Page 34 of Bratva Baby

I smile slightly. “Nobody’s invisible.”

Kolya watches my face while I listen. The contact keeps going. “There’s more. Separate line lit up an hour ago. Leonidov men are asking questions there too, and they’re doing it quietly through private security and older drivers. Not police, not open channels. Family work.”

That wipes the smile off my mouth. “How many?”

“Enough to make the city bad for her fast.”

I end the call and hand the phone back.

Kolya folds his arms. “If it’s real, we should put it upstairs first and get a cleaner picture before you move.”

“It is real.”

“You don’t know that yet.”

I grab my coat from the back of the chair and start for the door. “I know enough.”

He follows at once. “Anton.”

I keep walking. “Get me the Budapest file, every freight contact we’ve got within reach, and a car downstairs in two minutes.”

He catches up beside me. “This is exactly how men walk into other people’s traps.”

I hit the corridor, don’t break stride, and button my coat as we move. “Then Maks should’ve built a better one.”

Kolya exhales hard through his nose. “Stop just a second.”

I pause at the stair landing and look at him. “A Leonidov woman got into my bed, vanished before dawn, and now half her family is hunting her across borders because she knows something worth burying. She’s in Budapest, they’re closing in, and I’m not staying here while slower men hold a meeting about it.”

His face blanches, but he knows better than to waste another second trying to block me. By the time we hit the ground floor, I’m already pulling up routes in my head.

If Sofiya wants to keep running, she’s going to have to do it with me closing the distance.

11

SOFIYA

Budapest is burned the moment I see the watcher and read Maks’s note, and after that everything in me shifts from shock to time.

I go inside, lock the door, and pull the curtains before I do anything else. Then I put Maks’s note on the table, take out a pen, and start writing on the back of an old receipt.

Leave in twenty-four hours.

No flight if I can avoid it.

No straight line.

No calls unless absolutely necessary.

I stop, look at the list, then add one more.

Don’t waste what I have.

That’s the part that complicates everything.

If I were only trying to survive, I could stuff the cash into my coat, take the forged passport, grab the gun, and vanish by morning. Budapest gave me enough time to prepare for that. In the first week here, before I found the office job and before my body started betraying me in new ways, I spent every spare hour mapping exits.

I walked Keleti at rush hour and again close to midnight to see which departures swallowed people whole. I stood on platforms with a paper cup of coffee and watched who got checked and who didn’t. I rode trams out toward districts nobody romanticizes and checked short-term rentals that asked for cash and very few questions. I walked the riverfront, the bus terminal, and two separate coach depots to learn which routes ran south fast and which clerks cared more about their cigarettes than passports.