Chapter 4: The Call Home
The door clicked shut behind him, sealing Katerina inside with the hum of the monitors and the fragile silence of her own, painfully drawn breaths. In the hallway, the world was a study in fluorescent glare and antiseptic chill. Raziel leaned back against the cool, painted cinderblock, letting the solidity of it press into his shoulder blades. He closed his eyes for a single beat, trying to cage the thing that lived in his chest now—a hybrid of volcanic rage and a fear so profound it felt like a void.
The phone was a weight in his hand. He scrolled through his contacts, past the entries denoted by single letters or nicknames, past the numbers for lawyers and accountants and men who handled problems. He found the one he needed, saved under a simple, formal name: Lev Grigoriev.
He had only called this number a handful of times in seven years. An obligatory call on New Year’s Day. A terse update when he and Katerina travelled. Once, three years ago, when Katerina had the flu so badly she’d been hospitalized for dehydration, and Raziel, pacing a different hospital corridor, had felt a duty to inform the man who had raised her. Each call was a transaction of bare facts, conducted over a gulf of mutual, unspoken resentment.
Today would be different. Today, he was not the Pakhan delivering a report. He was a man about to shatter another man’s world. He was the messenger of the worst news a parent could receive, and he was, in Lev’s eyes, the very reason that news existed.
He pressed the call button and brought the phone to his ear. It rang twice, then connected.
“Raziel.” Lev’s voice was exactly as he remembered: a low rumble, like stones grinding together, devoid of warmth. There was no question, no greeting. Just the name, an acknowledgement of an unwanted intrusion.
“Lev,” Raziel said. His own voice was flat, stripped of all inflection. It was the voice he used before issuing an irreversible command. He realized how it must sound and made an effort to soften it, but the edges were too sharp. “There’s been an accident. Katerina.”
A silence. Not a breath. A complete, dead-air vacuum on the line.
Raziel filled it, forcing the words out. They were clinical, brutal. “Last night. A truck hit her car on the Moskovsky Prospect. Head-on. The vehicle is destroyed.” He swallowed, his throat tight. “She was brought to St. Luke’s. She had a traumatic brain injury, a bruised lung, broken ribs, a fractured pelvis. They placed her in a medically induced coma. She only woke a few hours ago.”
More silence. Then, the sound of a chair scraping, a heavy sigh. When Lev spoke again, the gruffness was gone, replaced by a raw, paper-thin tension. “Is she alive?”
“Yes.”
“Will she live?”
“The doctors say yes. The critical period is passing. But she is… she is badly hurt, Lev.”
“Can she speak?” The old man’s voice was tightening, focusing on practicalities to avoid the yawning chasm beneath them.
“No. Not yet. Her throat is… the ventilator tube was just removed. It will be days before she can try. Maybe longer.” Raziel opened his eyes, staring at the opposite wall where a faded poster about hand-washing techniques was tacked. “But she is conscious. She understands. She is in pain, but she is fighting.”
“I will come,” Lev said instantly. There was the sound of movement, keys jangling.
“No.” Raziel said it too quickly, too harshly. He moderated his tone. “Not yet. She is fragile. The slightest infection… the doctors want her strength to build before any additional stress. A flight from Murmansk, the travel, it’s too much. For her. And for you.”
He was lying. Partly. The infection risk was real, but the greater truth was that Raziel could not handle Lev Grigoriev in this space, not now. The old man’s accusing eyes, his palpable belief that his daughter’s life with Raziel was the root of this tragedy, would be a distraction he couldn’t afford. He needed every neuron focused on her, on the quiet war for her recovery, and on the bloody reckoning waiting in the wings.
“You are telling me I cannot see my daughter?” Lev’s voice dropped into a dangerous register, one Raziel recognized—it was the voice of a man used to command, a retired colonel who had led men in Chechnya.
“I am telling you that seeing her on a video call will be better for her today than seeing you collapse from exhaustion in her doorway tomorrow,” Raziel said, the words diplomacy wrapped in steel. “I will call you. Every day. I will tell you everything. And when she is stronger, when she can speak, you will be the first person she talks to.”
Another agonizing pause. He could hear the old man’s struggle, the paternal instinct to charge into battle warring with the rational understanding that Raziel, for all his poison, was not wrong.
“The accident,” Lev said finally, the word heavy with implication. “Was it an accident?”
Raziel’s grip on the phone tightened. He had hoped to avoid this, but he should have known better. Lev Grigoriev had never been a fool. He understood the currency of violence and retaliation, even if he despised the market Raziel operated in.
“The police report will say it was. A commercial truck, faulty brakes, driver distracted.” Raziel kept his voice even. “The driver is in custody. It is being handled.”
