24. Sofiya
SOFIYA
I realize something is off the second Kolya calls me instead of Anton.
I answer before the first full ring finishes—my hand has been locked around the phone since Anton left and every nerve in my body has been waiting for this exact kind of disaster.
“Talk,” I say.
Kolya’s voice comes through rough, crowded by movement and the hard bang of something metal nearby. “We’re off the dock. Anton’s hit.”
For one second the library tilts, and I grip the edge of the desk so hard, the papers under my palm wrinkle. Then my father’s voice cuts through the panic in my head, dry and irritated and alive only where I keep him.
When panic rises, Dochka, put it to work.
“Where is he hit?” I ask, and my voice sounds steadier than the rest of me feels.
“Side. Maybe shoulder too. He’s upright, but he’s bleeding through his jacket and refusing to sit down because apparently, dying standing up is a family value now.”
I close my eyes for half a second, then open them and drag the Khimki yard map closer. “Is he talking?”
“He’s cursing.”
“Good. That means his lungs work.”
“Glad we’re taking comfort where we can.
” Kolya breathes hard, then the line crackles as he moves.
“We’re behind the storage lane wall near the archive building.
Two cars boxed us in from the side street after we opened the cartons.
They’re not rushing us yet, but they’ve got a clean enough angle to make moving stupid. ”
I scan the notes Anton left beside mine, and the whole route comes back in pieces. Cold yard. Reassignment lane. Short run to the archive building. Boxes marked like Varga’s batch system. Maks didn’t send men because of a truck. He sent them because Anton found the throat of the thing.
“How many shooters?” I ask.
“Four that I’ve seen. Maybe more. One on the side door, one behind the service car, two shifting near the outer fence.”
“Are they shooting to kill?”
Kolya pauses, and in that pause, I hear another round hit something close enough to make him swear. “They’re shooting well enough to hurt us, but not enough to finish this.”
“Then they’re buying time,” I say, already reaching for Anton’s second phone. “They either want the boxes confirmed before they burn them, or they’re waiting for Maks to decide whether Anton is worth more dead or breathing.”
Kolya doesn’t answer right away. When he does, his voice has changed. “You sure?”
“No. But I’m right.”
“That sounds exactly like something he’d say.”
“Then listen like he would.” I grab a pen and circle the archive building on the map.
“Don’t push the front. Don’t chase the first open gap.
If they wanted the records gone, the truck would already be burning.
If they wanted Anton dead, they wouldn’t have waited until after he opened the boxes.
They’re holding you there because someone wants terms.”
Kolya gives a short, ugly laugh. “You’re telling me Maks wants to negotiate?”
“No,” I say, and my stomach pulls tight because the answer is worse. “I’m telling you he wants me.”
The library door opens while I’m still on the call.
One of Anton’s guards steps in, pale around the mouth, one hand pressed to his earpiece as if the whole house has started speaking at once.
He looks from me to the papers, then to the phone, and I can see the decision forming in his face before he makes it.
He’s going to manage me.
I point at him before he gets a word out. “Don’t.”
The guard stops.
Kolya hears enough to ask, “Who’s with you?”
“Someone about to be useful,” I say. “Stay down, keep Anton behind cover even if you have to insult his pride, and don’t let anyone split those boxes.”
“He’s not going to like any part of this.”
“Anton dislikes many things and survives most of them. Keep him alive long enough to complain.”
I hang up before Kolya can argue and turn fully to the guard. His name is Niko, I think, though Anton has too many men around this penthouse and they all stand like doors until someone gives them a reason to move.
“Get me Zhenya’s line on the monitored phone,” I say.
His brows pull in. “Mr. Reznikov ordered you to stay here and wait for updates.”
“Mr. Reznikov is bleeding behind a concrete wall because he followed my freight read and found the records Maks is trying to move.” I step around the desk, and every word gets calmer as I walk toward him.
“So now you can either help me get him out of that yard, or you can explain to him later that you protected his rules while his blood was running into his shirt.”
Niko’s mouth tightens. He’s not stupid. He touches his earpiece and speaks quickly to someone in the hall while I pick up the monitored phone and dial Zhenya from memory. The call connects on the third ring.
“Sofiya?” she says, and the way she says my name tells me she already knows something has broken.
“I need Maks’s direct number.”
“No.”
“Zhenya.”
“No,” she repeats, harder this time. “There are bad ideas, and then there’s walking into a room after setting your dress on fire. This is the second one.”
“Anton’s hit. Kolya’s pinned near the archive building. Maks’s men are holding instead of finishing, which means they want something.”
Zhenya goes quiet. I hear a chair scrape on her end, then a drawer opening. “You’re going to call him.”
“Yes.”
“And say what?”
I look at the old notes spread across the desk, at my father’s handwriting copied from memory, at the cold route names and the company markers that started all of this. “I’m going to tell him what he’s always been afraid my father left behind.”
Zhenya exhales slowly. “Did he?”
My hand stills on the desk.
No. My father left me training, warnings, half-remembered names, and enough fear dressed up as practical lessons to keep me moving when any normal woman would’ve collapsed. He didn’t leave me a perfect weapon in a clock, a box, or some fairy-tale hiding place.
But Maks doesn’t know that.
“No one needs to know the answer tonight,” I say.
Zhenya gives me the number after a long pause, and she reads it once, slowly enough that I can write it in the margin of the Khimki schedule. Before she hangs up, her voice roughens. “If you put your hand in that wolf’s mouth, don’t do it halfway.”
“I won’t.”
The call ends, and for one second I stand over the number with the pen still in my hand.
My pulse is fast, but my thoughts are not.
They’re clean now. Almost cold. Maks understands fear when it has paperwork attached, and he understands my father’s name better than anyone else alive because he helped make that name dangerous in the last months before it went silent.
I dial before courage has time to turn into something weaker.
Maks answers on the fourth ring. “Sofiya.”
I hate his voice. I hate that smooth, careful warmth he uses when he wants someone to remember the knife only after it’s already in. My hand goes to my stomach, and the small contact steadies me in a way anger can’t.
“Call off your men.”
A soft breath moves through the line. “No hello?”
“Call them off.”
“You’ve always been rude under stress.” He sounds almost amused, which means he thinks he has room to enjoy this. “I assume Reznikov found something he shouldn’t have.”
“He found enough.”
“Then he should’ve stayed home.”
I lean my hip against the desk because my knees want to remember that I’m pregnant and terrified and in love with a man who may be bleeding out because he trusted my mind. None of that gets to reach my voice.
“You don’t have time to play with me,” I say. “Your men are holding the position because you don’t know whether Anton opened the right boxes yet. You want confirmation before you decide whether to burn the records, move them, or let him die beside them.”
Maks says nothing.
That’s the first gift.
I take it.
“You always did need one extra second before you committed,” I continue. “It’s why my father noticed you.”
His silence changes. “My uncle noticed ambition,” Maks says. “That’s not the same thing.”
“No, Maks. My father noticed fear. Ambition is what men like you call fear when they have money and drivers.”
His laugh is quiet, but the edges are gone. “You’re spending too much time with Reznikov. He’s making you theatrical.”
“Anton didn’t make me anything. He just listened when I told him where to look.”
A door shuts on his end. I hear it, and I picture him leaving whatever room he was in because he doesn’t want witnesses for the next part. “What do you want?” he asks.
“I told you. Call off your men.”
“And in return?”
I look at the clock over Anton’s library shelves. “You get to hear what my father left behind.”
Maks goes silent.
I let it sit because this is the part he needs to feel.