Chapter 20
Galina
“Third time’s the charm,” I mutter and hit redial. Dad is being deliberately obtuse, and it’s starting to piss me off. It rings, and I look around Irina Voronova’s sewing room.
It’s a small, warm room, tucked at the back of the house, and it feels nothing like the rest of the Voronov estate.
No marble. No cold pale walls. A wide wooden table runs along one side, covered in fabric samples and half-finished projects.
A dress form stands in the corner, wearing an elegant, cream dress with a matching coat.
There are framed photographs on the shelves between reels of thread, family shots, candid ones, the kind of photographs that exist in houses where people actually love each other rather than perform it.
I look away from them before they make me feel something I can’t afford right now.
It goes to voicemail again, and I grit my teeth. After the beep, I say as calmly as I can, “Dad. I want someone dead. Pick up the phone.” I hang up, and not a second later, it rings.
I smile and answer the video call.
“Who?” he barks out. “Voronov? I’ll rip his balls off.”
“Anton Petrov,” I say, staring into his eyes, which go from flaming hot to ice cold in the blink of an eye.
The silence on the other end of the call stretches long enough for me to count four seconds. Five. Six.
My father’s face on the screen is unreadable in the way that only men who have survived a lifetime in the Bratva can manage. Not blank. Controlled. There is a difference, and I have spent my entire life learning to read it.
“Galina,” he says finally.
“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t say my name in that voice like I’m being hysterical. I know, Dad.”
“You know nothing.”
“I know enough.” I keep my voice steady even though my heart is hammering against my ribs. “I know you’ve been planning this for a long time. I know the corridor is for her. I know the wedding is the cover.”
He says nothing.
“And I know she had three babies in three years and a husband who beats her bloody. You have been sitting on this plan for God knows how long while I lay awake thinking I was the only one who gave a shit. Mum would be appalled.”
Something moves across his face. Not guilt. He is not built for guilt. But something adjacent to it. “Don’t bring your mother into this.”
“Tell me you are saving Yelena and I won’t.”
His jaw works once. He looks away from the screen, to the side, and I wait. I am good at waiting. I learned it from him.
He looks back at me, and his eyes are hard and certain in a way that hits me somewhere behind the sternum. “I am.”
I press my lips together. My throat is tight, and I hate it. “You should have told me.”
“I could not tell anyone.”
“I’m not anyone. I’m your daughter.”
“Which is precisely why I couldn’t tell you.” His voice drops, and the control in it costs him something. I can see it. “You would have blown the entire thing apart if you knew.”
I open my mouth.
Close it again.
He is not wrong, and we both know it.
“That is not the point,” I say anyway.
“It is exactly the point.” He leans forward slightly. “I have spent months building something that will work. Not something that will make you feel better for a week before Petrov burns the world down to retrieve her and the children.”
A loud knock on the door distracts me.
“Galina, open up.” It’s Laszlo.
I keep eye contact with my dad so he can’t wiggle away as I unlock and open the door. I take a step back as Baron barges into the room like a thundercloud. He snatches the phone from me with a low growl.
“Viktor, you fuck.”
“Baron,” Dad says calmly. “What is this about?”
I look at Laszlo. He grimaces back at me with a look that screams apology, but I don’t know what for.
Until I do.
“Oh, you didn’t,” I hiss.
“I had to,” he hisses back as Dad and Baron get into a verbal slanging match in Russian that turns the air blue. “He knew I was hiding something. He always knows.”
I huff out a breath. “Now what?”
“He has a plan.”
“So does my dad. You were right.”
“You’re going to want to hear Baron’s plan,” Laszlo says carefully.
A loud thump cuts my gaze back to the phone. “No,” Dad roars in English. “I have worked on this plan. It is meticulous.”
“Mine is better,” Baron spits out.
“Going in there with all guns blazing is the worst idea I have ever heard, Voronov, and I’ve heard some pretty shit concepts in my time.”
“What?” I say with a look at Laszlo.
He shrugs. “Turns out Baron disapproves of young women being raped and beaten.”
I close my eyes as tears prick my eyes. Raped. I have never used that word. I couldn’t. I open them again and blink them back. “Let me guess, he also disapproves of those young women being smuggled through his territory without his knowledge.”
“Pretty much.”
I swallow hard and move forward. “We need to discuss this calmly,” I say, interrupting the two men.
