"I have the manifests pulled up." I gestured to the screen, where my photographic memory had already organized the relevant documents. "Shipments arriving March eighth, eleventh, and fourteenth. All marked as industrial components, but the weights are wrong again."
Nikolai moved to the screen, his Pakhan mask sliding into place as he studied the data. We'd developed this rhythm—me presenting, him analyzing, both of us thinking through implications before speaking. It worked. We worked.
"More weapons caches?" Kostya's voice rumbled from the doorway. I hadn't heard him approach, but that was normal. The man moved like a predator despite his size.
"Possibly." I pulled up the correlating documents. "Or more laundering infrastructure we haven't found yet. The timingsuggests Anton knew the families were moving against him. He might have been establishing escape routes."
"While we're all here, Alexei said," he said slowly, like the words cost him, "we should discuss the wedding arrangements."
The topic shift was so abrupt I blinked. Wedding arrangements. My wedding. To Nikolai. The engagement that had been formalized six weeks ago with a ring that probably cost more than my father's debts, with a proposal that had involved Nikolai getting down on one knee in our nursery while I'd been Little, asking both Big Sophie and his malyshka if she'd marry him.
I'd said yes before he'd finished the question.
"The traditional Russian ceremony at the cathedral will be public," Alexei continued, his discomfort making him sound even gruffer than usual. "Families need to witness it. Need to see the alliance formalized. But the private ceremony—" He paused, and something in his expression gentled. "That's for family. For us."
Us. The word hit differently than it should have. Alexei Volkov, the man who'd exiled my father twenty-five years ago, was claiming me as family. Was planning to attend my wedding not as political necessity but as my cousin. As someone who cared.
"We were thinking the compound gardens," Nikolai said quietly, his hand still on my back. "Small ceremony. Mikhail officiating. Just the people who matter."
"That sounds perfect." Ivan looked up from his laptop, his expression carrying warmth I was still learning to recognize. "Clara wants to help with the planning, if that's okay. She's been asking."
Clara. Alexei's wife. The woman I'd met briefly at a family dinner two weeks ago, who'd hugged me despite my frozen surprise and whispered "I'm so glad you're here" like she meant it.
I had a cousin-in-law. Had family who wanted to help plan my wedding. Had a life that extended beyond Nikolai and survival, into something that looked almost normal if you ignored the criminal enterprise funding it.
"I'd like that," I managed, my throat tight with emotions I couldn't name.
We returned to work then, but the atmosphere had shifted. Become softer. Ivan moved from the sofa to my desk without asking, pulling up his own data to compare against the shipping manifests I'd been analyzing. His shoulder bumped mine as we both leaned toward the screen—casual contact that would have made me flinch three months ago but now just felt like family.
"Your memory really is faster than my algorithm," he said after pulling up his analysis. "Look at this."
He'd run a program tracking the same shipping patterns I'd identified manually, but his results had taken three hours to compile. I'd done it in forty minutes.
"You were right about these manifests," Ivan continued, pointing to the discrepancies. "The weight differences led me to a hidden arms cache in the Red Hook facility. Twenty crates of weapons Anton had marked as machine parts." He looked at me with something that might have been awe. "How did you see that?"
I shrugged, uncomfortable with the praise despite having earned it. "Numbers tell stories if you know how to read them. The weights were wrong for the declared contents. After we found the first pattern with the galleries, I started looking for the same discrepancies in other records."
"Brilliant," Ivan said simply. "We need to loop Maks in on this. His systems can automate the search across all remaining Belyaev records."
We worked for another hour, falling into an easy collaboration that shouldn't have been possible between people who'd beenstrangers four months ago. But here we were—analyzing criminal operations like a very dangerous study group, occasionally interrupted by Kostya's observations or Alexei's tactical questions.
The light was starting to fade when Alexei finally stood, stretching with the careful movements of someone whose body had taken too many hits over too many years.
"We should head out," he said, reaching for his jacket. "Clara's expecting us for dinner."
Ivan packed his laptop with the same efficient movements, but he paused at the desk. "Thanks for this, Sophie. Your work today probably saved us months of investigation."
"Family helps family," I said, and the words came out steadier than I felt.
Alexei's expression did something complicated—surprise and approval and maybe the smallest hint of guilt for all the years my father had been alone. "Yes. We do."
Nikolai walked them toward the library entrance, his hand never leaving my back. The touch had become constant whenever we were together in "Big Sophie" mode—his way of maintaining connection even when I couldn't be Little, when I needed to be the analyst and the advisor instead of his malyshka.
"We'll see you at the engagement dinner, then," Alexei said at the doorway, and he actually clapped Nikolai on the shoulder. A gesture of brotherhood, of alliance, of family ties that ran deeper than business.
"Looking forward to it," Nikolai replied, and he sounded like he meant it.
The door closed behind them, leaving us alone in the library with the dust motes and the fading light and the comfortable silence of people who didn't need to fill every moment with words.
