“Don’t get cute.”
I wave him off, and the office quiets down after the door closes. I flex my hand once and open the next directory. More internal reporting. More operations. More old damage dressed up as logistics.
Most of it, I already know, which is comforting. Familiar filth is easier to sort than fresh surprises.
Then I open a folder marked 08.17.06 / MERCURY, and my whole body locks.
I stare at it for one second before I move again.
The date is off by a few days. Internal files are usually stamped when accounting processes them, not when the work happened. The code name matters more. I know it. I knew it two years ago when I cracked a sealed archive in one of my father’s private offices and found documents he never meant for anyone else to see.
My hand tightens on the mouse.
Then I click.
A spreadsheet opens first. It’s filled with driver names, surveillance notes, vehicle registrations, and payment approvals routed through one of the offshore shells my father uses when he wants distance between himself and blood.
I open the next file.
It’s a memo, short and to the point, written by a man who treated death like scheduling.
Target male prepared to disclose operational details concerning joint Kozlov-Morozov transport channel. Immediate intervention approved. Spouse included due to exposure risk. Scene to support accidental loss of control. Local police contact confirmed.
I stop breathing for a second.
Not because the memo surprises me. It doesn’t. I know every line before I finish reading it. But because it’s here, sitting in front of me, who knows who else on the Kozlov team has or will find it.
I open the third document…and there it is.
The payout ledger. The police contact. The cleanup team. The mechanic who altered the brake system. Final confirmation from my father’s office that both targets were deceased and the matter was closed.
Polina’s parents.
Their crash wasn’t a matter of black-ice or bad luck. It wasn’t some family tragedy everyone accepted because the paperwork looked right. Her father threatened to expose a joint Kozlov-Morozov operation because he didn’t believe the Kozlovs should be working with the enemy without informing the men dying for the cause and my father had him killed before the problem reached anyone powerful enough to use it. Her mother died with him because witnesses were inconvenient.
I sit there with my eyes on the screen until the back of my neck starts to ache.
Two years ago, I found these same files in a locked archive hidden behind a false cabinet wall in my father’s private study while he was away handling business in Moscow. I was tearing through everything I could reach, looking for leverage, insurance, something I could keep in my back pocket before the rest of the family decided exactly where I belonged and how much of a threat I’d become.
I found this instead.
At first, I thought I had the wrong file. Polina’s parents were a story everyone in our world knew in pieces. Respected surgeon, just as his daughter eventually became. Quiet wife. Dead on a highway outside Saint Petersburg. Then I saw the Kozlov notation. Then the routing number. Then my father’s approval code.
And I buried it.
Those files didn’t just prove murder. They proved the Morozovs and Kozlovs had worked together, even briefly, and if that got out, it wouldn’t just stain my father’s name. It could blow a hole through the whole empire he built. Men had died for less. Allies would turn. Enemies would smell blood. Half our power rested on the lie that we stood apart from families like hers.
So I moved the documents into a deeper storage layer, locked the archive again, and told myself I was buying time. For him. For me. For the machine that raised me and taught me exactly how to protect it even as I was searching for ways to dismantle it. Even then, I knew what I was doing. I chose the empire over the truth. Now I’m sitting in Dmitri’s house, helping tear that same empire apart piece by piece, and all I can think is that I should have burned this thing to the ground the day I found it.
Then time turned into two years. Two years turned into Polina in my bed, Polina in my arms, and now, Polina looking at me like she wants to hate me but can’t figure out how.
Then I see the import path at the top of the screen.
Cross-reference.
DAUGHTER #1 – keep watch
DAUGHTER #2 – too young to be a risk
