It’s small, black, and unassuming. The kind you’d pick up at any office supply store. But inside it carries every password, every shell-company detail, every scrap of dirty routing information I secretly copied from Fadir’s laptop during those last tense weeks when I still pretended everything was fine. I’d done it in bits and pieces late at night while he thought I was asleep, fingers trembling over the keys, heart hammering every time the floor creaked. Back then, it felt like survival. Now it feels like a weapon.
Alexey picks it up without ceremony, brown eyes scanning the label I’d scratched onto it in tiny handwriting. He plugs it into his laptop right there at the island, the soft click echoing in the quiet penthouse. The gas fireplace flickers low behind us, casting shifting orange light across the pale oak floors and the black leather sectional. It’s just after breakfast on a gray Tuesday, but the city beyond the windows feels distant, irrelevant.
“Everything?” he asks, voice level as always.
“Everything I could reach without him noticing,” I reply. My hands are steady now, but my pulse still thrums with leftover adrenaline. “Bank logins, offshore shells, the secondary ledger he kept hidden behind that ugly abstract painting in the living room. Even the coded contact list from his second phone.”
“This will accelerate things,” he nods once, already typing.
Over the next forty-eight hours, I watch it happen from the safety of the penthouse.
I haven’t handed over the little drive at the beginning of this entire fiasco because I'm not sure I can trust Alexey completely. But over the last few months, since he firstkidnappedme, he has shown me that I can trust him.
Alexey’s team moves like the wind. One by one, Fadir’s accounts begin to lock. I sit beside Alexey at the island during the late-night updates, laptop screens glowing blue against the faintly lit room, while Andrei’s voice crackles through the speaker, confirming each freeze.
First, the main import business account began payroll stuttering, and suppliers suddenly demanded cash up front. Then the charity front that Fadir used to launder both money and reputation. Then the smaller shells that he thought no one knew about. Each confirmation lands like a small, satisfying strike.
I feel it in my chest every time: real justice. The kind I never thought I’d get. Not the screaming, dramatic kind. The quiet, grinding kind that strips a man of his power piece by piece while he watches, helpless.
Fadir trapped me with my own desperation. Now his own tools are being turned against him, and I’m the one handing over the keys.
By the end of the second day, Alexey closes the laptop with a soft click and looks at me across the marble. “It’s done. The rope is tightening faster.”
A malicious satisfaction blooms in my veins, warmer than the tea I’ve been nursing.
“Good.”
***
Sunday dinner at the Sokolov estate has become routine in a way that still surprises me every time we drive through those iron gates.
This week, the mansion feels even more lived-in, with the late-afternoon light spilling across the stone terraces and the faint scent of rosemary and garlic drifting from the open kitchen windows. Arina greets us at the door again, pulling me into one of her fierce, warm hugs before dragging me inside with a grin.
Tikhon is here in person this time, towering and broad-shouldered, his deep voice filling the dining room the moment we step in. He claps me on the shoulder like I’m already one of them, and with no hesitation.
“Anja. Good to see you still putting up with my brother’s brooding. Sit. Eat. You look like you could use seconds before we even start,’ his voice booms.
Katya’s face appears on the large screen at the end of the table via video call, her smile gentle and tired but genuine. She asks soft questions about how I’m feeling, not prying into the revenge or the deal, just… checking.
“The first few weeks are the hardest,” she says quietly. “If the nightmares get bad, tell Alexey. He’s better at listening than he lets on.”
Arina laughs from the head of the table as she sets down a massive platter of roasted lamb and vegetables. “Oh, please. Alexey? Listening? Remember his stubborn teenage phase? Fourteen years old, convinced he could out-strategize every adult in the room by quoting Machiavelli at breakfast. Walked around with that serious little frown, like the weight of the world was on his shoulders. Tikhon used to hide his books just to watch him panic.”
Alexey sits across from me, quiet as usual, but the corner of his mouth twitches in that rare half-smile. He doesn’t deny it. Just offers a low, “At least I read them. You were too busy breaking things.”
I catch myself laughing. A genuine, surprised sound that bubbles up before I can stop it. It feels strange in my throat, light and real. The table erupts into easy banter, Tikhon ribbing Arina about her cooking experiments.
Katya chimed in with gentle teasing from the screen. They close ranks without question, pulling me into the circle like it’s the most natural thing. No suspicion. No weighing my worth. Just warm and appreciated loyalty.
It clashes violently with every memory I carry from home.
My hometown wasn’t always the dusty Midwest trap it became. Before that, my father moved us to the city, trying to evade his growing debts, but the collectors still found us. But eventually we lost our rented house and moved back to that God-forsaken town.
The memory came flooding back to me.
“Pay what you owe, Viktor, or we take whatever’s left... including the girl if she’s old enough.”
My father’s slurred begging. My mother was already gone years earlier, leaving nothing but silence and shame. Those men, I later found out, are Sokolov-linked, loud, brutal, and chaotic. They enjoyed the fear.
