Page 108 of Bratva Baby

“We’ve been useful,” she says.

“Still a problem.”

She taps the paper. “So, what do we do with Sergei?”

“We give him a false route,” I say. “Something good enough to tempt him, ugly enough to hurt when he passes it, and clean enough to trace back to him when Maks’s remaining men reach for it.”

Her smile is slow and full of satisfaction. “I love when you say practical things.”

Kolya groans. “Please stop flirting over treason.”

“We’re not flirting,” Sofiya says.

I button my jacket. “We are.”

She looks me over in a way that makes Kolya immediately study the ceiling. “Fine. We are.”

Sergei takes the bait in under forty-eight hours.

We give him a fake meeting tied to an old Finnish transfer point, a route number that never existed, and the name of a broker we already own. The information sits in one closed conversation at the Brotherhood house with only five men present.

That same night, one of Maks’s remaining drivers reaches for the broker.

The next morning, Sergei arrives at the Brotherhood house in a charcoal suit and leaves without his watch, his phones, his keys, his men, or his place at the table.

I’m there when the boss strips him.

Sergei keeps his chin up at first. He says the words men always say when they’ve been caught. Misunderstanding. Overreach. Protective instinct. A need to monitor both sides. The boss listens with both hands folded in front of him, and everyone knows that’s worse than anger.

Viktor reads the messages aloud.

Sergei’s face loses color by the third one.

When Viktor reaches the line about Sofiya’s pregnancy, I cross the room and hit Sergei hard enough to knock him into the chair behind him. He grabs the table, blood showing at his lip, and looks up at me with hatred.

The boss doesn’t tell me to stop, so I don’t. I take him by the collar, pull him close, and speak near his face so every man at the table hears me. “You fed Maks a pregnant woman’s location and thought you’d still sit in this room after it.”

Sergei spits blood onto the floor. “She’s Leonidov.”

“She’s under my protection.”

“She weakened you.”

I hit him again, and this time, he stays down longer. The boss finally speaks. “Enough.”

I step back because that word means the room has decided, and the room’s decision matters more than my hands.

Sergei is stripped, documented, and removed. His money goes toward cleaning the route damage he helped create. His men are split under Viktor and Mikhail. His name disappears from the board before dinner.

As for Sergei himself, the boss gives him to the northern labor route for ten years, no title, no phone, no family visits, and no chance to turn himself into a dead martyr men can romanticize.

Sofiya likes that part when I tell her.

“Ten years?” she asks from the bedroom doorway that night, wearing a robe that doesn’t close properly anymore.

“At minimum.”

She thinks about it while I unbutton my shirt. “Alive enough to suffer, gone enough to stop talking.”