27. Sofiya #2
Grigor’s voice drops into something harder than shouting. “You built theft on my brother’s grave.”
Maks’s eyes come back to me.
There’s no plan in them now, just rage looking for the closest body.
“You did this,” he says to me.
I should move then, I know I should. My hand is near the gun at my back, and Niko is somewhere outside the gate, waiting for a signal he can use. Yuri is supposed to be near too, if Zhenya’s message reached him fast enough. Anton should be moving. Kolya should be using the gap.
All of that is true.
But Maks is faster than I expect.
He throws the phone to the ground so hard it skips across the concrete, and his hand goes under his coat.
The man by the gate reacts half a second too late. I reach for my gun, but my coat catches at the wrong angle, and Maks already has his pistol up.
For a tiny slice of time, everything becomes stupidly clear. The repair shed at my back. The open service gate to my left. The fake folder lying near Maks’s shoe. The scarf tight against my throat. My child under my hand because I’ve moved without realizing I’m protecting my stomach first.
Maks points the gun at me.
“You should’ve stayed in Prague,” he says.
Then the service doors behind him burst open.
The metal slams back against the wall, and Yuri Petrov comes through first with a shotgun in both hands and a face like he has spent all night driving toward this exact insult.
Behind him, men flood into the yard from the side entrance and the outer fence line, rough coats, hard faces, guns up and ready.
Freight men. Yard men. Old-route men who look like they’d rather solve a problem with boots and rope than a meeting.
Yuri barks one order in Russian, and the whole yard shifts.
Maks’s men turn toward the doors.
That’s their mistake.
Niko fires from the gate.
The first shot takes the gunman nearest the shed in the shoulder and spins him hard into the side wall.
Another man reaches for his weapon and gets tackled by two of Yuri’s men before he clears leather.
Someone shouts. Someone slips on loose gravel.
A gun goes off into the side of the repair shed, close enough that I feel the hit in the wall behind me.
Maks swings back toward me, desperate now, and I finally get my gun free.
My hand shakes, but the barrel points where it should.
“Don’t,” I say.
He stares at me like he can’t process that I’m holding a weapon on him. “You won’t.”
“No,” I say. “But you don’t know that for sure.”
His eyes flick toward my stomach, and the old cruelty tries to return, but it has nowhere to stand. He’s lost everything.
Then Anton comes through the service gate like fury learned to walk on blood loss.
Kolya is beside him, one hand gripping Anton’s arm whether Anton likes it or not, and two Reznikov men come in tight behind them carrying one of the record boxes between them.
Anton’s shirt is dark at his side under the open jacket, and there is a pressure wrap pulled tightly over one shoulder. He looks terrible.
He also looks ready to murder every living man in the yard before breakfast.
My breath catches, and the gun dips for half a second before I force it back up.
Anton’s eyes find me first and that does something dangerous to my knees, so I lock them and glare at him because I have no interest in collapsing in front of anyone tonight. “You’re bleeding,” I call. “I told Yuri not to bring you here!”
His mouth curves even though his face has gone pale around the edges. “You’re holding a gun badly.”
I almost laugh, and it comes out shaky. “I’m under stress.”
“You’re always under stress.”
“You cause most of it.”
His eyes flick over me fast, checking my face, throat, coat, hands, stomach. When he sees I’m standing and not bleeding, his shoulders loosen by a fraction. Then his gaze moves to Maks, and whatever softness lived there for half a breath dies at once.
Yuri steps between two of Maks’s men and drives the butt of his shotgun into one man’s gut when he thinks about moving. “Nobody gets heroic,” he snaps. “I hate cleaning up heroes.”
Kolya looks at him, then at Anton. “I like him.”
Yuri doesn’t look back. “I don’t care.”
Good. Definitely Yuri.
Niko reaches me and steps close enough to cover my side without touching me. “You all right?”
“Ask me when nobody is pointing weapons near my baby.”
He nods once, which is the correct response.
Maks has not lowered his gun completely, but he’s no longer aiming cleanly at me.
His eyes move across the yard, counting.
Yuri’s men by the side entrance. Niko’s men at the gate.
Anton’s people moving from the archive side with boxes and the coat man dragged between two guards.
The key players were all here, too busy using me as bait to notice the bigger trap closing behind them.
That had been the part I didn’t know until Zhenya called. Lazlo hadn’t only reached her. He had reached Yuri first.
Yuri knew the yard.
Yuri knew the men Maks used on old freight roads.
And Yuri had told Zhenya something that made the whole night make sense.
If Maks pulls his key men to the archive building, he’s not guarding the outer road. He’s trusting fear to do the work. Tell Sofiya to make noise at the gate. I’ll bring men through the side.
So I made noise. I made so much noise that Maks stood here explaining his murder while Yuri took his yard apart.
Maks looks at me then, and whatever is left of him folds into hate. “You planned this.”
“Some of it,” I say. “I’m happy to take credit for the rest.”
Anton’s mouth twitches, but his eyes stay on Maks’s gun. “Put it down.”
Maks laughs, and it sounds broken now. “You’re giving me orders while bleeding because of her?”
“I’ve done better things because of her.”
That hits me in the middle of all the terror, and I want to yell at him for being romantic at a time like this. I also want to cross the yard and put my hands on him to make sure he’s real.
Maks steps back once, looking for a lane that no longer exists. “You think Grigor can touch me after tonight? You think he’ll survive what comes out when I start talking?”
Yuri snorts. “Men who say that usually talk too late.”
His phone is still on the ground, cracked but alive, and Grigor’s voice suddenly bursts through the damaged speaker. “Maksim.”
Everyone stills.
Maks looks down.
His father is still on the line. Grigor Leonidov would survive the end of the world if he thought someone was trying to hang up on him first.
“You will put the gun down,” Grigor says. “You will go with Yuri. You will keep your mouth shut until I decide who is allowed to hear it. And if Sofiya has one bruise I did not authorize, you will beg before I am finished with you.”
Maks’s face crumples for half a second, enough for me to see the boy who thought power meant never being told no, and enough for everyone else to see it too.
He lowers the gun.