I believed him. Against all logic, against all evidence that the bratva world was built on violence and betrayal and broken promises—I believed him.
Because Nikolai had sacrificed it all to save me. Had violated sacred protocols and destroyed his reputation and turned a formal Council into chaos, all because I mattered.
That kind of love wasn't logical. Wasn't strategic. Wasn't the carefully calculated devotion of a man who thought seventeen moves ahead.
It was just love. Pure and desperate and absolute.
And I would spend the rest of my life trying to be worthy of it.
Chapter 18
Sophie
Family.
The word meant so much to me now.
Over my life, my idea of family had shifted and morphed. Losing my mom, then my dad. Feeling alone and then, recently, discovering links to the Volkovs and the Belyaevs.
But none of that was real family.
Real family was Nikolai. Was Kostya. Was Maks.
Real family was the family you chose. The people who accepted you just the way you were.
The people who didn’t bat an eyelid when I needed Little time. When I needed to be with my stuffies and drink from a sippy cup. The people who comforted me when I was stressed, who helped me color when I felt gray.
But that wasn’t who I was right now.
I stood at the head of the war room table in my gray blouse and tailored trousers, my tablet connected to the projection screen, my voice clear and professional as I walked three of themost dangerous men in Brooklyn through financial forensics that would have made my college professors proud. Both versions were me—the little girl who needed Daddy to make her breakfast, and the analyst who could track money through shell corporations faster than Maks's algorithms.
Morning light slanted through the bulletproof windows, catching dust motes that drifted past the mahogany table where Nikolai, Kostya, and Maks sat like judges at a very dangerous dissertation defense. Except they weren't judging. They were listening.
That still felt strange. Powerful.
"Anton Belyaev's assets weren't just in shipping." I tapped the screen, bringing up the first spreadsheet. My photographic memory had the numbers burned into my brain, but showing the evidence made it real for them. Made it actionable. "My analysis of his hidden ledgers shows he was also routing money through three offshore art galleries."
I pulled up the next image—a web of connections I'd mapped out over the past week in the library that had become my office. The room where I'd once hidden from the world now held my desk, my files, my carefully organized system for tracking the pieces of Anton's empire that the families were still absorbing.
"Here." I circled the first gallery name with my stylus. "Galerie Rousseau in Monaco. Established 2019, two months after Anton took control of Belyaev operations. The ownership documentation lists it under a French holding company, but if you cross-reference the incorporation dates with these shipping manifests—" I swiped to show the correlation. "—you'll see containers arriving in Monaco on the same days the gallery reported major acquisitions."
Maks was leaning forward, his tablet out, fingers already flying across the screen to verify my work. He did that every time. Notbecause he didn't trust me, but because he couldn't help himself. The man thought in code and data streams.
"The container contents were listed as industrial machinery," I continued, pulling up the customs forms I'd found buried in Anton's files. "But the weights don't match. A crate marked as containing textile equipment shouldn't weigh eight hundred pounds unless—"
"Unless it's full of something a lot denser," Kostya rumbled from his position against the wall. He'd stayed standing for the whole presentation, arms crossed, looking like violence waiting to happen. But his eyes were sharp. Tracking. "Weapons?"
"Or gold." I brought up the final correlation—auction records from Galerie Rousseau that showed pieces selling for amounts that made no sense unless you were laundering money. "These paintings sold for three to five times their estimated value. Always to anonymous buyers. Always with payment processing through the same Cayman Islands bank that handled Anton's shipping accounts."
The room went quiet. Not the bad kind of quiet where men were deciding whether to believe a woman who'd walked into their world through an auction and chaos. The good kind. The kind where strategic minds were processing information and seeing the implications.
I risked a glance at Nikolai.
He sat at the opposite end of the table, positioned so we faced each other like we were playing chess. His three-piece suit was immaculate—charcoal gray, crisp white shirt, burgundy tie that I'd straightened for him this morning before the softness had faded and I'd needed to be Big Sophie instead of his malyshka. His Pakhan mask was fully in place. The controlled expression that gave nothing away, the still posture that made him look carved from marble, the gray eyes that assessed without revealing.
But those eyes met mine across the mahogany, and everything changed.
I saw it. The pride. Raw and fierce and absolutely certain. His expression didn't shift—couldn't shift, not in front of Kostya and Maks, not when he was being the leader who'd made the hard calls and paid the brutal prices. But his eyes softened just slightly. Warmed in ways only I could read after three months of learning his tells.
