Page 99 of Bratva Baby

At the time, I thought the worst thing that could happen that night was Anton calling to say the records were gone.

Then Zhenya called.

I almost didn’t answer. My eyes were on the schedule Anton had marked before leaving, and my head was already in the yard with him, tracking the truck, the records, the timing, all of it. But Zhenya didn’t call for comfort, and she never wasted a line when danger was moving.

I picked up and said, “Tell me this is useful.”

“It is,” she said. Her voice was tight and fast, and everything in me sat up straighter before I knew why. “Lazlo reached me.”

My hand closed around the phone. “Alive?”

“For now. He got out before Maks’s men cleaned the place, but he won’t stay clear for long. Listen carefully because he couldn’t stay on the line.”

I grabbed the pen Anton had used and turned over one of the freight summaries. “Talk.”

“I need to tell you about the Yantar clock.”

For a second, I didn’t understand her. “What clock?”

“The Yantar clock,” Zhenya said. “He used it as a phrase, Sofiya. A marker. When he said the room trusted the clock more than the men in it, he meant the system around it. The maintenance access. The service logs. Old audio backups tied to the office wing.”

My pen stopped against the page.

The clock was a signpost, and I’d never known that.

Zhenya kept talking while I wrote, and the words started turning into a shape I could use. “Lazlo had an old service invoice, a backup login, and copies of the access trail. He used them after he realized Maks was moving the archive. He found audio fragments. Your father and Maks, two days before your father died. Maks talking about old routes, the intermediary trail, and your father asking too many questions.”

I stopped breathing properly.

Some part of me had known since the night Maks stepped into my father’s office and looked at me like grief was an inconvenience he’d already budgeted for.

“What else?” I asked.

“Payment copies,” Zhenya said. “One to the consultant who signed off after your father’s death. One to a private medical supply contact. Lazlo says it isn’t neat enough for public court on its own, but it’s more than enough for Grigor.”

More than enough for Grigor.

That mattered more than court right now. Court needed procedure, witnesses, timing, clean custody. Family needed enough truth to justify punishment. “Send it,” I said.

“I already did. To you, and to the emergency address you gave me.”

I looked down at the page where I had written three words.

Yantar. Maintenance. Audio.

“Grigor,” I said.

“Yes,” Zhenya answered. “But he won’t open it unless you force him to.”

So I built the force before anyone knew I had it.

I saved the files, copied the key points, and wrote Grigor one message with enough poison in it to cut through whatever story Maks had already started feeding him.

Then, before stepping in here, I called him. And one more time—the last number that I rang. I’d warned him to call Maks if I cut the call before I could speak to him.

By the time I stepped into Maks’s yard, I already knew two things he didn’t. The clock story was a lie, but the fear behind it was real. And Grigor had enough proof in his hands to stop hearing Maks as family and start hearing him as a threat.

“You will listen to me,” Grigor says through the phone, and there is no politics left in his voice. “I heard enough of your voice on file to know you lied to me for eighteen months.”