A grunt. Lev understood the subtext. It is being handled. The three most ominous words in Raziel’s vocabulary.
“Handle it well, Raziel,” Lev said, and the threat in his tone was as clear as a knife on glass. “If this… spillover… has touched her, there is no hole deep enough for you to hide in.”
“I am aware,” Raziel replied, a cold reciprocal promise. Then he broke the standoff. “She is awake now. She is scared. She cannot talk, but she can hear. Do you want to speak to her? I can hold the phone. She will hear your voice.”
The shift was audibly disorienting. The aggression bled out of the line, replaced by a vulnerability that was somehow more difficult to witness. Lev cleared his throat, a rough, wet sound. “Yes. Put her on.”
“Wait.”
Raziel pushed off the wall and opened the door to Katerina’s room. The light was softer in here, the air warmer, carrying her scent beneath the hospital sterility. Her head was turned towards the window, but her eyes were open, unfocused, riding another wave of pain. She looked impossibly small in the bed.
He moved to her side. Her green eyes tracked him, a question in them. He held up the phone and mouthed, Your father.
Her reaction was instantaneous. Her eyes widened, then filled. A soft, desperate sound, a failed attempt at speech, escaped her bruised throat. She tried to lift a hand, but it only managed a weak tremor. The heart monitor jumped.
“Shh, shh, it’s alright,” Raziel murmured. He carefully sat on the edge of the bed, angling the phone. He didn’t use the speaker. This was too private. Instead, he gently held the phone to her ear, his hand cradling the back of her head with a tenderness that belied his strength. “Papa is on the phone. Just listen, kotik. Just listen.”
He watched her face. He saw her eyes squeeze shut. A single tear traced a path through the hair at her temple.
“Katenka?” Lev’s voice, through the tiny speaker, was transformed. The granite roughness was still there, but it had fissured, revealing a bedrock of aching love. It was a voice Raziel had never heard, a voice from a lifetime before he entered the picture. “My little Katenka. Can you hear me?”
Katerina’s lips trembled. She gave the faintest, most agonizing nod, her skin moving against the phone. A choked, whisper-soft exhale that was all the answer she could give.
KATERINA LOVES HER PAPA. The thought wasn’t intellectual; it was a physical truth that filled the room. It was in the way her body yearned towards the sound, the way her pain seemed to momentarily recede before a deeper, more ancient need for comfort. Lev Grigoriev was her history, her safe harbor from a time before darkness had a name and a handsome, dangerous face. In his voice was the smell of old books and pipe tobacco, the memory of strong hands lifting her onto his shoulders at a parade, the steadfast, unchanging love that had been the first foundation of her world.
“You listen to me,” Lev said, and his voice was thick. “You are strong. Stronger than you know. Stronger than any Grigoriev woman before you. Your mother… she had this same steel. You will get through this. You will heal. Do you understand me? Nod if you understand.”
She nodded again, more firmly this time, a tear dripping onto Raziel’s wrist where it supported her head.
“Good girl. I am coming. Not today, your… Raziel is right, today is too soon. But soon. I will see you soon. Until then, you rest. You fight. You do everything those doctors say. And you tell that husband of yours…” Lev paused, and Raziel held his breath. “You tell him to take care of you. Or he will answer to me.”
A tiny, hitching sound from Katerina. Almost a laugh. Almost a sob.
“I love you, my girl. More than anything. You just get better. That is your only job now.”
She opened her eyes, looking directly at Raziel, her gaze pleading. She wanted to say something, to respond. The frustration was a living thing in her face.
“She hears you, Lev,” Raziel said softly into the phone, answering the unspoken plea. “She is trying to say she loves you. It’s in her eyes.”
“I know,” Lev said, his voice breaking for the first time. “I know, solnyshko. I know. I will call tomorrow. Rest now.”
Raziel took the phone from her ear. “I’ll call you later with an update,” he said to Lev, his tone formal once more, rebuilding the necessary wall between them.
“See that you do.” The colonel was back, the moment of vulnerability sealed shut. The line went dead.
Raziel lowered the phone. Katerina was weeping silently, the tears flowing freely now, a release of fear, of pain, of longing. He placed the phone on the table and used his thumb to wipe her cheeks.
“See?” he whispered, his own chest constricted. “He knows. He’s with you. You’re not alone.”
She captured his hand, holding it with a surprising firmness against her wet cheek. She turned her head and pressed a frail kiss into his palm. It was an apology, a thank you, a transfer of trust all at once.
He sat with her until the tears subsided and her breathing evened out into the shallow, measured rhythm of sleep. The conversation had drained her last reserves. Carefully, he extracted his hand, adjusted her blanket, and stood.
