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Someone planned tonight. Someone knew the schedule, knew the room, knew when to send the men through the door. Someone decided I needed to die and came close enough that my brother paid for it instead.

I get in the car, and Marka gets in beside me.

“We start with Berezin,” I say.

1

Evelina

“He was a good man,” the woman says, and I smile at her as though I believe it.

The casket is mahogany. I keep coming back to that, the wood grain, the brass handles, the way the light catches it like it’s something worth looking at. There’s no body inside. I found that out on day two, when the men in suits came to the apartment and explained, with a politeness that made my skin crawl, what would and wouldn’t be returned to me. The casket was a courtesy. A political calculation dressed up as grief. Everyone here is pretending not to know that, and so am I, because that’s what you do, and because I learned how to do it from the man supposedly lying inside it.

I shake another hand. Accept another embrace. Say the right things in the right order. It’s not difficult. Most people at funerals don’t actually want to connect with the bereaved, they want to feel like they showed up, like they did the decent thing, like they can go home afterward and tick the box. I make it easy for them. I’ve been making things easy for rooms full of people my entire life.

My father taught me that. “In a room full of people who want something from you, Lina, your face is your first argument.” He said it when I was twelve, sitting across from me at the kitchen table over a chessboard he was finally letting me win on my own terms. I never forgot it. I’ve been winning arguments with my face ever since, and today is just another room, another argument, another performance I can run in my sleep.

Don’t look at the casket. Not yet.

What I haven’t told anyone is that I found the files four days ago.

I wasn’t supposed to be in his study. The men had already come through, thorough and fast, and taken everything obvious. Laptop, external drives, the paper files in the top drawer. I didn’t know who sent them. I still don’t know exactly what they were looking for. Three weeks ago, I didn’t know words like Bratva, didn’t know there was a Crown council or five families or a web of organized crime so embedded in this city that it operates in plain sight and nobody with any sense says a word about it. I knew my father had complicated business relationships. I knew there were things he didn’t discuss. But I was a good daughter. One who dressed accordingly and didn’t ask complicated questions.

I should have asked.

The drive was behind a loose panel in his bookshelf, behind three years of law review journals he’d never once opened. Small, matte black. I almost walked past it. Then I thought about who killed him, about the name I’d spent three weeks learning from the outside in, and I put it in my coat pocket and walked out without looking back.

It’s encrypted. I’m working on it, but I have to do it alone because I don’t know who to trust, and I don’t have much experience with encryption, so I’m doing my best to learn from YouTube, which is not a sentence I ever expected my legal career to produce.

The fragments I’ve cracked so far don’t add up to much yet. Financial references without context, strings of numbers that could be account codes or could be nothing. The encryption is layered, and I’m doing it manually, which is slow. I’m a lawyer, not a forensic accountant. I’m working with what I have, which is stubbornness, time, and the growing certainty that whatever is on this drive is the reason my father is dead.

Someone touches my arm. A man I don’t recognize, silver-haired, with the kind of tan you only get from a boat.

“Your father was one of the good ones,” he says. “We’ll miss him at the club.”

“He spoke of it often,” I say, which is a lie, but a good one. Specific enough to feel true, vague enough to be unfalsifiable.

He squeezes my arm and moves on, satisfied. That’s all he came for.

None of these people knew my father. They knew the version he showed them, warm, attentive, the man who remembered your kid’s name, called on your birthday, anonymously donated to causes he never publicized. That version was real. I’m not ready to say it wasn’t.

But it wasn’t all of it. And the gap between what I knew and what I’m starting to find in those files is something I keep almost looking at and then not. Like a bruise you keep pressing. Like you need to confirm it still hurts.

He was fifty-four. He taught me chess, flew to Chicago for every moot court competition I had, called every Sunday at ten without fail. He kept his world away from mine so cleanly that I built an entire life without ever once having to think about what his actually looked like. I was grateful for that. I thought it was protection. Now I’m standing at his funeral with a drive full of encrypted files I can’t fully read yet, and I think maybe the distance was something else. Maybe he knew this was always how it ended, and he just wanted me somewhere else when it did.

Three weeks ago, a man named Volkov Nazarov had him killed. I can’t prove it. But I’ve spent three weeks following every lead, and they all pointed at the same name. That’s enough for me.

That name sits in my chest like a stone. Not just a target, not just a problem to solve. The man who took my father from me. Who left me standing at an empty casket making small talk with strangers while he goes on living his life in Brooklyn like nothing happened. I’ve read everything I could find about him. I know what he is. I know what he does to people who cross him. And I know what he did to my father, and my father is gone, and that is a fact I have to carry through every conversation in this church today without letting a single person see it on my face.

I know that name now. I’ve spent three weeks learning it from every angle available to me. What I found is not comforting. The Bratva, the Crown, the five families, the scale of violence that sits underneath this city like a second infrastructure. By any rational measure, I should have grabbed my passport and left. I have a law degree, I speak three languages, I could build a life somewhere with no connection to any of this.

But I’m not leaving.

The decision came the night I found the drive, quiet and final, not something I reasoned my way to but something I arrived at. I sat at my father’s desk for a long time with it in my hands. At some point the grief stopped being just grief and became something with a shape, a direction.

Not rage. Rage makes you loud and loud makes you dead. Something colder. Something that can wait.

The hardest part isn’t the danger. I’ve thought about the danger, and I’ve made my peace with it. The hardest part is that I have to walk into his house, sit across from the man who killed my father, and smile. I have to be useful to him. I have to make him want to keep me alive. And I have to do all of that while carrying everything I feel about what he did, every single day, without letting any of it show.