28. Anton
ANTON
By the time I get Sofiya home from the yard, I’ve lost enough blood to make the doctor rude, Kolya has threatened to tie me to a chair, and Sofiya has decided she’s in charge of everyone.
She stands at the foot of my bed in my coat, her scarf still wrapped around her throat, one hand resting over her stomach and the other holding a cup of tea she hasn’t touched.
Her face is pale, her wrist is bruised from Maks, and she looks at the doctor stitching my side like she might take the needle and do it herself if the work disappoints her.
“Stop moving,” she snaps at me.
I look at the doctor. “Was that medical advice?”
The doctor doesn’t look up. “It was better than anything you’ve contributed.”
Kolya, standing near the bedroom door with dried blood on his cuff and a bandage across his temple, makes a pleased sound. “I like her.”
“You like anyone insulting me while I’m wounded,” I tell him.
“Yes,” he says. “I’m consistent.”
Sofiya steps closer, and her eyes go over the bandage at my shoulder, the stitches at my side, and the bruise starting to rise across my ribs. She tries to keep her face hard, but she can’t hide the way her hand tightens around the cup.
“You said it wasn’t bad.”
“It wasn’t,” I say.
The doctor snorts. “He needed fourteen stitches.”
Sofiya’s eyes come back to mine. “Fourteen.”
“Could’ve been fifteen,” I counter. “I negotiated.”
Her mouth tightens, and then she sets the tea down with enough force to make Kolya take one careful step back. “You are the most impossible man I have ever met.”
I reach for her hand before she can turn away. “You drove into a trap while pregnant, lied to Maks with a fake clock story, pulled Grigor into the war, and held a gun on your cousin badly enough to offend me. I’m not accepting that title alone.”
Her lips part, and for one second I think she’ll argue.
Instead, she leans down and kisses me, fast and hard enough to make the stitches pull.
I don’t complain because I’m injured, not dead, and because Sofiya kissing me while angry is one of the few things in this life that feels worth getting shot for.
The doctor clears her throat. “If you tear my work open, I’m billing double.”
Sofiya pulls back, breathing harder than before, and points at me. “Don’t tempt me.”
Kolya turns toward the door. “I’m leaving.”
The first week after the yard is all blood, paper, and men pretending they don’t know they’re scared.
Grigor moves first. He sends a sealed Leonidov car with four older house men, takes Maks through the back entrance of the main residence, and makes him wait in the office wing under the Yantar clock.
I hear that detail from Yuri, who has likely heard it from someone in their house, and when I tell Sofiya, she laughs so suddenly, she has to sit down.
“That’s cruel,” she says, one hand braced on the kitchen counter and the other over her stomach.
“From your uncle, that may count as sentiment.”
She looks at me over her shoulder. She’s wearing one of my shirts again, though now the buttons strain at the curve of her belly in a way that keeps ruining my focus. “You should never use that word.”
“Which one?”
“Sentiment. It sounds wrong in your mouth.”
“My mouth sounded fine to you this morning.”
She points a spoon at me. “Do not start while I’m making eggs.”
“You’re stirring an empty pan.”
“That’s because you walked in.”
I lean against the counter and watch her pretend to be annoyed. She has gotten softer in shape and more dangerous in mood, and every day I wake up with the same thought. She is mine, and she is still not tame enough to make that simple.
Grigor strips Maks with signatures.
By dawn, Maks loses access to three companies, two family accounts, the private driver pool, and every freight authorization tied to his name or his men. By noon, Grigor has his phones, his apartments, his side accounts, and his favorite lawyers sitting in separate rooms giving separate answers.
By dinner, Maks has nothing left except his name.
“He cried?” Sofiya asks when Yuri calls from Moscow three days later.
Yuri’s rough laugh comes through the kitchen speaker. “Not in front of the old man. Later, maybe.”
Sofiya folds one arm under her belly and leans closer to the phone. “What did Grigor do after the accounts?”
“Made him listen to your father’s recording twice.”
Her face changes.
I move closer, but I don’t touch her yet. Sofiya hates being handled when the pain is too clean. She likes choosing the moment she leans into me, and I’ve learned enough not to steal it from her when it matters.
Yuri continues, softer now. “Then Grigor asked him whether he had anything to say about his uncle’s death. Maks tried to blame pressure, bad advice, old family weakness. Grigor let him talk until he ran out of excuses.”
“And then?”
“Then Grigor broke his hand on the desk.”
Sofiya blinks. “His hand?”
