I stared at the bar.
Someone who lacks emotions.
Matvey had said it like a compliment. Like a qualification. Like the thing that made me the right tool for the job.
I pressed my knuckle against the bar’s edge until I felt the pressure of it, which was the closest I came to centering techniques, and I thought about the folder and the mission and Tomas Alvarez and everything that needed to happen in the correct order for this investigation to produce the truth that Matvey needed.
The access point. That’s what she was. A means, not an end. A door I needed to walk through to get to what was on the other side.
She was not a brown-eyed problem I’d developed in the span of four minutes and two days of self-enforced isolation.
She was not the reason I was sitting at a bar, unable to redirect my attention toward a perfectly suitable alternative.
She was absolutely not the reason I was about to order another vodka and go home alone for the third night in a row.
I ordered another vodka.
The bartender didn’t comment. Barmen at Volkov never commented. Another thing I’d always appreciated about this place—the specific, practiced indifference of people who had seen enough that nothing qualified as remarkable anymore.
I drank it.
Sat with the empty glass.
And accepted, with the cold, clear precision of a man who had been honest with himself about difficult things for four decades and wasn’t going to stop now—
That the interference had not been removed.
That it was, if anything, louder in a crowded room than it had been in the quiet of my apartment.
That Matvey Kamarov, who saw everything and planned accordingly, had sent me to a fundraiser with a photograph of a girl not looking at the camera and a directive to get close to her.
And had known, with the certainty of a man who had been running the most feared criminal organization in Chicago for twenty years, exactly what would happen if I did.
I didn’t know yet whether that made me a fool or a weapon.
I suspected, sitting in the noise and smoke of Volkov with an empty glass and a chest full of something I couldn’t name, it made me both.
Chapter 5 – Sofia
There were exactly two people in the world I told everything to.
One was my mother, and she had been gone for years.
The other was Camila.
My sister was three years older than me, which meant she had always been three years ahead of me in every way that mattered—three years more polished, three years more strategic, three years deeper into the understanding of what it meant to be an Alvarez woman in a world that our father had built to run on his terms. She had learned to navigate it the way you learn to navigate anything dangerous—carefully, intelligently, and with the specific kind of grace that looks effortless from the outside and costs everything on the inside.
I’d always followed her map, even when it led somewhere I didn’t expect.
Like the Bratva.
I’d known about it before the wedding, in the vague, peripheral way you know about things that exist at the edge of your family’s life without being invited into the center of it. I’d known Camila was seeing someone dangerous. She had never said his name, had never confirmed what world he moved in, but there were signs if you knew how to read them, and I’d always known how to read Camila. The way she checked her phone with her body angled slightly away. The way she talked about him—never directly, always in the shape of his absence, the negative space where a name should have been. The way she smiled sometimes when she thought no one was watching, which was a smile I’d never seen her wear for anyone else. Fierce. Unguarded. The smile of a woman who had found something she hadn’t been looking for and was still deciding whether to be terrified about it.
She had married Yegor seven months ago.
I’d stood at that altar beside her and watched my sister become a Kamarov and thought, in the private, honest part of myself that I rarely let speak at full volume:She looks like she’s exactly where she’s supposed to be.
I’d not seen Gregory at that wedding.