Page 14 of The Pakhan’s Bride (Mafia Bosses #3)

KONSTANTIN

O ver the next few hours, I go deeper. The folder marked Astra Line is chock-full of maritime records.

There are manifests stamped by half a dozen port states, all oddly clean for ships so battered they shouldn't still be in service.

The registry shifts with every page. Lithuanian, then Panamanian, then Turkish.

The captains change names. The crews are ghosts, hired through third-party brokers and always impossible to trace.

Every sixth shipment is flagged for expedited diplomatic clearance.

That's the first tell. The seals are inconsistent, the paperwork laughable—one is from a dead vice consul in Romania, another signed by a notary who hasn't practiced since the nineties.

Different names, different dates, but the same trick.

Someone's laundering freight through state immunity.

I turn to the next folder— Zvezda Route .

Air manifests this time. The shipments are listed as donations, museum transfers, church heirlooms. All of them are declared fragile, all insured beyond reason, and all far heavier than the stated cargo.

I tap my fingers on the surface, thinking to myself.

This has to be a front, and a clever one at that, the kind that works because no one checks crates from the Orthodox diocese.

I flag three entries with connections to Batumi and Varna, both old ports still loyal to the Baranovs.

This is bad news for me. Valentin is reactivating the old Vory shadow networks.

He's piggybacking on relics of Soviet trade corridors, securing silent ports and dead channels long buried under legitimate business.

The Astra Line is a sea route for arms and allies.

The Zvezda Route handles air shipments, money, favors, maybe influence.

Whatever Valentin is building, he wants it active soon.

Antonov finally speaks. "Something is afoot under the codename U-PJKT. You want to escalate?"

I look at him. He's still as a hunting dog, waiting for the command. "Full trace on this," I say to him. "Find out who's moving the operation, where it's going, and who's funding the courier chain. I want names."

He nods, typing already.

To Orlov, I say, "double the satellite time over Varna, Batumi, and Odessa. Scramble the image analysis. If anyone moves at night, I want to know the make of their shoes before they hit customs."

He grins, teeth white and hungry. "Understood."

I stare at the pile. For a moment, I imagine lighting it on fire, watching the bureaucracy burn down to the steel frame. Instead, I take out a red pen, circle three names in the Zvezda Route folder, and draw a line connecting them. The pattern is obvious now, but only if you know where to look.

The men drift out, one by one. I remain, the hum of the server racks the only heartbeat in the room. I let the details settle in my head, every alias and code word slotted into place, every face mapped onto the board, before I finally see myself out.

The world does not stop for war. It just gets louder, faster, more efficient at hiding the bodies.

My current office is a bunker beneath Moscow, thirty meters down, shielded by steel and boredom.

The clocks are set to six time zones, but it's always the same hour.

Now. We run it as a twenty-four-hour operation.

No downtime, no holidays, no room for sentiment.

Every desk is manned by someone with a specialty—translation, decryption, asset vetting, digital intrusion.

The lights are always on. The coffee is always gone.

I like to stand at the glass wall and watch the motion.

The techs never glance up, even when the servers whine or the lights flicker from another power surge.

Data moves faster than thought. It's the only thing in Russia that does.

Field ops come in and out, each one with a file or a lead.

The room is a living organism, and I am its heart, brain, and soul.

The U-PJKT operation seems to be extensive.

First, there are the satellite feeds. Orlov's boys tune into the back-channel comms of half the embassies in the Balkans.

They monitor every car that leaves after midnight, every briefcase that never passes through X-ray, every child who goes to school with a new last name.

The next layer is the digital. Sokolov and his team run decryption on the latest batch of emails from the Isle of Man shell companies.

At first, it's slow—nothing but "seasonal greetings" and "investment opportunities".

But then the patterns emerge. Every third message is a code for a new transfer.

Every password reset is a marker for an upcoming shipment. It's as predictable as spring rain.

We map it all. On the walls are whiteboards with tangles of arrows, digital screens filled with heat maps and facial composites, physical boards with strings and pins because despite all the tech, the old ways still work best.

The picture sharpens. The Baranovs aren't just running a forgery ring.

They are rewriting the DNA of Europe. Every fake passport is a new citizen, a new voting bloc, a new whisper in the ear of power.

Every shipping container is a safehouse or a bank or a weapons cache, placed exactly where it will matter three years from now, or thirty.

Every marriage pact is a bullet fired into the next generation.

One name that keeps emerging is the Albani syndicate, a Slavic-Balkan hybrid, technically Albanian by name only.

Their leadership fractured twice over the last decade, but what emerged was something harder to kill, tighter, nastier, and backed by Ricci capital, the worst of the old Italian rot dressed in globalist polish.

They traffic everything from girls to plutonium and keep a payroll of men whose morals are sold hourly.

They were Valentin Baranov's enemies once.

Cut off his funding in Kraków. Hijacked three of his trucks outside, split and returned them empty, but wrapped in wire.

The cargo was found stripped and bleeding in a warehouse near Belgrade.

Valentin retaliated, of course, quietly and lethally.

For a time, the two operations orbited each other like stars in a dying binary system—too violent to co-exist, too entangled to escape.

Then, last year, everything shifted. A sealed meeting in Tirana. No audio, no surveillance. After that, Albani stopped skimming off the Baranov channels. The hijackings ceased. Valentin's ships began docking in ports previously under Albani control, and no one asked questions.

The part that impresses me most is the subtlety.

No violence, unless you count the violence done to truth.

