The justification sat between us like smoke. Like the kind of lie people told themselves until it became true through repetition. And something in me—something that had been quiet and obedient and carefully controlled my entire life—cracked open.
"You had a choice." My voice came out shakier than I wanted, but it came. "You chose business over family."
Alexei's jaw clenched. “We chose not to kill him.”
Dmitry shifted his weight, hands moving away from his sides—not threatening exactly, but preparing for violence that might become necessary. Ivan just watched me with those distant eyes, cataloging my defiance like data to be analyzed later.
But I wasn't done. My father had died believing himself a failure, believing the exile had been justified, believing he deserved the gambling debts and the isolation and the slow destruction of everything he'd tried to build. And these men—these strangers who shared my blood—had let him believe it.
"He was desperate." I was shaking now, but the words kept coming. "My mother was dying and you—you cast him out instead of helping. You let him spiral into debt and gambling and eventually into selling his own daughter to settle what he owed. So don't stand there and tell me you had no choice. You had every choice. You just made the one that was easier."
Silence. The kind that pressed against eardrums and made breathing feel difficult.
Then Dmitry moved—not toward me but forward, stepping into the light with predator grace that made Kostya shift positions near the door. When he spoke, his voice was pure Brooklyn, Russian accent barely detectable under decades of American streets.
"The Belyaevs want you." Not a question. A statement that demanded explanation. "Why?"
The shift in topic was tactical—moving away from uncomfortable history toward immediate threat. I should have felt grateful for the redirect. Instead I felt cheated, like the confrontation I'd needed had been stolen before reaching any kind of resolution.
But Nikolai was already responding, his Pakhan mask fully in place. "Mikhail was taken Saturday morning. They're holding him hostage in exchange for Sophie. Twenty-four hour deadline."
"Why her?" Ivan spoke for the first time, his voice quieter than his brothers' but carrying its own kind of authority. The scholar's precision, each word chosen deliberately. "Sophie's photographic memory and family connection has value, but not enough to justify this level of risk. Kidnapping a rival Pakhan's grandfather? That's a declaration of war."
"That's what we're trying to understand." Nikolai's hand pressed firmer against my back. "Anton Belyaev said this isn't about information. He said it's about something old. Something Mikhail knows but didn't tell me. He seemed to think—" Nikolai paused, choosing words carefully. "He seemed to think you might know. Something about Sophie's mother."
I felt the change in atmosphere immediately. The way all three Volkov brothers exchanged looks that carried weight, history, secrets that had been buried for exactly this long.
Alexei's ice-blue eyes found mine again, and this time there was something else in them. Not just assessment, butrecognition. Like he was seeing something in my features he'd missed before, or maybe something he'd deliberately avoided seeing.
"We heard rumors," he said carefully, his voice dropping lower. "Before the exile. Your mother—Katerina—there was talk she'd had an affair. With someone connected."
My stomach dropped. The fragments my photographic memory had been pulling all morning suddenly snapped into sharper focus—my mother's guilty eyes, my father's silences, the way people would sometimes look at me like they were seeing someone else.
"Connected to who?" Nikolai's voice had gone deadly quiet, the kind of quiet that preceded violence.
Alexei's gaze held mine. And when he spoke, each word landed with enough force to restructure my entire understanding of who I was.
"To Konstantin Belyaev. Anton's father."
The revelation hit me like someone had reached into my chest and rearranged my organs.
Konstantin Belyaev.
Anton's father. Having an affair with my mother before I was born.
My eyes widened. This was why I was here—in America. My mother had told me that we’d fled Moscow to escape something bad, but had never explained what it was. They’d run to stop Konstantin from discovering me.
The warehouse tilted sideways. Or maybe I was tilting. Hard to tell when your entire understanding of identity was being restructured in real-time under fluorescent lighting that made everything look sickly and wrong.
My bad knee buckled—the surgically repaired joint that had ended my ballet career deciding this was an excellent time toremind me about structural weakness. About how bodies failed when you pushed them beyond their tolerances.
Nikolai caught me before I hit concrete, his hands finding my waist, guiding me into a chair someone—Dmitry maybe—pulled over. The metal was cold against my thighs through my jeans. Solid. Real. Something to anchor to while my brain tried to process information it categorically did not want to process.
"Breathe, printsessa." Nikolai's voice in my ear, low and grounding. His hand on the back of my neck, warm and steady. "Just breathe."
But breathing felt impossible when my entire existence had just been recontextualized. Every memory was suddenly suspect. Every moment with my father now carried this terrible question mark—had he known? Had he raised me knowing I might not be his? Had he looked at me and seen another man's child, another man's betrayal, another man's claim on the woman he'd loved?
"The dates align." Alexei's voice cut through my thoughts with clinical precision. "Your mother, Katerina, was married to Dmitri but the marriage was—complicated. She'd been promised to someone else before your father. A Belyaev connection that fell through when Konstantin chose a different alliance. But they maintained—" He paused, choosing words carefully. "Contact."
