26. Sofiya
SOFIYA
I make the last phone call before I step away from the car.
Niko keeps one hand near his coat, eyes on the repair shed, while the driver watches the street through the rearview mirror and pretends he isn’t listening.
The east service gate sits half a block ahead, dull metal under the yard lamps, with one man posted beside it and another shape moving behind the fence.
Maks isn’t visible, but I can feel him in the setup.
The call connects, and I speak before anyone on the other end can ask why I’m calling this late. “If I don’t call again in twenty minutes, open the message I just sent. Don’t trust anyone who tells you I’m unstable, compromised, or confused. And please call your son when I tell you to.”
I hang up before the silence can answer me.
Niko turns his head. “Who was that?”
I tuck the phone into my coat pocket and check that the scarf sits flat at my throat. “Insurance.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting.”
His mouth tightens, but he doesn’t argue.
Anton’s men are good at orders, but they’re better at reading when a situation has already stepped past the point where obedience matters.
Niko reaches under the seat and pulls out a thin folder I asked for on the ride over.
It holds plain records, old shipping copies, enough stamps and numbers to look useful if someone wants to believe too fast. Empty paper dressed as weight.
He hands it to me. “This won’t fool him for long.”
“It doesn’t need to.”
“Sofiya.”
I look at him then. “If I don’t walk out, you don’t rush the gate. You call Kolya, and you tell Anton I bought him time because he taught me to stop waiting for permission.”
Niko studies me for one long beat. “He’s going to hate that.”
“Good. It’ll keep him busy.”
I step out before he can say more. The cold hits my face and slides under Anton’s coat, but I keep walking.
My boots strike the cracked pavement, one step after another, while the man by the repair shed straightens and shifts his hand closer to his jacket.
He knows who I am. Men always look twice when they’ve been told to expect a woman but not the one who arrives.
I stop ten feet from him. “I’m here.”
He looks past me toward the car.
I lift the folder. “If you waste time checking whether I brought an army, Maks loses what he asked for.”
That gets him moving. He opens the service gate just wide enough for me to pass, then reaches toward my arm. I angle back and let him see my face properly. “Touch me and I walk.”
He almost smiles. “You’re not walking anywhere unless he says so.”
“Then ask him whether he wants your hand on me more than he wants what I brought.”
The man’s expression changes. He has orders, but he doesn’t have courage. He steps aside, and I walk through the gate with my heart beating hard under the scarf that hides the real drive.
I’m still not sure why I brought it. Maybe I wanted one last hail Mary if all else would fail.
The yard stretches around me in strips of light and concrete. Trucks sleep in numbered lanes. A forklift sits dead near a loading bay. Somewhere beyond the archive building, a man shouts, then another answers fast.
Anton is out there.
I keep my face still.
Maks waits near the repair shed with his coat buttoned, leather gloves on, and that calm, pretty face arranged into something close to regret.
The sight of him pulls me back to Moscow, to my father’s office, to the Yantar clock ticking while Maks asked why I’d been digging through files that should’ve stayed closed.
He looks me over once and stops at my stomach before returning to my face. “You came.”
“You gave me the address.”
“I didn’t think Reznikov would let you.”
“He’s bleeding. His opinions are less convenient right now.”
Maks laughs softly. “You always did choose strange moments for humor.”
“You always did mistake breathing room for victory.”
His eyes flick toward the folder in my hand. “Is that it?”
I raise a brow at him. “No greeting for your cousin? No concern? You used to have manners.”
His smile thins. “You used to have sense.”
“I still do. That’s why you’re standing in a yard at midnight trying to trade hostages for paper.”
He takes one step closer, and two men shift near the shed. One of them carries his gun openly. The other watches the road. Maks has brought enough force to feel safe and not enough to look panicked. That tells me the lie is still working.
“Where is Anton?” I ask.
“Alive.”
“I didn’t ask for poetry.”
His face tightens at the insult, but he keeps his voice pleasant. “You’re in no position to ask for much.”
“I’m carrying the thing you want, so yes, I am.” I lift the folder an inch. “Anton and Kolya walk.”
Maks’s mouth curves. “You bargain well for someone who arrived alone.”
“I didn’t arrive alone. I arrived pregnant, angry, and better informed than you. That’s crowded enough.”
For the first time, something real flashes in his eyes. Anger, maybe. Or the old irritation he always had when I refused to stay in the shape he preferred. He steps close enough that I can smell his expensive soap and the cold leather of his gloves.
“Give it to me.”
“Call your men first.”
He pulls out his phone, dials, and keeps his eyes on me while the line connects. “Let Reznikov and the others move off the dock. Don’t fire unless they fire first.” He listens for a second, then adds, “That’s all for now.”
For now. I hear it and file it away.
He ends the call. “Satisfied?”
“No, but I’m less irritated.”
“That’s almost charming.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
I hand him the folder.
He doesn’t take it right away. He watches my face as if he expects me to flinch, and I let him look and see the fear because hiding all of it would be stupid. Fear belongs here. It belongs in my hands, in my throat, in the child under my heart. What doesn’t belong here is surrender.
Maks takes the folder and opens it.
