Chapter 36 Natalia
NATALIA
The house is too quiet.
Not peaceful quiet. The kind of quiet that happens when people leave in a hurry and don’t bother telling you where they’re going. I noticed it twenty minutes ago when I came downstairs for a snack and found the kitchen dark, the hallway dark, the TV in the den playing to no one.
There are still guards on the property. Through the kitchen window, I can see one smoking near the gate and another posted by the front entrance. But the interior is different. The hallway outside my father’s study is empty, and it’s never empty.
It’s not safe. But it’s the closest thing to a window I’m going to get.
My father’s office is at the end of the east corridor, behind a door that’s always locked. I pause outside and listen.
Nothing.
The hallway is dim, lit only by a sconce at the far end and the weak spill of moonlight from the tall window over the landing. The carpet muffles everything. Even my breathing sounds too loud. I glance once over each shoulder, then crouch and slide the bobby pins into the lock.
My hands are shaking just enough to make me miss the tension point the first time. I force myself to slow down, feel for it, and a second later the lock clicks open.
I let out the breath I was holding and slip inside, shutting the door carefully behind me.
The office smells like leather, old paper, and my father’s cologne. The desk is massive, dark walnut, positioned so whoever sits behind it faces the door. A power move. The chair, oversized and high-backed, like a throne for a man who thinks he deserves one.
I sit in it. My skin crawls.
Usually, when I’m in here, I’m standing on the wrong side of that desk while my father reminds me what I owe him. Seeing the room empty feels almost indecent, like I’ve walked in on someone naked.
The computer wakes with a wiggle of the mouse. No password on the desktop because who would dare come in here uninvited? His arrogance has always been his blind spot, and tonight, I’m counting on it.
His email is open. Most of it is the usual coded bullshit. Men like my father love pretending they’re clever. Half the time they are, unfortunately. Half the time they just wrap obvious crimes in expensive language and act impressed with themselves.
I scroll through the recent threads until I find what I’m looking for. A chain between my father and someone I have to assume is Restrepo, or one of Restrepo’s people. The tone is warm, congratulatory. Talk of the upcoming wedding, how pleased both families will be about the “partnership.”
And then, in the most recent message, sent yesterday: the expected wedding presents will be flown in from Colombia and arrive in two days.
This has to be it.
I reach for the Sharpie I brought and uncap it with my teeth, then write the address in tiny block letters on the inside of my forearm. A private airstrip outside Henderson. Time window. The ink bleeds a little where I press too hard, but the letters are legible.
Two days.
That’s not much time. But it’s something. Enough for the Andrettis to move on. Enough to make Restrepo think my father is selling him out if the right people happen to be waiting when the shipment arrives. Enough to crack the alliance before I’m marched down an aisle like livestock.
A small, desperate kind of triumph flickers through me.
I cap the Sharpie. That’s a good lead. Maybe enough on its own. But I’m already here, and the quiet hasn’t broken, and there might be more.
The top two desk drawers give me nothing. Pens, loose ammunition, a legal pad, financial documents bland enough to put me in a coma.
The bottom drawer is locked. Deeper than the others, wide enough for hanging files.
I slide off the chair and kneel, fitting the pins into the lock.
This one fights me. My fingers are clumsy with adrenaline, and I have to force myself to slow down, breathe through it, feel for the give in the mechanism instead of just stabbing at it.
Every second on my knees in front of this desk is a second closer to someone walking down that hallway.
The lock clicks. The drawer rolls open.
Dozens of folders, organized by year, hanging in neat rows. I start at the front, the most recent. I flip through them quickly, skimming tabs and labels for anything that looks useful. Financial summaries. Property records. Nothing that means anything to me.
I should shut the drawer. I have the airstrip, I have the timeline. Every extra minute is a risk.
But my fingers keep moving through the tabs, and the years keep ticking backward. 2019. 2014. 2008. The files go further than I expected, all the way to the back of the drawer, and I’m about to pull my hand out when a tab catches my eye.
2004
Not relevant. Not what I came for. But my hand stops moving, and something in my chest locks up.
It is probably nothing. An old ledger. Some dead deal. A piece of family business that has nothing to do with me. But that year is a bruise in my life even though I can’t remember it. The year my mother died giving birth to me.
I pull the folder.
There are photographs clipped to typed reports, receipts, notes, a few official-looking documents. At first it’s all too much to make sense of. Then my gaze catches on a woman’s face, and the world narrows so fast it makes me dizzy.
My mother.
I’ve seen one picture of her in my entire life.
One. A single stolen image I’ve looked at so many times I could probably redraw it from memory with my eyes closed.
But this is her. There’s no mistaking it.
Dark hair loose around her shoulders, chin tilted slightly up, one hand half-raised like she’s about to tuck it behind her ear.
