I wished she could stay exactly like this—tucked against me, asleep, trusting, unbothered by the things I knew and she didn’t. I wished the folder didn’t exist. I wished her father’s name wasn’t in it. I wished I were the kind of man who could walk into a girl’s life without an agenda built into every point of contact, without the corruption of having chosen her as a means before I understood that she was a person.
The sunrise found me still awake.
It came in gray and gradual through the gap in her curtains, threading across the ceiling in slow, pale increments, and I got dressed in the thin morning light.
I was pulling on my jacket when she woke. I heard her breathing change first—the shift from the deep, even cadence of sleep to the lighter awareness of someone surfacing. Then the sound of her moving. I didn’t turn around immediately, which was cowardice, and I knew it.
“Where are you going?”
Her voice was soft with sleep. Unguarded—just Sofia, just her voice, with nothing in front of it yet.
I turned.
She was sitting up in her bed with her hair loose around her shoulders, the sheets around her waist, and her eyes still carrying that morning openness, and she was looking at me with an expression that was not yet anything—not hurt, not demanding, just a question. Simple and direct and trusting in a way that hit me somewhere I’d specifically, deliberately fortified.
I had one job in this moment.
One necessary, non-negotiable job.
“We scratched an itch,” I said. “Move on with your life.”
The words came out level. I watched the morning openness on her face close—not all at once, but in a sequence. The slight intake of breath. The moment where her eyes went very still, which was worse than if she’d flinched, because the stillness meant she was processing, meant the thing had landed, and she was deciding how much of what it did to her I was going to be allowed to see.
She decided I wasn’t going to see any of it.
The composure came down. Chin lifting fractionally. Eyes clearing. The version of Sofia Alvarez that the world got—steady, unreadable, present without being available.
She said nothing.
That was the part that stayed with me.
She just looked at me with those dark eyes and let me go.
I walked to the door without looking back, because looking back was the one thing I absolutely could not afford right now—not with her sitting in that bed, or with the heavy knowledge of what I’d just done and why and what it was going to cost both of us.
The door closed behind me.
The lobby was quiet in the gray Chicago morning, just the doorman and the amber light and the city beyond the glass already moving, already indifferent, already requiring nothing from me that I wasn’t prepared to give.
I walked to my car and got in, telling myself this was the right thing. I told myself that distance was the only protection I could offer her—that proximity to me was proximity to a mission she knew nothing about, and the kindest version of this ending was the one where she thought I was cold rather than the one where she learned the truth. I told myself the mission required this. That the Bratva required this. That Matvey’s voice in a dark SUV had required this before Sofia Alvarez had ever looked at me with those unguarded eyes.
And then I started the car and pulled away from the curb and back to an apartment with a folder on the kitchen table and half a bottle of whiskey on the counter, and I sat with the absolute, clear-eyed, unsparing knowledge of a man who had been honest with himself about difficult things for four decades.
I hadn’t scratched an itch.
I’d made a mistake of an entirely different kind.
And the worst part was that somewhere in the thin gray light of her apartment, while she slept against my chest and the city moved outside her window, I’d looked at the ceiling and wished the night wouldn’t end.
And I’d meant it.
Completely.
The way I meant very few things.
Chapter 7 – Sofia
I threw myself into work the way I always did when something inside me needed to be ignored directly.