27. Sofiya
SOFIYA
Maks stares at the name on his phone long enough for me to watch the color shift under his skin.
Grigor Leonidov.
For most of my life, that name has meant a chair at the head of the table, a room straightening before he speaks, men swallowing answers they were stupid enough to prepare in advance.
My uncle has plenty of sins on his soul, and I’m not confused about the kind of man he is, but he knows the family machine better than anyone living.
Maks knows that too.
The phone rings again.
His fingers tighten around it, and the gloved hand still gripping my coat goes slack enough that I breathe for the first time since he lunged.
My wrist hurts from where he slammed it against the repair shed, and the scarf bites at my throat because he nearly found the real drive hidden inside the seam.
“Answer it,” I repeat.
Maks’s eyes lift to mine. “What did you do?”
“What you taught me to do,” I say. “I made sure the room turned before you could finish talking.”
The phone keeps ringing.
One of his men shifts near the gate, and that tiny move tells me more than his face does.
They don’t know whether to protect him, grab me, or wait for the call to decide the shape of the next order.
Men like that get paid to follow certainty, and Maks has lost just enough of it to make them nervous.
He answers before the line can die.
“Father,” he says, and he almost pulls it off.
The phone isn’t on speaker, but Grigor’s voice hits hard enough to carry. “Tell me where she is.”
Maks’s face goes still.
“She called you,” he says.
“She sent me enough to make me call you first instead of sending men straight to your apartment,” Grigor snaps. “Where is my niece?”
I should feel victory then, but what moves through me is rougher. It has teeth. I’m standing in a yard with a bruise forming on my wrist, Anton’s blood somewhere behind that archive building, my father’s murderer close enough to touch, and my uncle is finally hearing the shape of what Maks built.
It shouldn’t have taken this much.
It shouldn’t have taken all of this.
Maks looks at me while he speaks. “She’s safe.”
Grigor’s laugh comes through the phone, ugly and furious. “Don’t use that word while my brother’s daughter is standing inside your mess.”
Maks’s mouth tightens. “You’re reacting to panic. She has been unstable for weeks. She ran, she fell into Reznikov hands, and now she’s throwing pieces of dirty paper around because she knows she can’t explain where she has been.”
I almost laugh.
He still thinks the story can save him.
My mind goes back to the library after Anton left for Khimki, to the mess of papers on the desk, the cold pizza on the sideboard, and the phone sitting beside the Khimki schedule.
At the time, I thought the worst thing that could happen that night was Anton calling to say the records were gone.
Then Zhenya called.
I almost didn’t answer. My eyes were on the schedule Anton had marked before leaving, and my head was already in the yard with him, tracking the truck, the records, the timing, all of it. But Zhenya didn’t call for comfort, and she never wasted a line when danger was moving.
I picked up and said, “Tell me this is useful.”
“It is,” she said. Her voice was tight and fast, and everything in me sat up straighter before I knew why. “Lazlo reached me.”
My hand closed around the phone. “Alive?”
“For now. He got out before Maks’s men cleaned the place, but he won’t stay clear for long. Listen carefully because he couldn’t stay on the line.”
I grabbed the pen Anton had used and turned over one of the freight summaries. “Talk.”
“I need to tell you about the Yantar clock.”
For a second, I didn’t understand her. “What clock?”
“The Yantar clock,” Zhenya said. “He used it as a phrase, Sofiya. A marker. When he said the room trusted the clock more than the men in it, he meant the system around it. The maintenance access. The service logs. Old audio backups tied to the office wing.”
My pen stopped against the page.
The clock was a signpost, and I’d never known that.
Zhenya kept talking while I wrote, and the words started turning into a shape I could use.
“Lazlo had an old service invoice, a backup login, and copies of the access trail. He used them after he realized Maks was moving the archive. He found audio fragments. Your father and Maks, two days before your father died. Maks talking about old routes, the intermediary trail, and your father asking too many questions.”
I stopped breathing properly.
Some part of me had known since the night Maks stepped into my father’s office and looked at me like grief was an inconvenience he’d already budgeted for.
“What else?” I asked.
“Payment copies,” Zhenya said. “One to the consultant who signed off after your father’s death. One to a private medical supply contact. Lazlo says it isn’t neat enough for public court on its own, but it’s more than enough for Grigor.”
More than enough for Grigor.