The silence in the room was different now. The call had changed the atmosphere. It had forced him to articulate her condition, to hear it in Lev’s reactions, making the reality even more concrete, more horrific. And it had reinforced the other, colder reality: this was not random. This was a message. A stupid, reckless message from a spoiled boy who felt slighted.
The rage, momentarily banked by the emotional intensity of the call, now returned, cold and precise. It was a tool, not a fever. He needed to use it.
He stepped back into the corridor. Anton was there, materializing from a shadowed alcove like a well-tailored ghost. He held a paper bag from an upscale deli.
“The tea,” Anton said, his voice a low monotone. “The yellow box. And pirozhki. The cabbage ones she likes.”
“Leave them inside the door,” Raziel instructed. “She’s sleeping.”
Anton nodded and slipped silently into the room, leaving the bag on a chair, and exited just as quietly. He resumed his post, a silent, watchful statue.
“I need to go out,” Raziel said, checking the heavy, tactical watch on his wrist. It was just past two in the afternoon. “For two hours, no more. You stay here. No one enters that room but hospital staff, and you stand where you can see every move they make. Is Mischa downstairs?”
“In the lobby, reading a car magazine. He looks bored.”
“Tell him to be ready in five minutes.” Raziel pulled his suit jacket from where it was draped over a chair in the hallway and shrugged it on. The transformation was immediate and chilling. The man who had wept over his wife’s hand, who had tenderly held a phone to her ear, was gone. In his place was the Pakhan, his sharp features arranged into an emotionless mask, the silver at his temples like frost on iron. He straightened his cuffs. “I have a conversation with an uncle to attend to.”
Pyotr Ilyin’s import-export office was in a nondescript Soviet-era building in the Vasileostrovsky district, overlooking a grey stretch of the Neva. It smelled of stale cigarette smoke, cheap coffee, and the faint, fishy odor of the river. Pyotr’s secretary, a nervous man with a twitching eye, vanished into the inner office at Raziel’s arrival and did not return.
Raziel entered without knocking. Mischa remained outside the door, a looming presence in the drab hallway.
Pyotr Ilyin was a bull of a man going to fat, his once-red hair now a faded orange streaked with white. He stood behind a large, cluttered desk, his face pale. He had not been told Raziel was coming, but the sight of him clearly confirmed whatever dread had been festering since the previous night.
“Raziel Mihailovich,” Pyotr said, his voice too loud, too hearty. “This is an honor. Please, sit. Some tea? Something stronger?”
Raziel ignored the offer. He didn’t sit. He stood in the center of the room, his hands loose at his sides, and let the silence stretch. He watched the older man sweat. He watched his eyes dart to the door, to the window, anywhere but meet his own.
“Your nephew,” Raziel began, his voice conversational, “Yakov. How is he?”
Pyotr flinched as if struck. “Yakov? He is… he is well. A good boy. Eager. Perhaps a bit impulsive, but his heart is in the right place.”
“Impulsive,” Raziel repeated, tasting the word. “Where is his heart located, Pyotr? On the Moskovsky Prospect last night at nine-forty-seven p.m.?”
The blood drained from Pyotr’s face completely, leaving his skin a sickly grey. “Raziel Mihailovich, I… I do not know what you have heard, but I assure you—”
“My wife is in St. Luke’s Hospital,” Raziel continued, as if Pyotr hadn’t spoken. “She has a traumatic brain injury, a bruised lung, six broken ribs, and a fractured pelvis. She cannot speak. She is learning how to breathe on her own again. The doctors say she will live. I am choosing to believe them.” He took a single step forward. The desk was the only thing between them. “Do you know how I spent my morning, Pyotr? I held a telephone to my wife’s ear so her father, a retired colonel who already believes I am the devil, could tell her he loved her while she cried because she couldn’t say it back.”
Pyotr had begun to tremble. His hands gripped the edge of the desk, knuckles white. “Raziel, I swear to you, I had no part in this. The boy, he has a temper, he was angry about the bakery routes, he said some foolish things, but I never thought—”
“You never thought he would be stupid enough to target my family,” Raziel finished for him. His voice was still quiet, but it cut through the air like a scalpel. “You gave a loaded gun to a child, Pyotr, and you looked away while he played with it. That is not impulsive. That is negligent. That is a failure of command so profound it borders on treason.”
“What do you want?” Pyotr whispered, his defiance gone, replaced by pure survival terror. “Money? The boy? He is yours. Do what you want with him.”
Raziel’s lip curled. “Yakov was mine the moment his tires left the pavement. His fate is not a bargaining chip. It is a foregone conclusion. I am here to discuss your fate.”
He leaned forward, placing his palms flat on Pyotr’s desk. The older man recoiled. “You have twenty-four hours. Liquidate your business interests here. All of them. The cut you receive from the Baltic shipping lanes, the protection fees from