Page 109 of Bratva Baby

“Yes.”

“That’s tidy.”

“I thought you’d approve.”

She walks toward me, takes one look at my bruised knuckles, and sighs like I’ve personally exhausted her. “You hit him.”

“Twice.”

“Only twice?”

“The boss interrupted.”

“Rude.”

I catch her by the waist and pull her carefully against me. The baby shifts between us, and every time that happens, something inside me goes stupid and reverent no matter how hard I try to look normal.

Sofiya notices and her hand comes up to my face. “You’re doing that thing again.”

“What thing?”

She smiles lightly. “Looking at my stomach like it might brief you on policy.”

“It might. She already has opinions.”

“She?”

I shrug. “Feels right.”

Sofiya’s eyes soften, then narrow. “If you’re right, you’ll be unbearable.”

“I’m already unbearable.”

She laughs at that. “Yes, but this will give you fresh material.”

I kiss her before she can keep talking, because she is laughing and tired and alive in my arms, and there are nights when I still wake thinking of that yard gate and her walking into Maks’s reach wearing my coat and a lie.

The larger world moves because men like us make it move, or because women like Sofiya reach under the table and pull the right wire.

Leonidovs and Reznikovs don’t become friends. That would be childish.

We become aligned where profit demands it and dangerous where memory insists. Grigor sends a formal apology without using the word. The boss accepts it without using the word either. That is how old men with blood on their hands pretend manners still matter.

The Baltic and Finnish routes get cleaned in pieces. Some brokers lose licenses. Some drivers disappear into retirement so sudden, it makes their wives very happy and their friends very nervous. Two cold yards change ownership. One customs officer develops a strong interest in leaving Russia and gets allowed to do so after signing papers that make several men safer.

The records from Varga’s boxes become the spine of the cleanup. Sofiya reads them faster than any man I put in front of them, and after the third time she catches a false vendor trail before my accounting team does, I stop pretending she’s consulting and give her a desk.

She hates the desk. “It faces the wall,” she says.

“It’s secure.”

“It faces the wall.”

“It has three locked drawers.”

“Anton.”

I look up from the report in my hand. “Yes.”