3. Sofiya
SOFIYA
I collect what I need with both hands working and no wasted motion.
My real passport.
A forged international passport.
Cash in euros, dollars, and rubles.
Two old keys with no labels.
A folded note in my father’s handwriting with three names, one phone number, and one line I used to roll my eyes at when I was younger.
I pick up my original phone, the backup phone.
Charger. Medication. Flashlight. Battery pack. Papers. The list in my head keeps ticking over while I pull drawers, check envelopes, and clear shelves.
I drag open the bottom drawer of the walnut chest and stop for half a second.
The gun is still there.
He placed it in my hand a few days before the heart attack that officially killed him.
A Makarov pistol, compact, solid, dark in the low light, with a weight that makes a point the second it touches skin.
I argued with him right here in front of the tall storage cabinet in my dressing room, angry enough to forget caution.
I’m a documentation manager, I told him. Not an enforcer.
All the more reason, Dochka, he’d answered.
He showed me the basics in the voice he used for ledgers and route sheets. Grip. Safety. Magazine. Sight line.
Tears well up in my eyes as I pick up the weapon.
Father understood that the danger that surrounded him so completely would come for me one day.
I brush off the urge to grieve and check the pistol, load the magazine, rack the slide, and set the safety.
Then I slip it into the inner pocket of my coat and change my dress.
Off comes the silk blouse.
The tailored trousers go back into the almirah.
I pull on dark jeans, a neutral sweater, thick socks, and flat black boots that can carry me through a station without slowing me down. A cashmere scarf goes around my neck, soft and plain. My fingers brush the line of fur at the collar of the camel coat. It was my mother’s.
I leave it where it is and choose an oversized charcoal one with deep pockets and a shape that breaks up my frame. It hides the gun, the papers, and the fact that I was at a Leonidov party an hour ago.
My hair goes up into a practical low knot. I tie it with a plain elastic from the ceramic dish by the mirror and pin the worst of the loose strands back behind my ears.
I wipe my face clean until there’s nothing left to shine. Women get remembered by the details they think define them.
By the time I’m done, I look exactly what I need to be. A woman easy to miss in transit.
I jam everything into the cloth tote and then leave the apartment building through the service exit.
The door shuts behind me with a hard metal snap, and the sound kicks me into motion. I don’t look back.
Maks has men watching my building, and by now he may have more than that in place.
Cameras, logs, and orders moving through too many hands.
All of it has the same meaning—I’m running out of time.
I head for the side street where the bins sit under a broken lamp, my phone already in my hand. It’s pretty, expensive, and still tied to the family whether I like it or not.
I look at the screen for half a second before killing it and pulling the SIM.
Teeth grinding together, I position the phone, snap it, and drop the pieces into separate bins.
There’s no time to waste. I move fast and quiet, checking the storefronts as I go. They’re shut for the night, dark behind metal grilles and dusty glass, with only a few weak lights still burning over signs. The pavement is empty.
Wind starts to pick up along the block, colder than it was an hour ago, and I remember the storm warning from this morning.
I pull the collar of my coat higher, tighten my grip on the tote, and keep going.
At the next corner, I strip the pins from my hair and twist it up with both hands. Two blocks later, I’m in the back seat of a taxi I flag down with cash.
The driver starts with the weather. “Looks like a bad one tonight.”
I don’t answer and keep looking out the window, thick glasses hiding half my face.
He catches my face in the mirror, thinks better of whatever else he was about to say, and shuts up.
Good instincts.
He puts the car in gear and keeps his eyes on the road. I pull my second phone from the inside pocket of my coat and keep it low in my lap.
My father set this one up years ago under another name, then made me memorize the number before he ever let me use it. It isn’t tied to my real accounts, real habits, or the family’s usual channels.
He kept only what he thought would matter in a real emergency—banking access, a small contact list, and a private line so tightly held that almost nobody knows it exists.
For now, it lets me move quietly without cutting myself off from everything I may still need.
The driver checks the mirror again. When I look up, he clears his throat and asks, “Where to?”
I give him one address.
Halfway there, I tap the divider and tell him to stop under a pharmacy sign.
I get out, wait until the red taillights disappear into the dark, then cross the street and cut through a narrow lane lined with locked garages and sleeping delivery vans.
The first name on my father’s sheet is Yuri Petrov.
Years ago, he handled overflow storage at a freight yard outside St. Petersburg and stayed close to men who collected debts, moved cargo, and remembered favors forever.
