Katerina
The drive back feels endless.
I spend the first five minutes calling the house over and over even though I already know no one is going to tell me anything useful until I’m standing there in front of them and can force it out myself. My hands are shaking so badly I hit the wrong contact twice.
Roman takes the phone from me once, quietly, and says, “Stop.”
I snatch it back. “Don’t.”
He says nothing.
That only makes me angrier.
“I left them,” I say, staring out the window because if I look at him I’ll scream. “I left them.”
Roman keeps his eyes on the road. “You didn’t know.”
“I should have known.”
“You couldn’t.”
“I don’t need your input.”
He takes that without reacting.
I sit there breathing unevenly, hating him for being calm, hating myself for leaving, hating the whole world for continuing to exist outside the window while my children are somewhere I can’t reach.
By the time we turn into the drive, my heart is pounding so hard it hurts.
Roman pulls up short of the steps.
I’m already reaching for the handle when he says, “Katerina.”
I turn back.
His face is hard and controlled again, but his voice is quieter than it was in the car. “I’ll stay out of sight. If you need me, call.”
For one second, I just look at him.
Then I nod, get out, and run up the steps without another word.
The front hall is chaos.
Mama is there almost immediately, grabbing both my arms so hard it hurts. “Katerina—”
“Where are they?”
Her face is wrecked. I have never seen her like this. Pale, crying openly, hair half fallen out of its pins.
“We don’t know.”
The words hit like a physical blow.
I stare at her. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“They were in the schoolroom,” she says, breathless, frantic. “The tutor left for ten minutes—ten minutes—to get Sofia’s reading book from the nursery because she said she wouldn’t finish the lesson without the right one, and when she came back they were gone.”
“Gone?”
Mama nods, crying harder now. “The back corridor door was open. One of the side cars is missing. No one saw—”
“No one saw?” My voice cracks high and sharp. “What do you mean no one saw?”
Footsteps come from the hall. Irina.
She arrives already furious, already dressed for judgment, not grief. Her eyes go first to me, then behind me, and she stops cold when she sees Roman step into the house a second later.
That gives her all the ammunition she needs.
“Unbelievable,” she says.
I turn to her so fast Mama lets go of my arms. “You.”
Irina laughs once, bitter and disgusted. “Yes, me, apparently, because no one else in this house is allowed to ask where you’ve been while your children disappeared.”
Mama says, “Irina, please.”
Irina ignores her. “Where were you?”
I don’t answer immediately, and that only makes her surer of herself.
“We’ve been looking for those children for the last hour,” she says. “Your mother is beside herself. The whole house is in uproar. And you walk in like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like someone who has been somewhere she shouldn’t have been.”
I can barely breathe. “You think this is the time?”
“I think it’s exactly the time.”
That’s when Papa comes in from the study.
He still has his phone in his hand. Two of his men are behind him. He takes in the room in one glance: Mama crying, Irina furious, me standing there in my coat with my face probably telling on me more than I realize.
“What happened?” he asks.
Irina says, “Ask your daughter where she’s been.”
His eyes shift to me.
I should lie. I know I should. I know it instantly. I should say I went for air. I went to the chapel. I drove around because I couldn’t think. Anything but the truth.
But I’m too frightened and too guilty to lie well.
“I was with Roman.”
The room goes still.
Mama closes her eyes.
Irina actually looks pleased.
Papa’s face does not change much, but I know him too well not to see the anger move in underneath.
“With him,” he says.
“Yes.”
His voice is quiet when he says the next part. That makes it worse. “While your children were missing.”
It hits exactly where it should.
I feel it in my chest, my throat, my stomach. “I didn’t know,” I say.
“No,” he says. “You didn’t.”
Mama reaches for me again, but I can’t look at her. If I do, I’ll fall apart.
Irina says, “Unbelievable.”
I turn on her. “Please shut up.”
“Katerina,” Mama says softly.
“No,” Irina says, louder now. “She does not get to speak to me like that. Not after disappearing and leaving her children in this house while she—”
She stops herself, but not out of kindness.
The damage is done. Something in me gives way.
“This house?” I say. “You mean this very safe house? This protected house? The one where children can vanish in the middle of the day, and no one sees anything?”
Papa says, “Enough.”
I look at him. “No,” I seethe. “Not enough.”
He comes a step closer. “This is not helping.”
“My children are gone.”
“Yes,” he says. “And shouting in the hall will not bring them back.” The coolness in his voice hits me like a tidal wave.
It makes me feel sick.
I laugh once, and there is no humor in it at all. “You always sound like that.”
His eyes narrow. “Like what?”
“Like this is a problem to manage.”
“It is a problem to manage.”
“They are not a problem,” I say. “They are my children.”
Mama starts crying harder.
Irina says, “Maybe you should have remembered that before you walked out.”
“Don’t say another word to me,” I say.
“Katerina—” My father says in a warning.
But I can’t stop.
I look at him and all I can think is that he’s too calm. He was too calm after the shooting. He’s too calm now. He looks furious, yes, but not lost. Not shocked. Not like a man whose grandchildren have just been taken from his own house.
And that frightens me more than anything else in the room.
“Who got into your security?” I ask him.
He goes still. It’s only a second, but I see it.
I say it again. “Who got into your house?”
His face hardens. “This is not the time.”
“It’s exactly the time.”
“Katerina.”
“No. Don’t.” I shake my head, and now I can hear myself unraveling but I can’t stop. “First the shooting. Now this. I can’t believe you would just let it happen.”
“What are you trying to say?” he says.
Mama says, frightened now, “Please, not now.”
I don’t look at her. I keep looking at him.
Because for the first time in my life, I think I’m seeing my father clearly and I hate what that might mean.
He lowers his voice. “Go upstairs.”
