He comes down the corridor like he belongs there.
The side door opens. Two more men move fast and low. One takes Nikolai. One lifts Sofia before she even understands what’s happening. She fights for half a second. My throat closes at the sight of it. In and out in less than thirty seconds.
This was planned.
I turn to Papa so fast the chair behind me almost topples.
“You let his men into this house.”
The words come out raw.
Papa looks at the paused screen and, for the first time in my life, I see real color leave his face.
“You knew,” I say. “You knew there were Morozov men in this house.”
Mama whispers, “Sergei…”
He doesn’t answer her.
I step toward him. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
Still nothing.
The security man looks like he wants the floor to open under him.
I point at the screen. “That’s one of Andrei Morozov’s men. He stopped me yesterday. He was inside your security. Inside our house. And now my children are gone.”
Papa finally turns to me.
When he speaks, his voice is lower than usual. “I didn’t know about him.”
I laugh once, harshly. “That’s supposed to comfort me?”
“No,” he says. “It isn’t.”
There’s something in his face I have never seen before. Guilt.
The room seems to narrow.
Mama stares at him. “Sergei.”
I look between them, and suddenly I know we are standing on the edge of something much worse than I thought.
Papa sits down slowly behind the desk, like his knees have remembered they’re made of bone. He looks older in that moment than I have ever allowed him to be in my head.
I don’t sit.
I don’t breathe properly either.
Then he says, “I should have known that sooner or later they’d find me.”
I frown. “What are you talking about?”
“Moscow,” he says.
My mouth goes dry.
The monitor hums quietly behind him. My children are still frozen on the screen, one frame from being taken, and now somehow, we are standing in the shadow of Moscow again.
