He held out the folder.
I took it.
“Why me?” The question was genuine. I was an enforcer. I was the end of a process, not the middle. There were men better built for this kind of quiet, careful work.
Matvey’s expression shifted. Not quite a smile. Something drier than that, something that lived in the space between amusement and certainty.
“Because this mission requires someone who lacks emotions,” he said.
The words sat in the air between us.
I turned them over once. Found the edge in them—because Matvey always put edges in things—and recognized it wasn’t an insult. It was a diagnosis. A deliberate one.
I filed it. Opened the folder.
Her photograph was on top.
Sofia Alvarez. Twenty-two. Dark hair, olive skin, brown eyes that the camera had caught mid-look—not at the lens, but slightly past it. Like something just out of frame had caught her attention at exactly the wrong moment. Or the right one. She wasn’t performing for whoever was holding the camera. She was just…existing. Caught in the middle of a thought that had nothing to do with being looked at.
It was an unguarded face.
I noted it and moved on.
The rest of the folder was clean and precise: shell companies, financial routing that bent in directions money shouldn’t naturally bend, names of rival faction leaders whose operations had quietly expanded over the past eight months with no visible explanation.
The architecture of it was careful. Deliberate. Built by someone who understood how to hide inside legitimacy.
Someone had been constructing something. And they had been doing it slowly, patiently, from inside the shelter of a name the Bratva had no reason to question.
Until now.
I closed the folder.
“The younger daughter,” Matvey said. “Sofia. She is your way in. Alvarez keeps his business separate from his family—but he is not untouched by them. She is close to him. Close enough.” A pause. “Proximity to her places you near enough to learn what you need to learn.”
Use the girl to get to the father. Clean. Logical.
I’d done worse for less.
“How much time?”
“As much as the truth requires.” He looked at me steadily. “But understand, Gregory: If Alvarez is guilty, there will be no delay for sentiment. Not even Yegor’s marriage changes that.”
“And if he’s innocent?”
The question landed in the silence and stayed there a moment.
“Then the real traitor,” Matvey said quietly, “is still inside our walls. And that becomes a very different problem.”
***
The SUV pulled away without a sound and disappeared around the corner.
I stood on the empty street with the folder under my arm and the city pressing in from all sides—noise from somewhere, wind off the lake, the distant rhythm of Volkov still breathing two blocks away as if nothing had happened.
Which, technically, nothing had.
I’d been given an assignment. I would complete it. That was the full, uncomplicated shape of my life, and I’d stopped expecting it to be anything else long enough ago that I no longer noticed the absence of expectation.