Every move is deniable, every connection plausible.

The European Union investigates a bribery scandal.

the next week, half the evidence is missing, and the only witness has been promoted to a sinecure in The Hague.

I spend nights at the table, hands folded, watching the data update in real time.

Tonight, Antonov brings me a fresh batch. He sets it down, opens to the first page, and steps back.

"Summary?" I ask.

He clears his throat. "They're running three parallel networks. First, the diplomatic channel—consular staff, immunity, direct-to-embassy transport. Second, the business channel—shell corporations, offshore accounts, trade missions. Third, the civil network—NGOs, church groups, cultural exchanges."

I nod. "Overlap?"

"Significant. They use the same people for all three."

"Exposure?"

He hesitates. "Minimal. They only burn the pawns."

I flip through the file. Every page is a sin against the natural order.

A Ukrainian priest with six different aliases, each tied to a bank account in Cyprus.

A Lithuanian journalist who "dies" in a car crash and resurfaces in Estonia as a government advisor.

A German MP's son, married off to a Baranov cousin, then groomed for party leadership.

The connections are not linear. They are fractal, spiraling outward, impossible to predict.

Orlov chimes in, voice dry. "There's another layer."

"Show me."

He gestures to the screen. "Legal infrastructure. The Baranovs are embedding their own in the courts, the notaries, the registrar offices. Any time a passport is questioned, someone in the bureaucracy smooths it over. Any time a marriage is flagged, it's ratified by an official who owes them."

"How deep?"

"Half the Balkans. A quarter of the Baltics. France is clean, but only because they haven't started there yet."

I lean back. "What about the security services?"

Sokolov answers this time. "They pay well. And they're patient. The highest infiltration is in the countries nobody cares about. But it's enough to build a base."

I stare at the maps. In every city, a red dot. Each dot, a cell. Each cell, a hand on the wheel.

"Who's running the field?"

Orlov shrugs. "No direct trace. Orders come through intermediaries. The only constant is the Baranov name."

I watch the dots pulse on the screen, a virus in the body politic. There is an elegance to it. But I hate elegance that isn't mine.

"Have we pulled any live assets?" I ask.

Antonov sighs. "Three. All local fixers. None would talk."

"Make them talk or finish them."

He nods, leaves the room.

I page through the last intake, a thumb drive.

The encryption on the drive is next-level.

Triple-stacked, salted hashes, the works.

But I know the pattern. Baranov always liked to think he was smarter than the men who hunted him.

The interface is slow, but after thirty minutes, it yields.

The root folder has one file. PROJECT ZOYA.

I read the name once, twice. The file is a text document, plus three image attachments.

I open the text first. At the top, a table of dates and locations.

Some are familiar—Paris, Prague, Istanbul.

Some are odd—Casablanca, Vancouver, Dubai.

Each entry is linked to a code. Cross-referenced to an operations index…

each date is a meeting, each code a set of players.

Below, there's a block of legalese. Marriage protocols, with references to international law. Immunity for spouses, transfer of citizenship, recognition of children, asset consolidation plans. A list of financial institutions that have already signed off on the arrangements.

There's a breakdown of the Baranov holdings—offshores, gold reserves, real estate, art. Valued in the billions. The entire apparatus is designed to be portable, to survive any regime change. The only catch—it all gets transferred with the signature on a marriage certificate.

Then the last section, a one-page psychological profile of the subject.

SUBJECT—ZOYA BARANOVA

QUALITIES—Polyglot, high IQ, disciplined, but prone to risk-taking and defiance.

LIKELY RESPONSE TO ARRANGED MARRIAGE—Initial resistance, probable escape attempt, eventual compliance through engineered leverage.

FINAL PHASE—"Wedding" to be performed under diplomatic cover, post-nuptial settlement to guarantee silence from all parties.

I scroll, and the first image loads. Zoya, in profile, sitting at a table in what looks like a Vienna café.

Zoya. My eyes widen. Her hair is a mess, but she's smiling a real smile.

Her eyes are alive. Next image—security camera, low-res, her walking alone along the Seine, hair tucked under a black scarf.

Last image—a passport photo. The background is blank, the light is flat, but the angle of her chin is unmistakable.

I sit back, and for a moment the world stops. The room is silent except for the dull whine of the fan in the rack server. Zoya Baranov is Sofia. My Sofia. And her family is planning to sell her. She's the dowry, not the heiress.

The Baranovs are running the oldest con in the world.

Zoya Baranov has been groomed for a single task—to secure an alliance with Matteo Ricci.

The more I read, the worse it gets. Should she refuse, there are systems in place to arrange a kidnapping and hold her hostage through the Albani syndicate, which would give a scoundrel like Matteo currency to do as he pleases with her.

Bile rises in my throat as I realize the extent of Valentin's greed.

The Riccis alone control a dozen Mediterranean ports and have leverage inside the Vatican Bank.

If she succeeds in gaining their favor through marriage, Valentin's network expands instantly.

New trade routes would open under diplomatic seals.

Arms and gold could be transferred under the cover of cultural exchange.

The Baranovs wouldn't just recover their lost territory.

They would become the backbone of a transnational syndicate that no regime could touch.

No street war, no police raid, no Bratva tribunal could undo it. All he needs is her signature.

I stand, blood boiling, and call up the comms. "Orlov, get the team ready."

This isn't about the Baranovs anymore. It's about Zoya, and if they think they can sell what's mine, they're even stupider than I thought.