I read the message.
I need a word with you. Come outside. No one should know.
Twelve words. And somehow every single one of them landed differently than the one before it.
I set the phone face down, picked up my jacket from the back of the chair, and stood.
“Calling it a night,” I said.
The table didn’t stop. Luka glanced at me, read whatever he read in my face—which was nothing, which was the point—and gave a single nod. Yegor didn’t look up. Damir raised two fingers in something that might have been a farewell.
I walked out without looking back.
***
The Chicago night was cold and unapologetic, smelling like exhaust and damp concrete and the ghost of lake wind that cut between buildings like it had somewhere important to be. I stepped off the curb and stopped.
The SUV was already there.
Black, unmarked, sitting across the street with its lights off and its engine silent, I’d seen Matvey’s vehicles enough times to know them by their absence. No plates that meant anything. No driver visible through the glass. Present by design. Invisible by design. ‘
I crossed the street.
The door opened before I reached it.
Inside was warm, and the air carried something I’d never been able to name—cedar, maybe, or something older than that. Matvey sat in the far corner, his face half-lit by the ambient glow from the street. A folder rested across his knee.
I got in and closed the door.
Silence.
This was one of the few things I genuinely respected about Matvey Kamarov. He didn’t need to fill the silence. Most powerful men did; they mistook quiet for a loss of ground and rushed to reclaim it with words. Matvey understood that silence was just another kind of language, and he had spoken it longer than most men had been alive.
He let it settle. Then: “Tomas Alvarez.”
I waited.
“You know who he is.”
“Latin businessman,” I said. “Real estate, trade. His daughter married Yegor.”
“Hiseldestdaughter.” A pause that had something deliberate in it. “There is a younger one. Sofia.” He said the name the way you say something you’ve been thinking about for longer than you’ve admitted. “Twenty-two. Medical student. She has nothing to do with her father’s business.”
I noted it. Filed it. “All right.”
Matvey looked out the window. Whatever was moving behind his eyes, he kept it behind them. “There are reports that Tomas has been supplying arms to rival factions in Chicago. Quietly, through layered channels built specifically so nothing traces back to a single name.”
He turned to me then, fully, the weight of it direct and without softening. “He has been doing this, if the reports are true, while sheltered by the truce we honored at Yegor’s wedding. While sitting at our table.”
The temperature in the car didn’t change.
Something else did.
“You want confirmation,” I said.
“I want the truth.” His voice was the same as it always was—even, composed, the way a man sounds when he has already walked through every possible outcome in his mind and chosen which one he can live with. “The truce matters. Yegor’s marriage matters. I won’t move against the Alvarez name without certainty.” A beat. “But if Tomas has betrayed us—”
He left it there. He didn’t need to finish it. Men like us didn’t need sentences finished.