It was a coping mechanism I’d developed young. All of it became manageable when there was something concrete in front of me that needed solving. Something I could fix. Something where the answer existed and was simply waiting to be found by someone willing to look carefully enough.
Medicine had been that. Numbers had been that. The logistics and inventory work I’d inherited from Camila after her marriage had been, at minimum, that.
Gregory Kamarov’s voice saying,We scratched an itch; move on with your life,and then closing the door on his way out of my apartment—
That wasn’t something I could look at directly, so I worked.
***
Since Camila had married Yegor and stepped into a different version of herself—wife, mother, daughter-in-law of a world that had its own requirements—the operational side of our father’s business had quietly, steadily redistributed in my direction. Not formally. Tomas Alvarez didn’t do things formally when informal was more efficient. He simply began copying me on emails, forwarding me reports, asking me totake a lookat things, knowing very well that I wouldn’t object.
Camila still came to work. But the day-to-day—the inventory, the logistics, the movement of goods through the layers of Alvarez Holdings’s import and distribution network—that had become mine.
I was good at it, which I resented and leaned into simultaneously.
The audit was routine.
That was the thing I kept coming back to in the days that followed, the detail that made the whole thing more unsettling rather than less. It was the quarterly reconciliation I ran every three months, with the same attention I brought to everything, cross-referencing inventory movement against GPS data, delivery logs, and the sign-off sheets from receiving warehouses.
Routine.
And the trucks weren’t there.
Three of them. Flagged in the system as dispatched, logged out of the central facility, and then—nothing. No GPS trail. No delivery confirmation. No sign-off or return record.
As if they had driven out of the facility and evaporated somewhere between the loading bay and wherever they were supposed to be going.
I stared at the screen for a long moment, running the same cross-reference twice, then a third time, because the first assumption in any data discrepancy is input error, and I always checked my assumptions before acting on them.
The trucks were still missing after the third run.
I pushed back from the desk and went to make coffee, because I needed a minute that wasn’t in front of a screen, and because I had a feeling I was about to find something I wasn’t going to like.
I called the warehouse supervisor from my office with the door closed.
His name was Ruiz. He’d been with the company for eleven years, competent in an unremarkable way. I had no particular feeling about him before this call.
By the end of it, I had several.
“The trucks—”
“Yes, I saw the report, Miss Alvarez.” Too quickly. The answer was already assembled before I’d finished the question, which meant he’d been expecting the question. “It’s a system issue. We’ve had some GPS syncing problems with the fleet management software—”
“The GPS syncing issue would show incomplete data,” I said, keeping my voice easy, clinical. “Not zero data. These trucks have no trail at all from the moment they leave the lot.”
A pause. One beat too long.
“Like I said, it’s a—”
“Who signed off on the departures?”
Another pause. “I’d have to check—”
“You’re looking at the same system I am, Ruiz. The sign-offs are right there. I’m asking you to confirm them.”
He confirmed them. Three names I didn’t recognize from the regular driver manifest. Every answer created two new questions. By the time I ended the call, the cold feeling in my chest had sharpened into something considerably more focused.
I spoke to all three drivers individually, spacing the conversations across an afternoon, keeping my tone light and my questions embedded in the ordinary administrative language of a routine audit.