Me. Them. All of it.”
She looks up at me for a long moment.
Outside the room, the house is quiet. My children are sleeping. Maxim drove home an hour ago. Viktor is three weeks from being cleared to return to work. The Malikov network is eleven days gone.
“Yes,” Anna says.
Just that. No conditions. No qualifications. Just yes.
I take her face in my hands and kiss her, and she reaches up and holds my wrists and kisses me back, and outside the window, the estate grounds are dark and quiet and entirely ours.
In the morning, Mila finds us at breakfast and announces that she wants to wear purple to the wedding.
We haven’t told them yet.
Anna looks at me across the kitchen table. I look back at her.
“How did you know there was going to be a wedding?” Anna asks her.
Mila picks up a piece of toast and shrugs with the confidence of a child who considers herself very well informed. “Alexei heard you say yes last night.”
Alexei, across the table, does not look up from his cereal. “I wasn’t listening on purpose.”
“Then what were you doing?”
“Getting water.” He lines up his spoon beside his bowl with precise spacing. “The door wasn’t fully closed.”
Anna puts her hand over her mouth. Her shoulders are shaking.
I reach across the table and steal a piece of her toast. “Purple it is,” I tell Mila.
She beams.
And just like that, without ceremony or announcement, our family has its first wedding to plan.