Kira makes her T. Rex roar at my triceratops, and I respond with what I hope is a convincing herbivore battle cry. She giggles with delight, and for a moment, the weight of everything lifts just enough.
This is what I’m protecting. Not just Daria, but this. The giggles. The dinosaur meetings. The small, ordinary moments that Bogdan has poisoned with fear for three years.
When this is over, when he’s nothing but a memory and a warning to anyone else who might think about threatening what’s mine, I will make sure they never have to be afraid again.
That’s not a promise I made to Dmitri.
That’s a promise I’m making to myself.
18
Daria
The laptop screen glows with numbers that turn my stomach.
“That’s four-point-two million in the past eighteen months alone.” Tony’s voice crackles through the secure video call. “All routed through shell companies registered in your name, then funneled to organizations on Yevgeny’s blacklist.”
I stare at the spreadsheet he’s shared with us, which displays rows and rows of transactions I never authorized or knew about, and never would have agreed to even if Bogdan had put a gun to my head.
“How is that possible?” I ask. “Wouldn’t Yevgeny’s people have flagged this?”
“Bogdan was careful,” Tony explains. “He used legitimate businesses as intermediaries. Import companies, art dealers, even a few restaurants. Everything looks like normal commerce on paper. You have to dig through three or four layers before you see where the money ends up.”
Pyotr leans forward in his chair with his shoulder brushing mine. “Can you trace the endpoints? We need to prove the final recipients are hostile to Lebedev interests.”
“Already working on it. I should have confirmation within forty-eight hours.” Tony pauses, and I hear him typing. “The bigger issue is documentation. We need something that proves Bogdan orchestrated this independently. Right now, a good lawyer could argue Daria was the mastermind, and Bogdan was just the muscle.”
My throat tightens. “That’s insane. I didn’t even know these accounts existed until?—”
“I know,” Tony assures me. “I’m not saying it’s true, I’m saying it’s what the opposition will argue. We need evidence that puts Bogdan in the driver’s seat. Communications, witnesses… something concrete.”
Pyotr glances at me. “You lived with him for years. You know how he operates. Is there anything we can use? Patterns, habits, people he trusts?”
I close my eyes and force myself back into the memories I’ve spent years trying to forget. The apartment in Moscow. The late-night phone calls Bogdan took in his study with the door locked. The men who came and went at odd hours, always greeted with backslaps and vodka.
“He keeps records,” I offer. “Physical ones. He doesn’t trust digital storage for anything sensitive.”
Tony perks up. “What kind of records?”
“Ledgers, mostly. They’re all handwritten. He used to joke that computers could be hacked, but a safe couldn’t talk.” I open myeyes. “He had one in our apartment, hidden behind a false panel in his closet. I found it once when I was looking for my passport. He’d taken it, of course. Didn’t want me to have any way to leave.”
“Do you know what was in the ledgers?”
“Names. Dates. Amounts. I only saw a few pages before he caught me, but it looked like a record of every transaction he’d made outside his uncle’s knowledge.” I swallow hard. “He beat me for finding it. Told me if I ever mentioned it to anyone, he’d make sure I disappeared, and Kira would grow up thinking I abandoned her.”
Pyotr’s hand finds my knee under the table. He doesn’t say anything, just applies steady pressure, grounding me.
“If those ledgers still exist,” Tony begins, “and if we can get our hands on them, that’s the kind of evidence we need. Handwritten records in Bogdan’s writing, proving he was running operations that his uncle never sanctioned.”
“He wouldn’t keep them in the old apartment,” I tell them. “He’s too paranoid for that. After I left, he would have moved everything to a more secure location.”
“Any idea where?”
I chew on my bottom lip and think. Bogdan was a creature of habit in ways he never realized. He thought he was unpredictable, but I learned to read him the way prey learns to read predators.
“His mother’s dacha,” I suggest. “Outside Vyborg. She died six years ago, but he kept the property. He used to go there when he needed to think, or when he was planning something big. Hecalled it his ‘retreat,’ but it was really just a place where no one could watch him.”
Tony starts typing again. “I can pull property records and satellite imagery. If he’s using it as a base of operations, we might be able to track patterns.”
