8. Sofia #3
Dima might be young, and he might make bad jokes at my expense about vegetables and how lacking I am in culinary techniques, but he is not stupid. No one working this close to my uncle’s inner world, whether staff or otherwise, survives this long by sheer luck alone.
“But if they wanted him dead, he’d be dead.” He continues, “He’s part of the Pact. They don’t tend to eat their own.”
Interesting.
That certainly explains a lot.
Until now, the Iron Pact has existed in my mind as a faceless thing that was more rumor than reality.
A shadow behind shadows only spoken about in lowered voices.
I have always understood, in a vague sense, that my uncle’s ties to what he does for a living would put him in the crosshairs of other powerful men.
Ones who move money and influence the state with violence and blackmail.
While it’s certainly surprising to know Nikolai is not simply a predator stopping by to remind those beneath him of their place but a co-worker of sorts, things are finally beginning to click.
It makes sense, what Dima is saying. Kings don’t murder other kings in public unless they’re ready to inherit the war that follows.
If the Iron Pact truly holds the kind of power people here seem to believe it does, then the attack on my uncle would not have been as sloppy as it was.
It wouldn’t have ended with him wounded but alive, recovering in his estate.
He would have been dead and disposed of before any of us knew what happened.
Which means someone outside of the Iron Pact is responsible and they’re nowhere to be found.
I stare at the crate of herbs in my arms, suddenly reminded of Italy. I’m pulled back to Giulia’s tiny apartment kitchen while Matteo complains from the table that studying political theory should be classified as a legal form of torture.
I miss the days where my life consisted of worrying about passing mid-terms and catching up with my friends after classes.
The careless drama of other people’s love lives in my dorm and the way Giulia always took up too much space at our small tables with her notes and bright, chaotic certainty.
I miss Matteo drawing terrible caricatures in the margins of serious textbooks while I tried not to laugh hard enough to get us thrown out of the library.
Now, that life seems so far removed from the one I’m living now. A pretty fictional place I wrote for myself in another language I no longer know. Italy feels softer every time I think about it, and it makes me miss it that much more.
Long after Dima dismisses me from the kitchen, almost fondly by the time dinner service is done with its prep, I feel like I’m floating above myself.
Chef doesn’t thank me, but he does hand me a wrapped slice of warm bread before I leave and says nothing when I take it.
Dima salutes me with a fresh carrot from across the way before getting wrapped up in something else again.
By the time I step back into the main hallway, the estate has changed again.
The kitchen noise fades behind me, swallowed by the distance.
Out here, everything returns to hush. The house is quieter this late in the afternoon, caught in that narrow hour between daytime movement and evening formality.
I wander the halls back to my room.
When I finally return to it, it’s almost exactly how I left it this morning. Someone has been in to straighten the bed sheets and lay out fresh towels for a bath later and drawn the curtains halfway back so the afternoon light spills across the floor.
I stand against the closed door for a long moment, listening to the quiet. There are no immediate footsteps roaming outside my door, especially none that remind me of Rowan’s. It irritates me that I notice the absence of him like this.
After pushing away from the door, I cross the room and drop the wrapped bread onto the desk and dig out my laptop from my still unpacked bag.
Most of my things remain trapped inside the suitcases I brought with me, folded and crushed from the frantic packing in Italy.
I haven’t had the will to unpack properly because every time I tried, it just felt like surrender.
I refuse to give my cage the courtesy of decorating it to feel more like home.
The laptop hums softly when I power it on.
My fingers hover over the keys for a long time before I type the name I haven’t allowed myself to think in years.
My father’s.
When the search results load, nothing meaningful appears.
It’s the usual scraps of old known addresses and references in documents too vague to be helpful.
I start with the basics in the form of old news articles and publicly accessible records, anything that might have survived the years of careful erasure.
My mother’s obituary is brief when I find it, preserved in a digital archive with a grainy scan that looks like it was lifted directly from a newspaper.
There is no mention of the man whose DNA I share, no mention of the marriage that must have existed even if everyone has spent years pretending it did not. The obituary mentions me and my uncle and nothing more.
I dig deeper into social media archives and old forum posts next, finding a genealogy site that still has fragments of public records from before I was born, though half the links are broken and the rest lead to files scrubbed of anything that actually matters.
A marriage record should exist somewhere…
or a birth record. Property transfers? Photos from before his disappearance? Anything?
My mother appears in public records before her death always attached to her maiden name. It isn’t until I find my own birth records that my father finally appears. After that, it’s nothing again.
None of this seems normal.
People leave traces, even those who wish to vanish.
Especially people attached to families like mine.
There should be more, something to connect him to the Kuznetsov family outside of a single birth record.
A photo from a gala event, a business document, even a lawsuit.
Rich people produce records all the time with how much they move money around.
How is it that my father existed outside of that surveillance network?
Unless my uncle purposefully erased all traces of him.
Now with my uncle connected to the Iron Pact, more of those theories are beginning to take shape inside my head.
Ugly ones.
Dangerous ones.
Could my father have known what really happened to my mother and fled because of it?
Is that why Ivan refuses to speak about him?
Did something happen after her death with the Iron Pact that forced my father to run for his life?
Who benefited from making sure everyone believed he was nothing more than a ghost?
I push back from the desk, suddenly unable to sit still.
I think of Ivan’s face when I asked about my mother and the way the softness disappeared in his eyes when he told me some wounds do not heal better when being reopened.
Maybe they are right.
Maybe the truth is dangerous.
But so is ignorance.
Ignorance is what got me pulled from Italy in the middle of my life and put me on a plane with armed men.
It’s what has trapped me inside this house, dependent on the mercy of people who have already decided that protection looks like control, with no answers and certainly no avenue to find out anything myself.
I return to the desk.
This time, I open a blank document and begin making notes.
My fingers move fast as I type, the document filling with fragments of what I remember about my father from my childhood and the half-formed theories I’m beginning to cultivate.
This is what Rowan warned me about, I think, the allure of asking questions I had no business knowing the answers to.
I sit back, staring at the growing document on my screen, the digital beginning of something that feels both reckless and necessary. I don’t know what I’m building yet. A timeline, a case to present to my uncle when the time is right to question him again. Maybe both.
All I know is that I refuse to give up until I find what I’m looking for.