I’d been here before—at the edge of using someone, looking at the cost of it with clear eyes and proceeding because the mission required it and the mission was what I was. I’d done it without flinching. I was not a man who flinched at the requirements of the work.
I picked up the glass.
Set it down without drinking and walked to the exit with the mission in my head and her name underneath it.
Use her.
Get close.
Get the evidence.
I pushed through the door, and the Chicago night received me, cold and indifferent and entirely unsympathetic, and I walked to my car with the weight of three weeks of evidence and one relief I hadn’t asked for and couldn’t seem to put down.
The story I was telling myself—the one where this was just a mission, just access, just the professional proximity required to do a job I’d been assigned by a man I’d never refused—was getting harder to tell.
I drove anyway.
Chapter 9 – Sofia
The trucks didn’t stop haunting me.
Even at two in the morning, when the rest of my apartment had gone quiet, and the city outside my window had softened into a low, distant hum, I sat at my kitchen table with my laptop open and the same cluster of spreadsheets staring back at me. Cold coffee beside my elbow. Three empty water glasses forming a small graveyard near the edge of the table. The kind of stillness that only existed when the brain refused to stop working, even though the body had long begged it to.
I’d been at this for three days straight, scrolling through the delivery logs again. The gaps were clean—too clean, which was the point. Whoever had done this hadn’t been careless. They had deliberately stripped the system: no GPS coordinates during the missing windows, no arrival confirmations, no driver sign-off sheets. The trucks had simply vanished from the record like they’d never existed, only to reappear hours later, docked back in the loading bay as if nothing had happened. A ghost route. Invisible on paper unless you already knew what you were looking for.
I knew what I was looking for now.
It had taken me the better part of a week to isolate the pattern. Shift rotations. Night crews. The three specific workers who kept appearing in the logs whenever a truck went dark. I’d been subtle about it—asking general questions during my loading bay visits, running routine spot checks that looked nothing like the investigation they actually were. I couldn’t afford to show my hand before I understood the full shape of what I was holding.
What I was holding was uglier than I’d expected.
I pulled up the timestamp I’d flagged the day before—a three-hour window on a Tuesday night when one of our freight trucks had gone completely off-grid, only to resurface with a full tank and clean tires, which made no logistical sense unless the vehicle had been driven a significant distance and then serviced before being returned. Someone had covered their tracks carefully.
I pressed my fingers against my eyes and breathed through the weight sitting at the center of my chest. My father had looked genuinely confused when I raised the audit issue with him. Not the kind of confusion that was performed—I knew my father’s face too well for that. He’d told me plainly that he had authorized no off-record deliveries and that I should dig deeper before bringing conclusions to him.
That had unsettled me more than anything else, because my father was not a man who got blindsided. He had built his entire business on knowing exactly what moved through his company and when. The idea that someone had been running ghost operations beneath his nose wasn’t just alarming; it was a direct attack on the infrastructure he’d spent decades building, and someone had done it quietly enough that even he hadn’t noticed.
That told me this wasn’t improvised.
I picked up my phone and looked at the photo I’d taken at the loading bay two days ago. Blurry, taken from across the yard, but clear enough. One of the workers—the one named Reyes, who had given me the most rehearsed non-answers of all three—standing outside the service entrance with a man I hadn’t recognized at first. I’d taken the photo instinctively, some low-grade alarm tripping in the back of my mind, and later that night, when I’d put the face through the employee system and found nothing, I’d done a broader search.
I found him eventually. Not in our records. In Nico’s.
He appeared in a photograph from a public event—standing two rows behind Nico Calderon at a political fundraiser hosted by Maverick Wiese three months ago. Background figure. Unremarkable.
I set my phone down and sat with that for a long moment.
I turned Nico’s name over in my mind carefully. I’d met him only once, and he’d been polite, which at the time I’d taken as simple disinterest. Now I read it differently. He hadn’t been trying to charm me because he’d found me interesting. He had been assessing whether I was a complication.
The answer, apparently, was yes.
***
I followed Reyes the next evening.
It wasn’t something I’d planned to do. It was something I decided to do thirty seconds after watching him leave the loading bay fifteen minutes before the end of his shift, moving like he was being chased by a ghost.
He walked south for about twelve minutes before ducking into a narrow side street adjacent to one of the service alleys that backed up against a row of commercial units. I pressed close to the building at the corner and watched.