My phone stays silent on the desk.
I stare at it. Pick it up. Dial again.
Four rings. Five.
Nothing.
32
ANNA
Alexei wants pancakes.
Not the ones my mother makes, which are thin and slightly sweet and perfectly fine. He wants the thick ones. The ones Luca taught him to make on Sunday mornings, standing on his step stool at the estate kitchen with his tongue pressed between his teeth in concentration.
He doesn’t say this out loud. He just sits at my mother’s kitchen table and looks at the plate in front of him with an expression that is entirely his father’s, that particular brand of polite disappointment that doesn’t complain but makes its feelings known.
Mila eats three pancakes without comment. She’s been more settled the past few days, mostly because my mother has been bribing her with the garden. They go out every morning and come back with dirt on their knees and handfuls of whatever is growing, and my mother lets her arrange it all in jam jars on the windowsill like a proper florist.
I watch them from across the table, drink my coffee, and think about the meeting I have arranged for this afternoon.
Four days.
That’s how long I’ve been sitting with this plan, turning it over, checking it from every angle the way you check a structure before you trust your weight to it. Four days of watching my father move through this house like a man waiting for something to fall on him. Four days of my mother pretending she isn’t watching the street from the front window. Four days of the twins asking questions I can’t answer, and Luca’s calls going to voicemail, and the knowledge that something is circling this house that none of us have the tools to stop.
I can stop it.
That’s what I keep coming back to. I am Luca Volkov’s wife. Legally, publicly, on every document that matters. Whatever the Malikov network wants from this surveillance, whatever leverage they think they’re building, my position is the one thing they can’t ignore. I can walk into a room and put that name on the table and negotiate something that keeps my family safe without dragging Luca back into my life to do it for me.
I’ve gone over the contact chain carefully. Gennady pointed me to Sorokin Freight. Sorokin Freight has a logistics office in the eastern district that anyone can walk into with a legitimate inquiry. I made a call through a routing that can’t be traced back to Luca’s network.
Asked for a meeting with whoever handles partnership discussions. The callback came yesterday from a man who called himself Renat, voice flat and businesslike, who gave me a time and an address without asking too many questions.
The address is a warehouse complex near the river. Busy during the day. Legitimate freight traffic in and out. Nothing that should feel dangerous in the middle of the afternoon.
I’ve told myself this approximately forty times in four days.
“Mama.” Mila is standing beside my chair with a jam jar full of marigolds. “Can we put these on the table?”
“Of course.”
She sets them down with great ceremony, adjusting the jar until it’s centered exactly, then steps back to assess her work. Alexei looks at the flowers and then at his half-eaten pancakes and then out the window with the expression of a child who has decided the morning is not going his way.
“We could call Papa,” he says. To the window, not to me.
“I’m seeing him tomorrow for your visit.”
“That’s not the same.”
“I know.”
He turns from the window and looks at me directly. “Are you still angry at him?”
I open my mouth. Close it.
“A little,” I say.
“Why?”
