Page 100 of Bratva Baby

Maks’s eyes flick once toward his men. “You heard lies, Father.”

“I heard my brother say your name,” Grigor shouts, and every man in the yard hears that part. “I heard you tell him he was circling things that no longer belonged to him. I saw the payment trail László Varga sent through Zhenya Markina.”

His voice is breaking with the strain of how panicked he clearly is. “I saw the consultant’s name and the private supply transfer! Do you think I am stupid enough not to know what that means?”

Maks’s face changes.

It doesn’t break all at once. That would be too satisfying, and Maks has spent too many years training his face to survive rooms. But the polish thins. His mouth pulls too tight at one corner, his eyes jump toward the gate, and his grip on the phone shifts like he wants to crush it.

I know him then—the future of the family or the perfect cousin with the clean jacket and the patient little smile. Just a spoiled child who got caught near the broken thing.

“You’re trusting her over me,” Maks pouts.

Grigor answers so fast it cuts into him. “I’m trusting my dead brother’s voice over yours.”

For the first time since I arrived, I see real fear in Maks.

He tries to cover it by turning from me, but he can’t move far because I’m still close to the shed and his men are watching. He lowers his voice, probably hoping the rest of us lose pieces of the call. Grigor doesn’t let him.

“You will let Sofiya go,” my uncle says. “You will pull your men away from the Reznikov team, you will leave whatever records they touched where they are, and you will come home.”

Maks swallows. “Father, you’re making a mistake.”

“No,” Grigor says. “I made one when I believed grief had made her suspicious instead of well-trained.”

The words hit me in the chest.

For one second, I’m back in my father’s office, twelve years old, staring at a vendor number while he waited for me to see the wrong digit. I hated that training some days. I hated how he made childhood feel like preparation for a war nobody named.

He had been trying to leave me hands steady enough for this.

Maks glances at me, and the look on his face turns mean because he sees something there he doesn’t get to touch. “She has been sleeping with Reznikov,” he says into the phone. “She’s carrying his child, and you’re letting her turn family business over to him because she’s angry.”

Grigor’s answer comes colder. “You killed her father.”

Maks’s mouth opens.

Nothing comes out.

Then he snaps it shut and finds his voice again. “That isn’t proven.”

“It will be proven enough for our table.” Grigor’s voice roughens. “Let her go, Maksim. Walk away from her now, or I swear to God I’ll give you something to cry about once you get home.”

The yard goes dead for one clean second.

I shouldn’t feel a flash of dark humor right now, but I do. My uncle has threatened governments, unions, customs men, dock owners, and once a cousin who overcharged him for a restaurant deal. Somehow, this is the first threat from him that sounds entirely personal.

Maks hears it too.

His face twists before he can stop it. “You’d choose her.”

Grigor almost roars through the phone. “I am choosing the family you tried to gut from the inside.”

“You sat at the head of a table you didn’t earn,” Maks snaps, and now the child is out in the open, furious, red-faced, and ugly with it. “You let old men and accountants turn us into paperwork. You let Reznikov dogs step into rooms that should’ve belonged to us. I built something with strength, and all of you were too comfortable to understand it.”

The man near the gate looks away.

That’s satisfying too, because men can follow ambition, greed, even fear if the money is steady enough. But they don’t like hearing the man paying them shout like a boy denied a toy.