Page 60 of Ruthless Bond

Not about what they are. I’m not that reckless. About the financial discrepancies I’ve been documenting, the payments that don’t match, the money that moves in patterns I can’t reconcile. I used the finances as a door because that’s the part of their operation Viktor eventually trusted me to manage, and questioning them gives me standing that questioning their biology would not.

The money.

The transfer Dad stopped.

I found it because he’d pulled it out of the normal routing and parked it somewhere safe. He wasn’t losing Voronov money.

He was protecting it from whatever he’d found inside their own accounts.

He wasn’t surprised. He looked at me across the desk with those old eyes, and I understood in that moment that Viktor Voronov has been expecting this conversation. Not from me specifically. From whoever got close enough, stayed long enough, paid enough attention. He’s been waiting for the question the way a spider waits for a vibration in the web.

He didn’t answer the financial question. He asked me one instead: “How much do you know, Marco?” Not what do you suspect. Not what have you heard. How much do you know. The difference matters. Suspicion he could manage. Knowledge is a different category.

I told him I knew about the temperatures. The speed. The eyes. I told him I knew the word.

His face changed. He said: “You’ve put us all at risk.”

I told him I hadn’t told anyone. I told him I wasn’t a threat. I told him I’d spent fifteen years proving my loyalty and I was asking for honesty in return.

He said: “Loyalty and knowledge are different currencies, Marco. You can spend one. The other spends you.”

I close my eyes. I open them. I keep reading.

Two weeks before.

Viktor has been watching me. Not subtly. He wants me to know he’s watching. He has people follow me to the restaurant and follow me home. A car sits outside my building at night. He’s not trying to be covert. He’s applying pressure, meant to make a man understand exactly how much attention he’s under.

I should leave. Pack a bag, drive to Wisconsin, disappear. I have enough money saved. I could vanish.

But the records. If I leave, the records stay behind, or I take them and risk being caught with them. And if something happens to me, Sophia needs to know. She needs to understand what I found and what it means. Whatever happens to me, the truth belongs to my daughter.

I’ll hide the notebook in my coat. The lining. The seam I can resew. If they come for me, they won’t find it. They’ll search the apartment. They’ll search the restaurant. They’ll search everywhere a man might hide something important. They won’t check the lining of a winter coat hanging in the closet.

Sophia will find it. She notices everything. I taught her to notice everything.

The tears are here now. Running down my face, dropping onto the legal pad, smearing the pencil marks. My father, sitting in this apartment, writing in a cipher he taught his little girl, hiding a notebook in his coat because he knew they were coming for him and he wanted me to have the truth.

Last entry. Ten days before his death.

Viktor knows everything. He knows what I found. He knows I wrote it down. He’s been asking, through intermediaries, where my records are. I’ve told him they don’t exist. He doesn’t believe me.

D.V. doesn’t know. I’m certain of this. Viktor is operating without his son’s knowledge, the way he operates on everything that threatens the family’s secret. D.V. would handle this differently. D.V. is cold but he’s not cruel. Viktor is both when he needs to be.

If something happens to me, I need Sophia to understand. Not just what they are. Why I stayed. Why I kept working with them even after I knew. I was never one of them. I knew that from the beginning. I was an Italian restaurant owner doing business with a Russian family that had been in Chicago longer than anyone seemed able to explain. I was useful, then trusted, and eventually close enough that Viktor stopped treating me like an outsider.

That took years.

Maybe that’s why I stayed after I began to understand. Because whatever else the Voronovs are, they never gave their trust cheaply, and once they gave it, I believed it meant something.

Because they’re not monsters. They’re different. They’re dangerous. But fifteen years of watching them has taught me that their violence is structural, not sadistic. They protect what’s theirs. They protect each other. They protect the people who work for them, the neighborhood, the businesses. They are, in their way, better guardians of this community than any human organization I’ve seen.

Viktor is the exception. Viktor protects the secret above all else. Above loyalty, above relationships, above the lives of men who have stood beside the family faithfully for a decade and a half. Viktor has decided that I am a threat, and Viktor does not leave threats unresolved.

I think Viktor is going to—

The entry ends. Mid-sentence. The last word my father wrote in the notebook is “to” followed by a dash, as though he was interrupted. As though the pressure finally became too much and he closed the notebook and hid it in his coat and never opened it again.

Ten days later, he was dead. Heart attack. Found on the kitchen floor by his neighbor who called me, and I flew to Chicago and scattered his ashes where we scattered mom’s. I never questioned the official story because why would I? Heart attacks happen. Men in their sixties die of natural causes. There was no reason to suspect anything else.