“Apply” and locked the ability to manually change the settings from the wall panels. On the monitor, the indicators began to change. The temperature graph slowly crept downwards.
I leaned back in my chair. My apartment was quiet and warm. And there, in the 12-million house, a climatic winter was beginning. They wanted a cold war? They got one. Now, all that was left was to wait.
Ignat said the guests would arrive at the height of the festivities. In the meantime, let Lukerya try to explain to her high-society lionesses why the atmosphere in her luxurious mansion resembled the waiting room of a district hospital in November. I closed the laptop. It was time for tea.
The tea in the porcelain cup had grown cold, a thin film forming on top, but I hadn’t taken a single sip. It wasn’t just a vengeful person who had awoken in me, but a professional. An engineer. When you see a crack in a facade, you can just patch it with plaster, or you can dig deeper to find the cause of the foundation’s subsidence.
Lukerya was the crack. And her behavior—this hysterical, animalistic aggression, this manic desire to keep me from the doorstep of my own house—didn’t fit the simple pattern of an evil mother-in-law. People with money and social standing behave differently.
They are condescending. They ignore, they don’t fight. Lukerya, however, was behaving like a cornered animal, baring its teeth at anyone who approached its den. Why? I pushed the cup aside and pulled the laptop back towards me.
This time, I closed the smart home control panel. I needed different tools. After forty years as the city’s chief architect, I had built connections that don’t just disappear upon retirement. My address book was worth more than gold.
I dialed the number of Larisa Petrovna, an old friend from the Unified Register of Property Rights. She still worked as a department head, sitting in the same office with dusty ficus plants where we once approved development master plans.
“Pelageya?” Her voice crackled with surprise over the phone. “How many years has it been? Decided to come back to work?”
“A private matter. I need to check one property. And one person.” I gave her the address of Lukerya’s elite apartment in the city center.
The very apartment she boasted about, talking about its 19th-century stucco and its famous artist neighbor. Lukerya always emphasized that she was only staying with Trofim temporarily, while her own apartment underwent a grand renovation. Keys clattered on the other end of the line.
I heard that rhythmic sound and imagined the cursor on Larisa’s screen scrolling down the database. “Strange,” Larisa muttered after a minute. A string tensed inside me. “What is it?”
“The property at this address… was sold. Six months ago. In May.” I froze. “Sold? By whom?” “By the owner, of course. A citizen Voronova, Lukerya Stepanovna. A direct, quick deal, the price… hmm, about twenty percent below market value. She must have been in a hurry.”
“And where is she registered now?” The pause dragged on. The keys were clattering more urgently now. “Polina…” Larisa’s voice grew quieter. “She has no property.”
“None at all?” “No apartment, no dacha, not even a garage. A clean slate. Her last registration was annulled upon sale. Officially, she’s… a person of no fixed abode.” I slowly lowered the phone to the table, putting it on speaker.
“Thanks, Lara. Check one more thing. The enforcement service database.” I already knew the answer, but I needed documentary proof. A minute later, Larisa whistled.
“Wow! This is quite a bouquet. Three enforcement proceedings. Loans. Microloans. And… wait a minute. A lawsuit from the ‘Golden Phoenix’ casino? Isn’t that the underground network that was busted last year? Gambling debts? Polina, who have you gotten involved with? The debt is almost 4 million. All her assets were auctioned off to cover at least part of it.”
I thanked my friend and hung up. A ringing silence filled the room. The puzzle fell into place. Click. Lukerya wasn’t just visiting Trofim. She wasn’t renovating her apartment.
She had no apartment. She was bankrupt. A gambling addict who had lost everything: her home, her reputation, her future. That’s why she had latched onto my son. That’s why she was gradually moving her things in.
I remembered how a month ago I noticed that the guest wing—two rooms with a separate entrance that I designed for Trofim’s friends—was locked. Trofim had brushed it off: “That’s where Lukerya’s things are stored, during the renovation.” It wasn’t storage. It was her life.
Those boxes I’d glimpsed on the cameras—that was all she had left. She hadn’t moved in temporarily. She had moved in for good. Like a parasite that invades a healthy organism when its own host dies.
And that was precisely why she was so fiercely driving me away. I was the only threat. As the owner and creator of the house, I could walk into the guest wing at any moment. I could see that it wasn’t just boxes, but a lived-in space.
I could ask questions. I could check. She needed to isolate Trofim from me to maintain her legend of a wealthy mother-in-law who was just helping the young couple. If Trofim found out that his mother-in-law had been kicked out not because of her personality, but out of fear of exposing a destitute gambling addict, everything would have collapsed.
She was playing for all or nothing. And the stake was my house. I opened the video stream from the surveillance cameras again. Now I was seeing things through different eyes. I didn’t see an arrogant socialite striding through the living room in a fuchsia dress. I saw a fraudster….
