28. Anton #2
Sergei is stripped, documented, and removed. His money goes toward cleaning the route damage he helped create. His men are split under Viktor and Mikhail. His name disappears from the board before dinner.
As for Sergei himself, the boss gives him to the northern labor route for ten years, no title, no phone, no family visits, and no chance to turn himself into a dead martyr men can romanticize.
Sofiya likes that part when I tell her.
“Ten years?” she asks from the bedroom doorway that night, wearing a robe that doesn’t close properly anymore.
“At minimum.”
She thinks about it while I unbutton my shirt. “Alive enough to suffer, gone enough to stop talking.”
“Yes.”
“That’s tidy.”
“I thought you’d approve.”
She walks toward me, takes one look at my bruised knuckles, and sighs like I’ve personally exhausted her. “You hit him.”
“Twice.”
“Only twice?”
“The boss interrupted.”
“Rude.”
I catch her by the waist and pull her carefully against me. The baby shifts between us, and every time that happens, something inside me goes stupid and reverent no matter how hard I try to look normal.
Sofiya notices and her hand comes up to my face. “You’re doing that thing again.”
“What thing?”
She smiles lightly. “Looking at my stomach like it might brief you on policy.”
“It might. She already has opinions.”
“She?”
I shrug. “Feels right.”
Sofiya’s eyes soften, then narrow. “If you’re right, you’ll be unbearable.”
“I’m already unbearable.”
She laughs at that. “Yes, but this will give you fresh material.”
I kiss her before she can keep talking, because she is laughing and tired and alive in my arms, and there are nights when I still wake thinking of that yard gate and her walking into Maks’s reach wearing my coat and a lie.
The larger world moves because men like us make it move, or because women like Sofiya reach under the table and pull the right wire.
Leonidovs and Reznikovs don’t become friends. That would be childish.
We become aligned where profit demands it and dangerous where memory insists. Grigor sends a formal apology without using the word. The boss accepts it without using the word either. That is how old men with blood on their hands pretend manners still matter.
The Baltic and Finnish routes get cleaned in pieces.
Some brokers lose licenses. Some drivers disappear into retirement so sudden, it makes their wives very happy and their friends very nervous.
Two cold yards change ownership. One customs officer develops a strong interest in leaving Russia and gets allowed to do so after signing papers that make several men safer.
The records from Varga’s boxes become the spine of the cleanup. Sofiya reads them faster than any man I put in front of them, and after the third time she catches a false vendor trail before my accounting team does, I stop pretending she’s consulting and give her a desk.
She hates the desk. “It faces the wall,” she says.
“It’s secure.”
“It faces the wall.”
“It has three locked drawers.”
“Anton.”
I look up from the report in my hand. “Yes.”
She points at the desk. “Move it.”
I stare at her for a second, then call two men in and have them move it near the window while Kolya watches from the hall with the expression of a man witnessing the fall of civilization.
Afterward, Sofiya sits at the new angle, sets one hand on her belly, and gives me a pleased smile. “See? Growth.”
Kolya mutters, “For all of us.”
Yuri does very well out of the cleanup.
He gets official control over certain refrigerated routes he used to work around, a clean share in two storage contracts, and enough new respect.
“I told you years ago,” he says one afternoon while Sofiya pops pitted cherries from a bowl and reads a transfer sheet. “Soft hands in freight are dangerous.”
Sofiya smiles into the phone. “You also told me your tea was good, and that was a lie.”
“My tea built character.”
“Your tea tasted like boiled regret.”
I lean back in my chair and watch her argue with an old freight man like she isn’t eight months pregnant and currently bossing three houses through paperwork. Yuri laughs so hard he coughs.
Zhenya gets her routes back, though not all at once, and not as charity. She refuses charity loudly enough that Kolya comes into my office after the call and says, “That woman just called you a romantic idiot.”
“She didn’t say romantic.”
“No, but I wanted to make it worse.”
Zhenya gets a restored stake in the refrigerated business, a legal shield around her trawlers, and a security arrangement she pretends not to appreciate.
She also sends Sofiya food twice a month, always too much of it, and once includes a note that says, Eat before your criminal starts making health decisions.
Sofiya reads it aloud at breakfast and looks at me over the paper. “She knows you.”
“I make excellent health decisions.”
“You tried to work three days after being shot.”
“That was a staffing issue.”
“That was a stupidity issue.”
Kolya, passing through with a folder, says, “Medically confirmed.”
I point at the door. “Out.”
He leaves smiling.
Lazlo Varga survives too, though barely at first.
Yuri’s men pull him from a second safe flat outside the city after Maks’s men burn the first one. He arrives in Moscow thinner than he should be, with one broken finger, two bruised ribs, and the expression of a man annoyed to still be alive because now people expect him to answer questions.
Sofiya sits with him for three hours the first time.
I stay in the next room because she asks me to, and because she doesn’t ask for much unless it matters. When she comes out, her face is pale, but her eyes are steady.
“He kept my father’s last note,” she says.
I close the folder in front of me. “What did it say?”
She holds herself still for a second, then hands me the paper.
If Sofiya comes asking, help her. If she doesn’t, stay safe until she does.
I read it once, then again.
“She came asking,” Lazlo says from the doorway behind her, voice rough. “Late, but she came.”
Sofiya turns, and for once she has no answer ready.
Lazlo gets a new identity, a protected flat, and a role reviewing archived freight records from a place nobody gets to enter without two permissions and my personal desire to ruin their week. He complains about the chair. Sofiya sends him a better one. He complains about that too.
A few months later, the war has become something else.
Grigor and the boss meet twice, both times under too much security and too little trust. They agree on route boundaries, broker accountability, and a shared rule that anyone trying to revive the old feud for private profit gets cut out before he gets romantic about blood.
Sofiya reads the agreement and crosses out three sections.
Grigor calls me ten minutes later. “Your woman edits like her father.”
“She’ll enjoy hearing that.”
“She’ll pretend not to.”
“She will.”
A pause follows, and when Grigor speaks again, his voice has less iron in it. “Tell her I received the photo.”
I look across the room at Sofiya, who is standing barefoot by her desk, one hand on her back and the other holding a pen. The latest scan photo is framed beside her monitor because she accused me of being sentimental, then put it there herself when she thought I wasn’t watching.
“She knows,” I say.
“She should visit when she’s ready.”
“That may take time.”
“I have time,” Grigor says and hangs up before either of us has to pretend the conversation was comfortable.
Sofiya doesn’t ask what he said. She already heard enough from my face, and she’s kind enough not to make me explain my face to myself.
That kindness lasts four seconds. “You look constipated,” she says.