“The hand that signed the first hidden authorization.” Yuri sounds almost cheerful. “Old men can still be poetic when they’re angry.”
I look at Sofiya. “Poetic?”
She wipes at one eye with the heel of her hand and glares at me immediately for noticing.
I throw my hands up. “I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to be pleased.”
“I’m always pleased when your family chooses efficient symbolism.”
She gives me a look, then turns back to the phone. “Where is Maks now?”
Yuri’s voice loses the humor. “Alive. Locked. Grigor is keeping him that way until he finishes cutting every route clean. After that, I wouldn’t send flowers.”
That answer sits in the room. Sofiya lets out a breath and nods once, more to herself than to us. “Good.”
Good is a small word for it, but it’s the one that fits. Maks wanted to become a man history feared. Instead, he becomes an internal caution, the kind of name men stop saying because it costs too much to remember him.
The Brotherhood problem takes longer.
Maks knew too much about my meeting, too much about Sofiya’s pregnancy, and enough about my Khimki move to set men on the archive building before we touched the boxes.
That kind of leak doesn’t come from a driver chatting in a yard.
It comes from someone close enough to hear strategy and stupid enough to think cleverness protects him.
Sofiya finds the first thread.
She’s sitting in the library two weeks after the yard, feet propped on a chair, belly rounding under a dark dress, while Kolya reads out copies of intercepted messages and I try not to look at her legs.
“Read that line again,” she says.
Kolya looks up from the folder. “Which one?”
“The one about the child.”
He checks the page. “Blood can be acknowledged later. Protection can be extended later.”
Sofiya’s eyes move to mine.
I feel it at the same time she does.
Sergei.
In the Brotherhood meeting, Sergei was the one who said almost exactly that. Not the boss. Not Viktor. Not Mikhail. Sergei, with his neat hands and his patient little dislike of every choice I made.
Kolya sees my face and lowers the folder. “You know who said it.”
“Yes,” I say.
Sofiya reaches for a pencil and circles the line on her copy. “Maks didn’t only know you were sheltering me. He knew how the argument was being framed. That phrase didn’t come from an outside guard.”
Kolya looks at her for a second too long. She tilts her head. “What?”
“I’m trying to decide if pregnancy made you more frightening or if I just didn’t notice before.”
I stand and pick up my jacket. “You noticed.”
Sofiya smiles sweetly. “He ignored it because I’m pretty.”
Kolya points at her. “That’s exactly what happened.”
I look between them. “The two of you are becoming a problem.”
“We’ve been useful,” she says.
“Still a problem.”
She taps the paper. “So, what do we do with Sergei?”
“We give him a false route,” I say. “Something good enough to tempt him, ugly enough to hurt when he passes it, and clean enough to trace back to him when Maks’s remaining men reach for it.”
Her smile is slow and full of satisfaction. “I love when you say practical things.”
Kolya groans. “Please stop flirting over treason.”
“We’re not flirting,” Sofiya says.
I button my jacket. “We are.”
She looks me over in a way that makes Kolya immediately study the ceiling. “Fine. We are.”
Sergei takes the bait in under forty-eight hours.
We give him a fake meeting tied to an old Finnish transfer point, a route number that never existed, and the name of a broker we already own. The information sits in one closed conversation at the Brotherhood house with only five men present.
That same night, one of Maks’s remaining drivers reaches for the broker.
The next morning, Sergei arrives at the Brotherhood house in a charcoal suit and leaves without his watch, his phones, his keys, his men, or his place at the table.
I’m there when the boss strips him.
Sergei keeps his chin up at first. He says the words men always say when they’ve been caught. Misunderstanding. Overreach. Protective instinct. A need to monitor both sides. The boss listens with both hands folded in front of him, and everyone knows that’s worse than anger.
Viktor reads the messages aloud.
Sergei’s face loses color by the third one.
When Viktor reaches the line about Sofiya’s pregnancy, I cross the room and hit Sergei hard enough to knock him into the chair behind him. He grabs the table, blood showing at his lip, and looks up at me with hatred.
The boss doesn’t tell me to stop, so I don’t. I take him by the collar, pull him close, and speak near his face so every man at the table hears me. “You fed Maks a pregnant woman’s location and thought you’d still sit in this room after it.”
Sergei spits blood onto the floor. “She’s Leonidov.”
“She’s under my protection.”
“She weakened you.”
I hit him again, and this time, he stays down longer. The boss finally speaks. “Enough.”
I step back because that word means the room has decided, and the room’s decision matters more than my hands.