I met him as a child because my father trusted him enough to let him linger around the edges of business.
When I was twelve, Yuri handed me a pair of dirty binoculars and taught me how to read container numbers from across a yard.
He told me never to trust a man with soft hands in freight. When I was fourteen, he poured me tea so sweet it hurt my teeth and told my father I paid better attention than his sons.
I call his number.
Yuri doesn’t work Leonidov Freight anymore. After my father died, he stepped out of that lane and into another one built on the same bones—transport, storage, customs, and men willing to pay for things to move without questions.
Now it’s fish, caviar, refrigerated shipments, restaurant supply, and import paperwork tied to Caspian and Black Sea products.
When he answers, I don’t use my name. I use the old phrase my father wrote next to his number. “The winter manifests were wrong.”
The silence on the line feels pointed. Then a rough voice says, “Where are you?”
“Moving.”
“That bad?”
“Yes.”
Another pause. I hear a television somewhere behind him, then a woman’s voice and the clatter of kitchen utensils. Yuri breathes once into the phone. “You have cash?”
“Yes.”
“Documents?”
“Yes.”
“Then don’t come straight to me. Your father’s name still clings to mine in the wrong circles.”
I keep walking. “I need to stay close for a day or two.”
A pause. I can almost hear him sorting people, debts, and risk.
“Go to Zhenya Markina in Khimki,” he says at last. “Her husband died owing your father more than once. She’ll cover you for a night, maybe two. Keep your head down, and you won’t be sorry.”
I know whom he speaks of, so I nod, though he can’t see me. “I'd still need somewhere after that.”
“You’ll come to me,” Yuri wheezes.
“Spasibo, Yuri. Thank you.”
“No need.” His voice comes out gruff. “I’ll help you move when it’s time.”
“Where?”
“We’ll talk. You stay in Moscow, and the house folds you back in.”
I look down the alley. The pavement is wet from the squall, with puddles here and there, missing tiles, and broken lamps. No movement yet.
“Do you have a clean line?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Good. I’ll send Zhenya’s address. One message. One use. Delete it after you read it.”
The line dies and lights up again a moment later.
Per the address he sends, Zhenya Markina lives in a low house at the edge of Khimki, with lace curtains gone yellow at the edges and a kitchen that smells like boiled potatoes, black tea, and dill.
She opens the door, looks at me once, and steps aside. “Come in.”
I follow her into the kitchen. Heat rolls off the wood stove. Beetroot, browned meat, onion, hot oil, dill. It all hangs in the air.
Copper-bottomed pans sway above the stove. A pot of borscht sits warm on the stovetop.
“Sit,” Zhenya says.
I do. She sets out fried kotleti, black bread, pickled cucumbers, smetana, then pours black tea into a glass in a metal podstakannik and places it in front of me.
“Eat.”
While I do, she wipes her hands on a towel and talks. “Warehouse rents are worse. Customs drags unless the right palms are greased early.”
“You still run the business?” I ask.
“I still own the trawlers,” she says. “Not the routes. After Misha died, holding all of it together stopped being worth the trouble.”
That night she comes into my room with warm cherry kisel on a saucer, sets it on the bedside table, and sits beside me.
“Drink it,” she says. “You’ll sleep better.”
I take the glass. “Thank you.”
She gives me a hard look. “You came into my house with your eyes too wide and your mouth set like a trap. I know enough.”
I say, “Then tell me.”
So she does. A protected shipment vanished years ago. Leonidov and Reznikov both had reason to keep it stable. Then a Reznikov captain turned up dead. Then the intermediary sent to calm the dispute got killed too.
Zhenya looks at me and says, “Men call it honor because it sounds better. It was always money. It was always movement.”
I look down into the dark red kisel as dread squeezes my stomach tightly. Men will die, routes will seize up, and the whole machine will start coming apart.
Next morning, Zhenya puts a phone in my hand and tells me to call Yuri. Then she slips out of the kitchen, closing the door softly behind her.
Yuri picks up quickly.
“It’s me.”
“I figured,” he says. His voice sounds rougher than before.
“Listen carefully. The house isn’t making noise, but it’s moving.
There are more cars near the old warehouse roads.
Drivers and house security are quietly asking whether anyone has seen you, always phrased as concern.
Maks is pulling on the old lines without making a scene. ”
Yuri tells me to leave the country for a while.