That mattered more than court right now. Court needed procedure, witnesses, timing, clean custody. Family needed enough truth to justify punishment. “Send it,” I said.
“I already did. To you, and to the emergency address you gave me.”
I looked down at the page where I had written three words.
Yantar. Maintenance. Audio.
“Grigor,” I said.
“Yes,” Zhenya answered. “But he won’t open it unless you force him to.”
So I built the force before anyone knew I had it.
I saved the files, copied the key points, and wrote Grigor one message with enough poison in it to cut through whatever story Maks had already started feeding him.
Then, before stepping in here, I called him. And one more time—the last number that I rang. I’d warned him to call Maks if I cut the call before I could speak to him.
By the time I stepped into Maks’s yard, I already knew two things he didn’t. The clock story was a lie, but the fear behind it was real. And Grigor had enough proof in his hands to stop hearing Maks as family and start hearing him as a threat.
“You will listen to me,” Grigor says through the phone, and there is no politics left in his voice. “I heard enough of your voice on file to know you lied to me for eighteen months.”
Maks’s eyes flick once toward his men. “You heard lies, Father.”
“I heard my brother say your name,” Grigor shouts, and every man in the yard hears that part. “I heard you tell him he was circling things that no longer belonged to him. I saw the payment trail László Varga sent through Zhenya Markina.”
His voice is breaking with the strain of how panicked he clearly is. “I saw the consultant’s name and the private supply transfer! Do you think I am stupid enough not to know what that means?”
Maks’s face changes.
It doesn’t break all at once. That would be too satisfying, and Maks has spent too many years training his face to survive rooms. But the polish thins. His mouth pulls too tight at one corner, his eyes jump toward the gate, and his grip on the phone shifts like he wants to crush it.
I know him then—the future of the family or the perfect cousin with the clean jacket and the patient little smile. Just a spoiled child who got caught near the broken thing.
“You’re trusting her over me,” Maks pouts.
Grigor answers so fast it cuts into him. “I’m trusting my dead brother’s voice over yours.”
For the first time since I arrived, I see real fear in Maks.
He tries to cover it by turning from me, but he can’t move far because I’m still close to the shed and his men are watching. He lowers his voice, probably hoping the rest of us lose pieces of the call. Grigor doesn’t let him.
“You will let Sofiya go,” my uncle says. “You will pull your men away from the Reznikov team, you will leave whatever records they touched where they are, and you will come home.”
Maks swallows. “Father, you’re making a mistake.”
“No,” Grigor says. “I made one when I believed grief had made her suspicious instead of well-trained.”
The words hit me in the chest.
For one second, I’m back in my father’s office, twelve years old, staring at a vendor number while he waited for me to see the wrong digit. I hated that training some days. I hated how he made childhood feel like preparation for a war nobody named.
He had been trying to leave me hands steady enough for this.
Maks glances at me, and the look on his face turns mean because he sees something there he doesn’t get to touch. “She has been sleeping with Reznikov,” he says into the phone. “She’s carrying his child, and you’re letting her turn family business over to him because she’s angry.”
Grigor’s answer comes colder. “You killed her father.”
Maks’s mouth opens.
Nothing comes out.
Then he snaps it shut and finds his voice again. “That isn’t proven.”
“It will be proven enough for our table.” Grigor’s voice roughens. “Let her go, Maksim. Walk away from her now, or I swear to God I’ll give you something to cry about once you get home.”
The yard goes dead for one clean second.
I shouldn’t feel a flash of dark humor right now, but I do. My uncle has threatened governments, unions, customs men, dock owners, and once a cousin who overcharged him for a restaurant deal. Somehow, this is the first threat from him that sounds entirely personal.
Maks hears it too.
His face twists before he can stop it. “You’d choose her.”
Grigor almost roars through the phone. “I am choosing the family you tried to gut from the inside.”
“You sat at the head of a table you didn’t earn,” Maks snaps, and now the child is out in the open, furious, red-faced, and ugly with it.
“You let old men and accountants turn us into paperwork. You let Reznikov dogs step into rooms that should’ve belonged to us.
I built something with strength, and all of you were too comfortable to understand it. ”
The man near the gate looks away.
That’s satisfying too, because men can follow ambition, greed, even fear if the money is steady enough. But they don’t like hearing the man paying them shout like a boy denied a toy.