“We’ll see,” I say. “For now, you pack the bag.”
She nods and steps forward to take Nadia.
My daughter clings harder. “I stay with Papa,” she says.
I stroke her hair. “I’m right here, little angel. No one will harm you in front of me.”
She loosens her grip slowly and lets Anastasia take her hand.
“Come, little one,” Anastasia says softly. “We’ll choose your warmest socks.”
They walk down the hall. I watch their backs. Anastasia moves with care. She bends her head to listen. She doesn’t touch her phone or look around. Anyone else would see a perfect nanny.
I see the way her eyes slid to the screen when the man's voice cut the call and how her body went still when he said the old world wants to die. She tried to argue against moving Nadia out, and that part bothers me. If I kill my soldiers randomly, I become a weak Pakhan who acts out of impulse. So I need good reason, but I’m not risking my daughter’s life waiting around for it.
And I remember something Raina said weeks ago, when we still thought the worst was behind us. We stood in the kitchen, late, with the lights low. Nadia slept. Anastasia had gone home for the night.
“She always knows when a delivery comes,” Raina said, half amused, half curious. “Even when we don’t tell her. She hearsthe knock, she hears the wheels on the hall, she’s there before the guard. That is a talent.”
At the time, I had smiled. Now that memory sits wrong.
Andrei and Kirill come in with laptops and printed maps. They spread them on the desk. I focus on the paper. I can’t afford to lose time in suspicion. That comes later.
Kirill drops a stack of old route charts beside the property list.
“I marked everything we ever held near Klin,” he says. “Cottages, warehouses, garages. Half of these we never used after the first year. The dam here.” He taps one map. “It matches the line your daughter sang. Narrow lake. Old stone dam. I remember we used to say it was a good spot to drown a car.”
He catches himself.
“Sorry,” he says.
“It’s fine,” I say. “Show me.”
He points to a thin blue ribbon of water, a small swollen part in the middle. A short dam line. A ring of houses.
“The state calls this Lake Serebryanka,” he says. “Locals call it something else. There is a line of twelve cottages on the north shore. We held number eight for one season. Blue roof. Red trim. Carved animals on the door. I do not remember which.”
I remember. “It fits,” I say.
“Yes,” Kirill says. “Third bridge on the road is half broken since the flood several years ago. The pavement falls off on one side. You always curse there.”
Andrei runs his finger down a list.
“The title to that cottage moved three times in ten years,” he says. “It went from a holding company we used to a dummy name in Kazan, then to a private owner two years ago. The last change has no clean trail. Shell company. Cyprus. Standard tricks.”
“So someone wanted it off my books,” I say.
“Yes,” he says.
“Then we have our place,” I say. “We move tonight.”
Andrei hesitates. “Pakhan,” he says, “there is one more thing.”
“Say it,” I snap.
“The shell company that first took the title from us belonged to an internal account,” he says. “It shows on old logs from twelve years ago. Before I came. The name on the account is someone you grew up with. Someone who worked for you in the early days. The same person handled logistics for some of your first warehouses.”
My neck tightens.