Unexpectedly, both men go quiet.
It is the quiet of two pakhans who are not used to being interrupted by anyone, let alone a woman standing in a sewing room, looking like a referee at a boxing match.
Baron looks at me.
Dad looks at me through the screen.
Laszlo looks at the ceiling, as if asking God for patience.
“Galina,” Dad starts.
“No,” I say. “You both seem to have forgotten this is about Yelena. Not whose idea is better.”
“She’s right,” Laszlo says, backing me up, moving to stand behind me. “We all want the same thing.”
“Petrov is a little pissant who needs a kick in the proverbials,” Baron says loftily. “I’ve been waiting for an excuse. Just waiting.”
“Blasting our way in there could hurt Yelena or the children,” I say calmly. “Dad, you need to tell us your plan, and you need to do it now.”
Dad’s jaw tightens on the screen. Baron stares back with the particular expression of a man who has decided he is going to win this argument by sheer force of personality. Dad’s gaze cuts to me, and something in it makes my throat tight before he looks back at Baron, then at me.
“I have a plan,” he says at last. “A real one. It is already in motion, and the less said about it now, the better for everyone involved.”
Baron makes a disgusted noise, but Dad keeps going.
“What matters is this: Yelena is not being left where she is. She knows enough to do what is required of her, and the children are accounted for. Timing matters. Routine matters. If either slips, the risk multiplies.”
I hold his gaze and force myself to stay still. “So she is getting out.”
“If nothing interferes,” he says. “Yes.”
The word lands hard enough to hollow me out. Not relief, exactly. Relief would be too easy. But for the first time in three years, I am no longer asking whether anyone is going to act. They already are.
Laszlo steps in behind me, close enough that I feel the heat of him at my back. “Then our role is simple,” he says. “We do not trip over a plan that is already moving. We make sure, if it wobbles, she is not left without options.”
Baron’s gaze flicks to him. “Contingency.”
“Exactly,” Laszlo says.
Dad’s expression stays hard, but I catch the smallest shift in it. Approval, maybe. Or surprise. “Then we leave it where it is,” I say. “And we stop adding more moving parts than necessary.”
Dad watches me carefully. “You agree to that?”
“I agree that Yelena does not need different people trying to save her in different ways,” I say. “She needs one plan to hold.”
Baron folds his arms. “And if it doesn’t?”
I look at Laszlo before I answer. “Then she needs people who are already in position to move fast.”
Laszlo’s hand settles on my back. “That, I can do.”
“Good,” Baron says. “Because I refuse to sit blind if Petrov’s name is anywhere near this.”
Dad exhales through his nose. “Contingency only.”
“Contingency only,” Laszlo agrees.
I draw in a breath and hear my own voice go cold. “Then we remove the one weakness still sitting in the middle of all this.”
Dad’s eyes narrow. “Meaning?”
“The marriage,” I say. “Not the church ceremony. The legal reality of it. If everything else is already in motion, then I will not sit here and let my future remain the one loose thread in the room.”
Baron’s expression sharpens. Laszlo goes very still behind me.
“Civil ceremony,” I say. “As soon as possible. The public wedding goes ahead because it has to. But this part?” I glance back at Laszlo, then return my attention to the screen. “This part is done first.”
Dad studies me in silence.
“You are sure,” he says.
“No,” I say. “I’m ruthless. Civil ceremony today, if possible. The church wedding proceeds as planned because it needs to.” If this is the cage they’ve built for me, I’ll make it mine. I’ll enter this marriage contract not as a sacrificial lamb, but as a wolf in white silk.
Behind me, Laszlo lets out a breath that sounds dangerously close to approval. “Today is ambitious,” he says.
“You have a pakhan standing in the room,” I say without turning around. “Tell me he can’t make a phone call, pay a few backhanders and have a registrar here within the hour for a legally binding wedding.”
A short silence.
“I know a man who owes me a favour,” Baron says, and the satisfaction in his voice is deeply irritating.
“Of course you do,” I mutter.
Dad looks at me for a long moment. “You have thought about this quickly.”
“I have been thinking about Yelena for three years, since I saw her dragged up the aisle by Uncle. She needs us, heads clear, and on point. We do what we must.”
“You’re amazing,” Laszlo whispers in my ear, moving closer.
“Ruthless,” I say. “I’m done pretending to be anything else.”