I was good at holding things in my mind.
I was less good, it turned out, at holding only the things that were relevant to the mission.
The evidence was clean. There was actual confirmation of Tomas’s trucks, his routes, and his people making drops at locations that fed directly into the supply chains of three separate factions operating against the Bratva within Chicago. The financial routing Kirill had flagged at the beginning had found its physical expression in delivery schedules and handoff points and a pattern of movement so deliberate it could only have been designed by someone who understood exactly what they were doing and why.
It was damning.
It was, by every professional measure, exactly what a successfully executed covert mission looked like from the inside—three weeks of careful observation condensed into a body of evidence that would give Matvey everything he needed to make a decision.
And then I’d seen Sofia at the loading bay.
It was a Tuesday afternoon, overcast, the lake wind doing its usual indifferent damage to the temperature. I’d been parked two streets back with a direct sightline to the facility entrance—one of several observation positions I rotated through on a schedule designed to avoid pattern recognition from anyone watching for surveillance.
She had walked out of the main building at 2:47 in the afternoon with a clipboard like she was conducting a routine check, and the sight of her had hit me in the chest like a stab to the heart.
I’d watched her move through the loading bay—checking logs, examining camera angles, stopping to ask questions of workers who shifted their weight when she approached, which was a tell if you knew how to read it.
She was investigating.
That was the first thing I understood, watching her from two hundred meters away, with everything I’d spent three weeks learning sitting in my chest like a verdict.
The second thing I understood arrived immediately after, colder and considerably more complicated.
She was investigating the same operation I was. Which meant one of two things. Either Tomas had sent her—his own daughter, his own operation’s logistics manager—to audit the very activity he was conducting, as a kind of internal cover maintenance. Or she had found something on her own.
I knew that by the time I walked into the club that evening, because the anger that had been my companion for the past three weeks had shifted into something with different edges. Something sharper and less clean.
She was already at the bar when I spotted her—half-turned on her stool, one hand around a glass of something clear, staring at the middle distance with the particular expression of a woman working through something in her head that she hadn’t resolved yet. Her hair was loose. The cross pendant at her throat caught the light.
She registered my presence with a slight stiffening of her posture, a fractional sharpening of her expression, like she had a Gregory Kamarov early warning system that she’d developed and deeply resented.
“You look tired,” I said as I sat down on the stool beside her.
The look she gave me could have cured concrete.
“You look like someone I don’t want to talk to,” she said.
“And yet here we both are.” Then: “Hard week?” I kept my voice easy. Light. The register of a man making casual conversation and not trying to read anything off her response.
“I’m not doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Whatever this is.” She gestured between us with two fingers in a small, precise movement. “The showing up, the—whatever expression that is on your face right now, all of it.”
“I’m just sitting here.”
“You’re never just sitting anywhere, Gregory.”
“Busy lately? At work?”
Her head turned slightly. Not looking at me fully—a fraction of a turn, the involuntary attention of someone who has heard something in a tone that didn’t match the words.
“Why?”
“Curious.”
“You’re not curious about people, Gregory. You’re suspicious of them.” She did look at me then, and those dark eyes were doing the assessment thing, running the rapid evaluation of someone who had spent four years in medicine learning to determine what the actual problem was underneath the presenting complaint. “What are you actually asking?”