Page 5 of Bratva Baby

Grief doesn’t hit me cleanly anymore. It arrives in muscle memory, in the way my hand reaches for the lamp he preferred before I remember he’s been dead a year and a half.

I set my clutch on the side table, strip off one diamond bracelet that clicks too loudly against the desk, and wake the terminal.

If there’s trouble in freight, it’ll leave a footprint. Maybe not in the main files. Maybe not in anything obvious. But panic spreads sloppily through timing, and tonight I only need one thread to pull.

I start with the container series attached to the protected shipment I heard mentioned last week in passing, a reference so brief, most people would’ve missed it.

Then I widen.

Declarations. Routing sheets. Customs hold flags. Insurance annotations. Warehouse staging. Cross-border transfer timing.

Three screens in, my pulse changes.

A container group marked Closed appears again under a secondary transit code that should never touch it. Not once, but twice.

One declaration lists machine components.

The weight says otherwise. A refrigerated split shipment out of Finland lines up a little too neatly with a Baltic billing adjustment from twelve days earlier.

Money moves through an account I know belongs to one of the outer companies, then vanishes under internal reconciliation tags that make no sense.

I sit back, then lean in again. Someone built a private corridor inside the legitimate one.

I open payment layering and follow the trail, slow and careful now. One false invoice.

Two renamed vendor references.

An internal authorization path that should never have cleared without higher approval.

Then a number I know by heart because my father made me memorize every branch structure worth fearing.

Maks.

My mouth goes dry.

I dig deeper, pulling archived route files and old dispute references, and the ugliness builds. This is off-book movement through Baltic and Finnish lines, hidden inside normal freight flow, feeding money somewhere the main house isn’t meant to see.

Then I see Maks’s name tied to the payments, and everything clicks into place.

He’s using hidden freight routes through Baltic and Finnish lines to move money and protected cargo outside the official Leonidov books.

That means he’s building something private, something he controls without my uncle or the rest of the house fully seeing it.

One of the buried payment references connects back to the old intermediary case, the murder that helped turn Leonidov and Reznikov tension into a blood feud.

That means Maks tied his off-book operation to the same old wound both families have been living inside for years.

He’s building a war structure under the family’s nose, and if this breaks open, it won’t stay a money problem. It’ll turn into blood.

I immediately suspect that my father knew.

My throat itches as I reach into my bag, pull out the slim personal drive I keep for work emergencies, and start copying what I can without tripping alerts.

My heart pounds harder with every second the transfer bar crawls across the screen.

Come on.

Faster.