The question was mild and surface-level and carried underneath it the thousand other questions he wasn’t asking, all of which related to Nico and the arrangement he’d engineered and whether the evening had gone the way he’d intended.
“The watch sold well,” I said.
He made a sound of agreement and turned back to the stage, and I sat beside him in my navy dress in the gold-lit room and kept my hands folded in my lap and didn’t look across the room again.
Not for a full three minutes.
When I finally did, Gregory was gone.
And the space where he’d been standing held nothing, just the ambient crowd, the chandelier light, the elegant indifference of a room that had already moved on. I sat with the particular, unaccountable feeling of a person looking at a door that had closed before they’d decided whether they wanted to walk through it.
Yegor’s cousin.
Two million dollars without blinking.
Tell me how you understood me so easily.
I didn’t have an answer for him.
I was starting to suspect that would be a problem.
Chapter 4 – Gregory
I watched her walk away and told myself the tightness in my chest was irritation.
That was the story I was going with. Irritation—clean, functional, entirely justified. I’d deviated from the mission parameters inside the first forty minutes of arriving at this event, inserted myself into a situation that had nothing to do with Tomas Alvarez’s alleged arms dealings, and somehow ended up standing in the middle of a fundraiser holding the hand of a twenty-two-year-old medical student while a string quartet played something mournful in the background.
Irritation was the appropriate response.
The fact that I could still feel exactly where her fingers had been in mine was irrelevant.
I turned away from the direction she’d gone—deliberately, the way you turn away from something you’ve decided not to look at—and pulled the comm from my jacket pocket. Small, discreet, the kind of tech that Kirill had sourced from somewhere he never explained, and I never asked about, because asking Kirill where things came from was like asking the city where the lake came from. It had always been there. The origin wasn’t the point.
I pressed it in and raised two fingers to adjust my collar, which was the gesture that meantI’m on.
Static. Then a click.
“Took you long enough.” A voice, low and dry. Female. Not Kirill’s flat baritone—which meant Illyana had drawn tonight’s surveillance shift, or Matvey had deployed them both, and they were trading off, which he did sometimes when the mission required it.
The secrecy of this particular operation meant I wasn’t entirely certain which of them had full visibility and which was operating on a need-to-know basis. What I did know was that whoever was on the other end of this line had a direct line to Matvey, and that Matvey’s instructions had been explicit: clean, quiet, no trail.
“I need a confirmation on the man who was standing with Maverick Wiese,” I said, keeping my voice below the ambient noise of the room. “Dark suit, Latin, mid-thirties. He was with Sofia Alvarez.”
A brief pause.
Then my phone buzzed—a photo, sent to the separate encrypted line we used for visual confirms. I glanced at the screen.
Dark eyes, angular jaw, the kind of build that saidfunctional strengthrather thangym vanity.The photo was recent, taken tonight from an angle that told me Illyana had eyes on the room from somewhere elevated, which meant she was either in the building or had accessed external surveillance feeds. With Illyana, it could have been either.
“That’s him,” I said.
“Nico Calderon.” Kirill’s voice this time, cutting in from the secondary channel—so they were both on. “Maverick Wiese’s stepson. Different father, took the mother’s second husband’s name. He runs ops for Maverick’s political machine. The kind of ops that don’t appear in any official capacity.”
I processed that. Filed it. “Tomas and Maverick are arranging a match. Between Calderon and the younger Alvarez daughter.”
A beat of silence that felt longer than it was.
“Keep your eyes on Tomas,” Kirill said. His voice carried no inflection—it never did—but the instruction had a precision to it that communicated more than the words.Stay on the target. Don’t drift.