I stare at him. “What?”
“Go upstairs. Change. Get hold of yourself.”
“My children have been kidnapped.”
“Yes,” he says. “And I will deal with it.”
That’s the exact wrong thing to say.
The words come out of me before I can stop them.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
The silence after that is absolute.
Mama stops crying for one breath.
Irina looks from me to Papa, suddenly less pleased than she was a minute ago.
My father’s face changes very slightly. Not loss of control. He would never give me that. But something colder moves in. “You’re upset,” he says.
“Yes.”
“You’re also in no state to question me.”
“I’m in exactly the right state.”
He takes one more step toward me. “Do not make this harder than it already is.”
I almost laugh again. As if this is a household inconvenience. As if we are discussing scandal and not children and fear and the sick certainty that something inside this house has already gone rotten.
Mama touches my shoulder. “Come upstairs with me.”
I don’t move.
Not because I want to fight. Because if I move now, if I let them send me upstairs and close the door on me, I will lose whatever little ground I still have.
Papa gives in so suddenly that for a second I think I imagined it.
He looks at me, then at Mama, then at the hall full of people pretending not to listen, and something in his face settles.
“Come,” he says.
Just that.
No apology. No concession. But he turns toward the study instead of sending me upstairs, and that’s enough.
I follow him at once.
Mama comes too. Irina starts to, but Papa says, without looking back, “No.”
She stops.
The study door shuts behind us with a heavy click. The room smells like old paper, leather, and the faint trace of Papa’s cologne. One of his security men is already there by the monitor wall, pale and sweating, clearly wishing he had been born into a simpler profession.
Papa says, “Show it.”
The man fumbles only once before pulling up the feed.
We watch in silence.
School corridor. Empty at first. Then the tutor leaving in a hurry, distracted, exactly as Mama said. A minute passes. Then another.
Then he appears.
My whole body goes cold.
The same man.
The same broad shoulders. The same walk. Even through the bad angle and flat security light, I know him instantly. The guard who stopped me the day before. The one with the tattoo on his arm.
There is no confusion now. No maybe.
He comes down the corridor like he belongs there.
The side door opens. Two more men move fast and low. One takes Nikolai. One lifts Sofia before she even understands what’s happening. She fights for half a second. My throat closes at the sight of it. In and out in less than thirty seconds.
This was planned.
I turn to Papa so fast the chair behind me almost topples.
“You let his men into this house.”
The words come out raw.
Papa looks at the paused screen and, for the first time in my life, I see real color leave his face.
“You knew,” I say. “You knew there were Morozov men in this house.”
Mama whispers, “Sergei…”
He doesn’t answer her.
I step toward him. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
Still nothing.
The security man looks like he wants the floor to open under him.
I point at the screen. “That’s one of Andrei Morozov’s men. He stopped me yesterday. He was inside your security. Inside our house. And now my children are gone.”
Papa finally turns to me.
When he speaks, his voice is lower than usual. “I didn’t know about him.”
I laugh once, harshly. “That’s supposed to comfort me?”
“No,” he says. “It isn’t.”
There’s something in his face I have never seen before. Guilt.
The room seems to narrow.
Mama stares at him. “Sergei.”
I look between them, and suddenly I know we are standing on the edge of something much worse than I thought.
Papa sits down slowly behind the desk, like his knees have remembered they’re made of bone. He looks older in that moment than I have ever allowed him to be in my head.
I don’t sit.
I don’t breathe properly either.
Then he says, “I should have known that sooner or later they’d find me.”
I frown. “What are you talking about?”
“Moscow,” he says.
My mouth goes dry.
The monitor hums quietly behind him. My children are still frozen on the screen, one frame from being taken, and now somehow, we are standing in the shadow of Moscow again.
“What about Moscow?” I ask.
He looks older suddenly. Not weak. Just older. Like the last five years have all caught up with him at once.
He closes his eyes for one moment and opens them again.
“Andrei Morozov was getting too strong,” he says. “Too certain he could move against everyone else and come out clean. I thought if pressure was applied in the right place, he’d be forced back. I thought it would weaken him.”
The words feel unreal in the room.
“You,” I say, because I need to hear it plainly, “You were the one who got Lev killed.”
“Yes,” he says. “But I did all of this for this family. The one I have kept alive while men like Andrei Morozov tried to turn all of us into property. I never wanted you to get married to Lev, but it was worse when he humiliated you and got away with it and I realized he would keep doing it, hold power over us.”
I shake my head. “You started this.”
“I tried to stop him,” he says. “I did it for you.”
“You started this,” I say. “Now don’t make it about me.”
The second time I say it, he flinches.
Just barely. But I see it.
Papa looks back at the screen, and when he speaks again, his voice is lower. “I thought I could use his son.”
For one second, I don’t understand. Then I do.
Roman. He means Roman.
My blood goes cold.
Papa continues, and now the words come slower, as if each one is being dragged out of him.
“Andrei had a son he did not trust. A son with enough anger in him to make people believe anything. Roman was already moving against him. Already building his own men, his own channels, his own name. So when Moscow began to crack, I let the blame turn toward him.”
My voice drops. “You betrayed Roman.”
His eyes look up at me.
Something flickers across his face, and then I understand.
He knows. He has known.
Papa sees the realization hit me.
For a second, neither of us speaks.
Then he says, carefully, “So you know too.”
The words go through me like ice.
Mama looks between us. “Know what?”
I don’t answer her. I can’t.
Papa looks at me like he wants to say something fatherly, something commanding, something that will put the room back where it belongs.
But there is no room anymore.
There is only the screen behind him, my children gone from it, and the truth standing between us with nowhere left to hide.
I step back from him. For the first time in my life, my father looks afraid of what I might do next.
And he should be.