“Send him up,” Anja told the terminal, not glancing at her brother.
Teofil wiped grease from his thumb with a rag. “Kazimir Volkov? Since when does the wolf prowl through our front door? Father despised him.”
“Father is dead, Teo. Go back to your drafting table. Don't touch the lubricants until I run a quality sweep on the batch. The air in here smells sour.”
She didn't wait for his reply. She crossed the basalt floor toward the east drawing room, where the perimeter glass framed the brutalist concrete spires of Varsova. Rain smeared the panorama in cold streaks. When she entered, Kazimir was already standing by the cantilevered hearth, his long wool coat still damp at the shoulders. He looked like an incision in the white room—sharp, dark, completely out of place.
“You didn’t offer me tea,” he said without turning around. “A tragic lapse in Mirecki hospitality.”
“Tea in this house is currently unsafe to drink,” Anja said, sliding into a low leather chair. She folded her hands in her lap. “Say what you came to say, Volkov. Then take your car off my driveway.”
Kazimir turned. He held a slender, carbon-slate data pad between two gloved fingers, tapping it against his palm. “Aevum Dynamics filed for quiet restructuring at dawn. Not public yet. Two board members tried to dump their options on the grey market an hour ago. By noon tomorrow, the regulatory council will freeze trading.”
He took three slow steps forward, looming over her chair with an amused, insolent tilt to his head.
“You didn’t just buy junk, Anja. You tied a boulder around your neck and jumped into the river. Unless, of course, you know what their chief immunologist tucked into a private server three nights ago.”
Anja kept her face blank, though her knuckles pressed together until the skin went pale. “Enlighten me.”
“Project Chimera,” Kazimir said softly. The name slid off his tongue like venom coated in velvet. “A targeted mitochondrial reconstructor. It exists on paper. It hasn't passed animal trials. It shouldn't even be listed on an audit. But you liquidated seventy million crowns of your inheritance within thirty minutes of market open to corner the firm.”
He bent down, resting his palms on the arms of her chair, trapping her within the span of his broad shoulders. His cologne smelled of crushed birch leaves and ozone. His dark eyes searched her face, hungry and unnervingly sharp.
“How?” he whispered. “You spend your life mending canvas and scraping varnish off centuries-old portraits. You have never looked at a biotechnology ticker in twenty-six years. Who fed you that file?”
“No one feeds me anything,” she said evenly, refusing to lean back.
“A lie.” He straightened, tossing the data pad onto the low glass table between them. It clattered against the surface. “I have twenty analysts tracking the leaks. The Ministry of Health didn't know. The Varsova Defense Council didn't know. Yet an art restorer moved before the ink on the patent draft was dry.”
“Then consider me a prodigy of intuition.”
“Consider yourself prey,” he countered, his voice dropping into a harsh gravel. “An informant tipped you off, or an enemy set you up. Either way, Aevum's creditors will dissect you by tomorrow afternoon. Volkov Industries holds forty parts of the mezzanine debt. I can squash the filing. I can keep the company solvent and shelter your shares until Chimera yields a synthesis.”
“In exchange for what?”
“The name of your source. And fifty-one parts of the yield.”
Anja smiled, a cold, humorless parting of her lips. “You ask for an empire in exchange for crumbs, Kazimir. You want to know who talks to me because it terrifies you that another player in Varsova moves faster than you do.”
His jaw hardened, the mocking playfulness peeling back to reveal iron. “Don't mistake leverage for a game, Anja. You are drowning.”
Before she could fire back, the comm-tablet strapped to her inner wrist buzzed with three sharp, rapid pulses. A high-priority ping from the off-grid bio-scanner she had rigged in the basement lab.
She pulled it up, ignoring Kazimir entirely.
The spectral analysis of the grease sample she had scraped from Teofil’s workshop was complete. The screen broke down the chemical profile of Aethel-Glide. Ninety-eight parts synthetic silicone base. Two parts unknown compound.
Then the local database matched the molecular footprint.
*Compound: Myelo-Paralytic Agent 7-B. Neuro-degenerative organophosphate analogue. Dermal and respiratory absorption. Latency period: three to four weeks.*
*Effects: Progressive motor-neuron collapse. Mimics rapid-onset amyotrophic sclerosis.*
The text burned into her retinas.
It wasn't a biological sickness. It never was.
Ten years ago, Teofil hadn't withered under an act of God or a cruel stroke of genetics. A hand within this house had painted the poison onto his tools. Onto the metal armatures he touched with bare, sweat-slicked fingers day after day. He had inhaled the fumes as the friction heated the joints of his kinetic sculptures. Drop by drop. Layer by layer.
And Elena—Elena had been there every evening, checking his trembling hands, offering soothing words, feeding him chamomile tea to mask the symptoms while administering secondary doses to ensure the rot took hold.
They hadn't just watched him die. They had manufactured his agony.
A furious heat flared behind Anja’s ribs, roaring up her throat until she could taste copper. Every thread of past sorrow dissolved into pure, black rage. The grief that had hollowed her out in her first life was gone, incinerated in an instant.
Kazimir’s gaze narrowed as he watched her. He took half a step forward, reading the shift in her posture. “What is that?”
Anja stood. Her movements were sudden, stripped of hesitation.
She picked up her tablet and thrust it flat against Kazimir’s chest, forcing his hand to take it.
“Look at it,” she commanded.
Kazimir glanced down, his brow furrowing as his eyes scanned the chemical breakdown. The cynic’s smirk faded from his lips. “Organophosphate. Military-grade delivery matrix. Who is working with this?”
“It was smeared across the tools in my brother’s private studio,” she said. Each word landed like a steel bolt driven into stone. “Someone has been slowly murdering Teofil under my roof.”
Kazimir went rigid. His eyes darted from the screen back to her, absorbing the raw, feral fury burning in her stare. For the first time since he had walked through the gate, he looked uncertain.
“This isn't corporate espionage,” he murmured, the financier gone, replaced by the predator who recognized blood in the water.
“No,” Anja said, her voice dropping into a register so cold it cut the air between them. “It isn't. The Aevum patent will save him if this poison takes root, but I am not waiting for him to fall. I don't just want the cure anymore, Volkov.”
She leaned in, closing the space between them until she could see the flecks of amber in his dark irises.
“I need you to find out who supplied this poison.”