Her Father's Enemy

Mila Orlova has not spoken to her father in four years. She speaks to him for eleven seconds on the night he is shot, long enough for him to push a flash drive into her hand and stop breathing. On it: the Vartanyan syndicate's payroll, every name, hers included. Dima Sokolov is forty-seven, a bratva enforcer, and the man who killed her father on orders. He is also the man who finds her smoking outside her hospital and, instead of finishing the job, hands her a burner phone and tells her to drive west. She does not drive west. She calls the number. What starts as a promise to a dead man becomes an apartment in Sheepshead Bay, a mattress on the floor, and a February cabin in the Catskills with no cell signal and no way out but through the snow and each other. By the time Mila tells him what she is carrying — the child and the file — Dima has one day to decide whose man he is. He decides. It costs him two of his own crew, his freedom, and every Tuesday evening for the next ten years. The phone still rings.