Page 1 of The Pakhan’s Debt by Leona White

1

ELENA

I’m hiding from bad men, but that’s not as surprising as what I’m about to admit next. I know exactly why they’re here.

“Blyat’,” I mutter as I press my back harder against the wall of the service stairwell with one hand wrapped around my phone and the other braced on the cold rail. Somewhere below me, a door slams and boots start taking the stairs two at a time.

These men didn’t ring downstairs or buzz random apartments. The ones inside came in through the service entrance behind the bins, and that tells me they knew the building and the route well enough not to waste time pretending this was anything except a grab.

“Professionals,” I sigh with a roll of my eyes. Even at a time such as this, my stubbornness refuses to let me surrender without a fight.

My apartment is on the ninth floor. I took it because it was small, bright, expensive enough to hurt, and paid for with money I earned myself. I liked the narrow balcony, the crowded bookshelves, the fact that nobody had chosen it for me, and the view over a row of roofs and tram lines that looked ordinary in the best possible way. I built that life carefully, piece by piece, and now I’m standing in a concrete stairwell listening to strangers approaching my home like none of it ever belonged to me in the first place.

Most people would have ignored the intrusion. Sergei Sokolov raised me to notice it.

I’d been standing by the window in my apartment, reading a case file, when the van approached and these men filed out. Something about the uniforms and the way they worked told me I was in danger. I locked my door, slipped into the service stairwell, and came up one flight to the tenth-floor landing just before they entered the building.

I hear them start to climb, and I edge higher into the shadow by the turn in the stairs. They’re not at my floor yet, but they’re close.

They’ll expect me to be in my apartment, and they’ll be wrong. My father, Sergei Sokolov, spent most of my life teaching me two things at once.

The first was how to sit straight, speak clearly, and sign my name without shaking. The second was that every locked door in the world becomes temporary once the wrong man decides it belongs to him.

I zone out for a moment, and the voice I hear isn’t his. It’s my mother’s, soft and close.

“Solnyshko, if men arrive quietly, run before they start talking.”

She used to say it by the fireplace at our house outside Moscow when the snow buried the gates and the windows frosted at the edges.

That house had belonged to Sokolovs long before my father turned our name into something men lowered their voices over. Before the shell companies and port contracts and fuel subsidiaries. Before Cyprus holdings and Latvian banks and the kind of freight paperwork that could make half a shipment disappear between one customs desk and the next.

My grandfather had run timber, then metals, then whatever kept money moving when the old order cracked apart. My father took that inheritance and cleaned it up for a modern century. He stopped looking like a gangster and started looking like counsel. He wore cashmere, sat on boards, built layers between himself and the blood, and made our life shine from the outside.

The house stayed warm all winter. The staff changed routinely. There was always black bread, caviar on holidays, imported fruit in January, and logs laid before the fire before anyone asked. I had every comfort that kind of empire could buy, and I cared about almost none of it.

She was warmth, order, the hand at the back of my neck when the house felt too large. When she died, the rooms stayed the same, but home went with her.

The back of my throat itches as I haul myself back to the present.

My mother believed in saying useful things and repeating them until they stuck. Count your cash. Watch hands, not smiles. Don’t let a man tell you what kind of girl you are.

I move before I can think too much about her. Up first. The roof. If the access door opens, I can get across to the next building and out through the front. My boots are quiet, and by the time I hit the top landing I’m already reaching for the handle. It doesn’t move.

There’s a chain through it from the other side and a cheap municipal padlock hanging off the latch. I swear under my breath, turn fast, and head back down.

An hour ago I was eating pizza with Yulia and Katya and trying not to think about graduation. The place was packed, the music loud, and the whole room smelled like yeast and garlic and wet wool drying by the radiators.

Yulia had stolen two olives off my plate and then denied it with a straight face. Katya had spent ten full minutes doing an impression of Professor Melnikov grilling a student on fiduciary duty while waving a breadstick like a pointer. I’d been laughing so hard my stomach hurt, and when the waiter dropped off another bottle of cola, I remember thinking, with real, stupid gratitude, that my life finally felt normal.

Normal for me had taken years.

I went to law school because I wanted a profession nobody could reduce to a favor from my father. I worked at the clinic because poor clients don’t care who your family is if you can keep an eviction from going through or stop a forged sale long enough to get a hearing. Once I’d saved enough money, I rented my own apartment, tracked my deadlines, bought my groceries, and learned how to build a life that looked plain from the outside, which was exactly how I wanted it.

My father liked pretty daughters with expensive educations and controlled smiles. I gave him distance, unanswered calls, and a future that had nothing to do with the machine he called work.

Clearly, it wasn’t good enough because this is connected to him somehow.

I stop at the tenth-floor landing, crouch by the wired-glass window that looks out over the back lot, and spot three more men in dark coats. One near the service door, one smoking by a van with the engine running, one looking up at the building with squinty eyes.