1. Sofiya #2
He looks over, spots nobody in silver who could possibly be with my aunt, and almost smiles. “You’re lying.”
“Of course. That doesn’t make me wrong to leave.”
He dips his head, accepting defeat for the evening. “I’ll try again.”
“That’s your worst quality.”
“It’s in my top five.”
I leave him with that and cross the ballroom at an unhurried pace. No rushing. No sharp turns. No look over the shoulder. If you live in a family like mine, you learn young that panic is most useful to the person causing it.
I pass my aunt near the floral arrangements and kiss the air by her cheek. She smells like white roses and old money. “You look beautiful,” she says automatically, then adds without changing her smile, “Your uncle wants everyone staying another hour.”
“Why?”
Her eyes remain on the room. “Because he said so.”
That’s answer enough.
I drift toward the hall, pausing once to take a canapé from a tray so anyone watching sees nothing but a bored niece getting fresh air from her own family’s event.
A pair of junior political wives block the corridor for a second, speaking in low, urgent voices about school admissions.
I slide past them, heels quiet on the marble, and keep going until the music fades behind me.
One of the guards near the study straightens when he sees me. He’s been with the family for years, long enough to remember me in braces and school uniforms. “Miss Leonidova.”
“Has my uncle gone into the office wing?”
His face gives me nothing. “Not this way.”
“Then Maks did.”
He says nothing.
I give him a pleasant little smile that means I know he won’t answer and we both know why. “Thank you. You’ve been no help at all.”
He almost smiles back, which is as far as men like him go.
I take the back stairs instead of the main corridor. My father taught me the house that way. Never use the obvious route when you’re trying to know something before someone wants you to.
The stairs bring me down behind the library and past the old administrative hall, where the public beauty of the Leonidov residence gives way to the actual skeleton.
Offices. Storage. Locked archive rooms.
Private terminals. Secure filing.
My badge still gets me through the import wing.
The office is dark when I enter. For one second, I just stand there with my hand on the door and take it in.
This used to be my father’s domain, though not the room, exactly. His real work lived in people and systems and habits.
Still, his shadow stays here more than anywhere else in the house.
Grief doesn’t hit me cleanly anymore. It arrives in muscle memory, in the way my hand reaches for the lamp he preferred before I remember he’s been dead a year and a half.
I set my clutch on the side table, strip off one diamond bracelet that clicks too loudly against the desk, and wake the terminal.
If there’s trouble in freight, it’ll leave a footprint. Maybe not in the main files. Maybe not in anything obvious. But panic spreads sloppily through timing, and tonight I only need one thread to pull.
I start with the container series attached to the protected shipment I heard mentioned last week in passing, a reference so brief, most people would’ve missed it.
Then I widen.
Declarations. Routing sheets. Customs hold flags. Insurance annotations. Warehouse staging. Cross-border transfer timing.
Three screens in, my pulse changes.
A container group marked Closed appears again under a secondary transit code that should never touch it. Not once, but twice.
One declaration lists machine components.
The weight says otherwise. A refrigerated split shipment out of Finland lines up a little too neatly with a Baltic billing adjustment from twelve days earlier.
Money moves through an account I know belongs to one of the outer companies, then vanishes under internal reconciliation tags that make no sense.
I sit back, then lean in again. Someone built a private corridor inside the legitimate one.
I open payment layering and follow the trail, slow and careful now. One false invoice.
Two renamed vendor references.
An internal authorization path that should never have cleared without higher approval.
Then a number I know by heart because my father made me memorize every branch structure worth fearing.
Maks.
My mouth goes dry.
I dig deeper, pulling archived route files and old dispute references, and the ugliness builds. This is off-book movement through Baltic and Finnish lines, hidden inside normal freight flow, feeding money somewhere the main house isn’t meant to see.
Then I see Maks’s name tied to the payments, and everything clicks into place.
He’s using hidden freight routes through Baltic and Finnish lines to move money and protected cargo outside the official Leonidov books.
That means he’s building something private, something he controls without my uncle or the rest of the house fully seeing it.
One of the buried payment references connects back to the old intermediary case, the murder that helped turn Leonidov and Reznikov tension into a blood feud.
That means Maks tied his off-book operation to the same old wound both families have been living inside for years.
He’s building a war structure under the family’s nose, and if this breaks open, it won’t stay a money problem. It’ll turn into blood.
I immediately suspect that my father knew.
My throat itches as I reach into my bag, pull out the slim personal drive I keep for work emergencies, and start copying what I can without tripping alerts.
My heart pounds harder with every second the transfer bar crawls across the screen.
Come on.
Faster.
The progress hits eighty-three percent when I hear the office door open behind me.
I pull the drive free so quickly that the port scrapes my knuckle. I pocket it, click two windows closed, and turn in my chair.
Maks steps inside with his jacket off and his expression easy, as if he just happened to circle back for a nightcap and a chat.
His eyes flick once to the screen, then to me.
“Sofiya,” he says, closing the door behind him. “Why are you digging through archived route files tied to a shipment that was already closed?”