The first page gets a glance.
The second gets a frown.
By the fourth, his face has gone flat.
He flips faster, then slower, then pulls one page free and holds it near the yard light. Old shipping copy. Dead vendor number. A transfer sheet that looks official until someone who knows the system notices it leads nowhere useful. Paper without teeth.
His eyes lift to mine.
“What is this?”
“What you asked for.”
His voice drops. “Don’t insult me.”
“You asked for records. Those are records.”
Maks goes still in a way that makes the men near him shift their weight. He isn’t a man who screams first. He likes his anger folded neatly until someone else bleeds from the creases. “You thought you could hand me garbage and walk out.”
I shrug my shoulders though my whole body has gone cold. “I thought you’d want to know how it feels.”
His hand closes around the folder until the paper bends. “Where is the real package?”
“Safe.”
“With Reznikov?”
“No.”
His eyes narrow. “Zhenya.”
I don’t answer.
“Yuri?”
Still nothing.
He steps closer, and this time, the old mask slips enough that I see the man underneath. This is the man who built a private corridor inside family freight and smiled while everyone else called it stability.
“You have no idea what you’re doing,” he whispers, his eyes shining with an odd, almost red glow.
“I know exactly what I’m doing.”
“No, Sofiya. You’re playing at war because a Reznikov put his hands on you and made you feel chosen.”
I don’t let him see how scared I am. “And you’re still talking about sex because the freight conversation got too difficult.”
His jaw works once. “Your father would be embarrassed by you,” he says.
That insult almost gets through, but I smile anyway. “My father knew what you were.”
Maks’s smile comes back, smaller now. “Your father knew many things. That was his problem.”
The yard noise fades behind the sound of my pulse.
I stare at him. “Say that again.”
He watches me carefully, and I know he realizes he’s stepped too close to truth. But Maks likes injury. He likes the second after the blade enters and before the blood shows.
“He knew too much,” Maks says. “He kept circling the same accounts, asking quiet questions, looking at me across tables like he’d already written the ending. Men like that become dangerous.”
My mouth goes dry.
The folder hangs from his hand now, forgotten.
“You killed him.”
He gives me a patient look, the same one he used when we were children and I caught him lying before the adults did. “He was warned.”
The world locks instead of tilting and I have to take a moment to stabilize myself. “You killed my father.”
Maks has the audacity to chuckle. “He had a weak heart.”
“Don’t.”
“Fine.” Maks steps closer and drops his voice, though there’s no softness in it.
“He was given something that made a weak heart look like the answer. No public mess. My father mourned because he’s a sentimental old fool who can’t see beyond family ties, you cried—but you were young.
It didn’t matter. After a while, the house kept moving. ”
For a second, I can’t breathe.
I see my father at the dining table, tired eyes on the papers beside his plate.
I see him pressing a gun into my hand. I hear him telling me to run if the numbers ever got ahead of the house.
He knew. He knew enough to prepare me, and I hated him for it because I thought fear had eaten too much of his life.
It had been a countdown.
“You bastard,” I say, and my voice shakes.
Maks tilts his head. “I’ll take that.”
I move before he expects it and slap him hard enough to turn his face.
One of his men steps forward, but Maks lifts a hand and stops him. Slowly, he turns back to me. A red mark grows across his cheek. “That was stupid.”
“It felt earned.”
His eyes go dead. “You are still his daughter. Always confusing courage with timing.”
“I learned timing from him. Courage came later.”
He lunges.
I see it half a second before he reaches me.
His hand shoots for my throat, and I twist back, but he catches the front of Anton’s coat and yanks hard.
The folder falls between us. My shoulder hits the side of the repair shed, and pain flashes down my arm as he crowds in, one gloved hand locking around the scarf at my neck.
The drive.
My body reacts before thought. I grab his wrist with both hands and drive my knee up.
He shifts enough that I catch his thigh instead of where I aimed, but he grunts and loosens his grip for one second.
I use it to shove at his chest and turn my body sideways, keeping the scarf pinned under my hand.
“Careful,” I snap. “You tear that, and you lose what you came for.”
He freezes.
I breathe hard through my nose, my back against the shed, his hand still gripping my coat. His face is inches from mine now, beautiful in the worst way, full of rage he hasn’t decided how to spend.
“You didn’t bring it,” he says.
“Then why are you scared to rip the scarf off?”
His eyes drop to my throat.
Too late, I realize I gave him something real to look at.
His hand moves, even as I pull out my phone as fast as possible and quickly dial the number from before. I let it ring for one second before Maks snatches the device and tosses it away and moves to swipe at me with his hand.
I slap it away and go for the gun at my back, but he catches my wrist and slams it against the shed hard enough to send numbness into my fingers. The gun stays tucked, barely. His other hand comes up fast.
Then his phone rings, loudly enough that the sound cuts through the yard. Maks stops so abruptly, I hear his breath.
The men near the gate turn as the phone rings again.
His eyes stay on mine as he reaches into his coat and pulls it out. For the first time since I walked through the gate, his face changes in a way he can’t hide.
I look down at the screen. Grigor Leonidov.
Maks looks back at me, and now I smile. “Answer it.”