For a second I can’t do anything except stare.
The room goes strange around me, blurred at the edges. My throat tightens so hard it hurts. I touch the corner of the photo with the tip of my finger, careful, absurdly careful, as if I could smudge her out of existence all over again.
She’s outside a hotel in oversized sunglasses. In the next photo, she’s stepping through the revolving door.
I look closer at the stone facade, the brass-trimmed glass, the crest worked into the awning.
I know that building. One of the older Andretti hotels downtown.
My skin prickles.
There are more photographs behind it. A whole stack, taken over what looks like weeks or months. She’s entering the lobby. Sitting in a restaurant. Standing on a balcony with the skyline behind her.
I keep going.
In the later photos, she isn’t alone.
A man appears beside her. Tall, dark-haired, well-dressed.
In one shot he’s holding a door open for her.
In another they’re sitting across from each other at a small table, leaning in too close for it to mean nothing.
Then there’s one of them kissing, his hand at her waist, her fingers hooked into his collar like she belongs there.
I stop breathing.
Not because I’m shocked my mother had secrets. Not even because I’m looking at proof she betrayed my father.
Because someone followed her long enough to catch all of this.
My father had her watched.
For weeks. Maybe months.
He knew.
My pulse is loud in my ears now, heavy and uneven. I lower the photograph back into the folder and force myself to look underneath it.
There’s a medical document beneath the stack. A paternity test, dated the same day I was born.
For one stupid, disorienting second, my mind snags on the man in the photos. On his dark hair, his height, the impossible shape of hope rising where it has no right to rise. Something inside me reaching for an explanation I never even let myself name.
I stare at the result until the words blur, blink hard, and force myself to focus again.
Probability of paternity: 99.99%.
Anton Kozlov.
My father.
The breath leaves me in a sharp, soundless rush.
Of course he is. The results are clear. Anton Kozlov is my father. The same man who raised me. The same man who looked at me my whole life and made me feel like an obligation he never wanted.
But he tested me.
He tested me because he knew there was reason to ask.
The thought lands like ice water straight down my back. I’m gripping the folder hard enough to crease it. The paper crackles under my fingers.
Under the paternity results is my birth certificate. I’ve never actually seen it. My father kept documents like this locked away, another small piece of my life he controlled by keeping it out of reach.
Everything looks normal. Time of birth, weight, length. Mother’s name. Father’s name. All present, all in order.
I almost put it back.
But there’s another page stuck to it. I peel them apart, and it’s a hospital discharge form.
My mother’s name at the top.
My eyes move down the page once, then again, slower this time.
Discharge date: three days after my birth.
I stare at the line until the words stop making sense. Then they slam into me all at once.
Three days after my birth.
Condition at discharge: stable.
My fingers go numb.
No.
I read it again. Same words. Same line. Same neat, merciless type.
She didn’t die in childbirth.
The folder slips in my lap. I catch it against my knees, but barely. My whole body feels wrong, hollowed out and violently overfull at the same time. The floor feels like it’s moving. I grab the edge of the desk to steady myself and feel polished wood bite into my palm.
My father lied.
Every version of the story. Every time he told it. She hemorrhaged. It was too fast. Nothing anyone could do. Told with that flat voice, that bored delivery, while I carried the guilt of it for twenty-three years. My whole life, believing I killed my mother just by being born.
All those years I thought it was my fault she died.
My chest tightens so fast it turns into pain.
I can’t get a full breath. I am back in every moment I ever let that guilt curl itself around my ribs.
Every birthday. Every cold look. Every punishment.
Every time I thought, yes, maybe I deserve this.
Maybe this is what it costs to be the girl who lived when her mother didn’t.
But she did live.
A sound breaks out of me. I don’t even know what it is. Not quite a gasp, not quite a sob.
The pages slide from my lap and scatter across the floor.
I don’t even try to catch them. I am staring at nothing, at everything, at the shape of a life I never had. My mother carrying me out of a hospital. My mother holding me. My mother alive somewhere beyond that doorway in time, breathing and warm and real, and then not.
If she didn’t die giving birth to me, then what happened?
The question opens like a crack in the ground, and I know the answer is in this room. I know it’s probably in this folder. I know that if I keep looking, I will find something I can never un-find.
My fingers move toward the remaining papers.
“Digging around in the old files, hmm?”
Every muscle in my body locks.
I look up too fast, and the room seems to lurch with me.
Boris is standing in the doorway, arms crossed, filling the frame. My father’s attack dog. The man who does the jobs even Nikolai won’t touch.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk.” His gaze drops to the papers scattered across the floor, then lifts back to my face.
Slowly, he smiles. “Not sure you’re supposed to be doing that.”