Page 98 of Bratva Baby

I look down at the screen. Grigor Leonidov.

Maks looks back at me, and now I smile. “Answer it.”

27

SOFIYA

Maks stares at the name on his phone long enough for me to watch the color shift under his skin.

Grigor Leonidov.

For most of my life, that name has meant a chair at the head of the table, a room straightening before he speaks, men swallowing answers they were stupid enough to prepare in advance. My uncle has plenty of sins on his soul, and I’m not confused about the kind of man he is, but he knows the family machine better than anyone living.

Maks knows that too.

The phone rings again.

His fingers tighten around it, and the gloved hand still gripping my coat goes slack enough that I breathe for the first time since he lunged. My wrist hurts from where he slammed it against the repair shed, and the scarf bites at my throat because he nearly found the real drive hidden inside the seam.

“Answer it,” I repeat.

Maks’s eyes lift to mine. “What did you do?”

“What you taught me to do,” I say. “I made sure the room turned before you could finish talking.”

The phone keeps ringing.

One of his men shifts near the gate, and that tiny move tells me more than his face does. They don’t know whether to protect him, grab me, or wait for the call to decide the shape of the next order. Men like that get paid to follow certainty, and Maks has lost just enough of it to make them nervous.

He answers before the line can die.

“Father,” he says, and he almost pulls it off.

The phone isn’t on speaker, but Grigor’s voice hits hard enough to carry. “Tell me where she is.”

Maks’s face goes still.

“She called you,” he says.

“She sent me enough to make me call you first instead of sending men straight to your apartment,” Grigor snaps. “Where is my niece?”

I should feel victory then, but what moves through me is rougher. It has teeth. I’m standing in a yard with a bruise forming on my wrist, Anton’s blood somewhere behind that archive building, my father’s murderer close enough to touch, and my uncle is finally hearing the shape of what Maks built.

It shouldn’t have taken this much.

It shouldn’t have taken all of this.

Maks looks at me while he speaks. “She’s safe.”

Grigor’s laugh comes through the phone, ugly and furious. “Don’t use that word while my brother’s daughter is standing inside your mess.”

Maks’s mouth tightens. “You’re reacting to panic. She has been unstable for weeks. She ran, she fell into Reznikov hands, and now she’s throwing pieces of dirty paper around because she knows she can’t explain where she has been.”

I almost laugh.

He still thinks the story can save him.

My mind goes back to the library after Anton left for Khimki, to the mess of papers on the desk, the cold pizza on the sideboard, and the phone sitting beside the Khimki schedule.