Page 6 of The Pakhan’s Debt by Leona White

I look at it, then at him. “If that’s a ransom demand, this is awkward. I don’t have enough money to replace your tires, let alone myself.”

He shakes his head. “It’s not a ransom demand.”

“Then start with your name, since your men were too busy drugging me to handle introductions.”

“You know my name.”

“Humor me anyway.” I’m probably being stupid, but this is how I begin a conversation out in the normal world—by getting to know the other person’s name. It makes me feel grounded, and I could do with some of that in here.

He chuckles again, and his voice is deep and light at the same time. “Maksim Volkov.”

I lean back as far as the chair allows. “Lovely. Elena Sokolov. You’ve heard of me.”

He presses his lips together and nods. “Yes.” Then, he opens the file and turns it toward me. “Read.”

I glance down before I can stop myself, and for a second I don’t understand what I’m looking at. It’s a filing. Clean formatting. Registry notation. Supplemental holding structure. Cross-reference language. One of those deeply ugly corporate pages that only lawyers and accountants pretend to love.

Then I see my name. I look up, frowning at him. “This is fake.”

He’s watching me steadily, without any movement. “No.”

My frown deepens. “It has to be.”

“It doesn’t.”

I pull the page closer. The seal is real. The paper looks real. The filing number is either real or backed by a very expensive lie. My name appears in full, spelled correctly, pulled from a source that knew who I was.

Elena Sergeyevna Sokolova.

Shareholder and conditional approval signatory under a subsidiary linked to a freight company I’ve never heard of. I turn the page to another filing, another entity. Warehousing this time. Then fuel distribution. Then an export company that loops through more than one jurisdiction before coming back with a respectable face.

My mouth dries out for a completely different reason now. “This is bluff,” I utter, though the words come out weak and my voice is shaking. “A file full of paper doesn’t prove anything.”

His expression doesn’t move. “Keep reading.”

I flip again and come across stacks of similar papers—a temporary directorship form, a beneficiary acknowledgment, a tax declaration, and a maintenance update on dormant corporate structures.

My palms feel clammy even though it’s so cold. This is, in part, because I know some of these papers.

Momentarily, I’m not in this study anymore. I’m back in my father’s house, standing in the office at the back where everything smelled like printer toner, leather, and whatever cologne he used when he wanted to look like a respectable man discussing respectable things. He’d call me in sometimes when I was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. “Educational,” he’d say. Or, “You want to be a lawyer, don’t you?”

Or, “This is family maintenance, Elena. Learn how structures work and men will stop lying to you so easily.”

I signed some things back then. Early on, I still thought there was a way to take pieces of his help without taking the world attached to it.

I push the file away as my eyes sting. “No.”

Maksim watches me, hands loose, posture easy in that way powerful men have when they know they don’t need to crowd anyone to own it. “You recognize them.”

I manage to speak through a dry throat. “I recognize paperwork my father put in front of me when I was too young to understand how much damage can hide inside a signature.”

Maksim’s eyes narrow. “So you do recognize them.”

I look up sharply. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Talk to me like I’m helping you build your case.”