Page 96 of Bratva Baby

“What is this?”

“What you asked for.”

His voice drops. “Don’t insult me.”

“You asked for records. Those are records.”

Maks goes still in a way that makes the men near him shift their weight. He isn’t a man who screams first. He likes his anger folded neatly until someone else bleeds from the creases. “You thought you could hand me garbage and walk out.”

I shrug my shoulders though my whole body has gone cold. “I thought you’d want to know how it feels.”

His hand closes around the folder until the paper bends. “Where is the real package?”

“Safe.”

“With Reznikov?”

“No.”

His eyes narrow. “Zhenya.”

I don’t answer.

“Yuri?”

Still nothing.

He steps closer, and this time, the old mask slips enough that I see the man underneath. This is the man who built a private corridor inside family freight and smiled while everyone else called it stability.

“You have no idea what you’re doing,” he whispers, his eyes shining with an odd, almost red glow.

“I know exactly what I’m doing.”

“No, Sofiya. You’re playing at war because a Reznikov put his hands on you and made you feel chosen.”

I don’t let him see how scared I am. “And you’re still talking about sex because the freight conversation got too difficult.”

His jaw works once. “Your father would be embarrassed by you,” he says.

That insult almost gets through, but I smile anyway. “My father knew what you were.”

Maks’s smile comes back, smaller now. “Your father knew many things. That was his problem.”

The yard noise fades behind the sound of my pulse.

I stare at him. “Say that again.”

He watches me carefully, and I know he realizes he’s stepped too close to truth. But Maks likes injury. He likes the second after the blade enters and before the blood shows.

“He knew too much,” Maks says. “He kept circling the same accounts, asking quiet questions, looking at me across tables like he’d already written the ending. Men like that become dangerous.”

My mouth goes dry.

The folder hangs from his hand now, forgotten.

“You killed him.”

He gives me a patient look, the same one he used when we were children and I caught him lying before the adults did. “He was warned.”