“Okay,” he said.
I left him there and walked out into the gray morning.
***
Nico’s office was on the fourteenth floor of a glass-and-steel building downtown that tried very hard to look like it housed serious people doing serious work. It probably did. That was the thing about men like Nico: They understood that the best camouflage was legitimacy. A clean address. A tasteful lobby. Assistants who didn’t ask about the things that happened outside business hours.
I told the woman at the front desk that I was Sofia Alvarez and that Nico was expecting me. “He asked me to come up,” I added, the lie delivered with enough quiet certainty that it functioned as truth.
She hesitated for less than three seconds before picking up the phone. “Miss Alvarez is here to see you,” she said into the receiver, and thirty seconds after that, I was being ushered toward the elevator. “Right this way,” she murmured, already holding the door open.
He was standing when I walked in, which told me he’d had just enough warning to compose himself—not enough to fully do it.
“Sofia.” He smiled. It was a good smile—the kind that had clearly worked on a lot of people. “I didn’t know we had a meeting.”
“We don’t.” I closed the door behind me. “Sit down.”
Something shifted in his jaw, just slightly. But he sat.
His office was designed to communicate authority without aggression—dark wood, clean lines, a window that looked out over the city like a statement. I didn’t sit. I walked to the desk, put my folder down between us, and opened it without preamble.
“Three weeks of missing delivery logs,” I said. “Seventeen trucks over a six-week window. GPS data scrubbed from our system, but not from the fleet maintenance records, which your people apparently didn’t think to touch. A drop-off location three miles from your stepfather’s campaign offices. And two of your people, one of them confirmed on camera, running point for the whole operation through our loading bay.”
I watched him look at the documents. I watched him process the fact that I’d more than he’d anticipated, and I watched the calculation happen behind his eyes as he decided what to do with that.
He leaned back slightly. “Sofia—”
“I’m going to need you to stop using our trucks,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt, which I was grateful for, because what I felt was a particular kind of cold fury that I didn’t want him to see. “Immediately. And I’m going to need you to remove every person you planted in our operation within the next twenty-four hours. After that, I will be presenting all of this to my father when he returns from Europe.”
“You’re presenting this as though there’s a simple explanation missing.” He tilted his head, spreading his hands on the desk in a gesture of openness that I found deeply unconvincing. “I understand how this looks. But what you’re seeing here—the full context is more complicated than the paper trail suggests. There are people involved in this arrangement who were operating without my knowledge, using the connection as cover—”
“Don’t.” The word came out before I’d fully decided to say it, and I didn’t take it back. I let it sit between us. “Don’t do that. I came here because I wanted to give you the opportunity to end this quietly, not because I need you to explain it to me. I understand it. I understand all of it, including why your stepfather spent twenty minutes trying to push us together at that fundraiser.” I held his gaze. “That was the part that I think was supposed to be subtle.”
The warmth left his face. Not violently—it simply withdrew, like a tide going out, leaving something cooler and more fundamental behind. He looked at me for a long moment with an expression that was harder to read than anything he’d shown me so far, and I felt something shift slightly in the air between us. Not threatening—not yet. But recalibrated.
“Your father has relationships with people you don’t fully understand,” he said quietly. “Some of those relationships have implications you’re not in a position to navigate.”
“My father has been your stepfather’s friend for fifteen years,” I said. “And he has been sitting in Europe, completely unaware that his logistics network is being used to move arms shipments under his name. Whatever you think those relationships imply, they don’t include this.”
“You’re very sure of yourself.”
“I’m sure of what I have in front of me.”
He stood slowly, and I held my ground, because I’d decided before walking in here that I was not going to take a single step backward. He was taller than me by several inches, and he was built in the way of a man who understood the vocabulary of physical presence, but I’d grown up in rooms full of men like that, and I’d learned a long time ago that space was a choice, not a given.
“I’d like to talk through this properly,” he said. “Sit down. Let me call for—”
“No.” I picked up my folder from the desk. “You’ve had your chance to talk. I said what I came to say. Stop using our trucks, remove your people, and understand that this ends here.” I looked at him directly, and I made sure he saw that I meant every word of it. “If I come back here, I won’t be coming alone.”
I didn’t wait for him to respond.
I walked out the same way I’d come in—unhurried, spine straight, the folder tucked under my arm—and I rode the elevator down alone and walked out into the afternoon air and only then let myself exhale fully.
My hands weren’t shaking.
I stood on the pavement for a moment, the city moving around me in its usual indifferent way, and I thought about Maverick Wiese sitting at my father’s dinner table, laughing at his jokes, accepting his hospitality—and I thought about fifteen years of friendship being used as cover for something that could destroy everything my father had built if it came to light under the wrong framing.
It would come to light. I was going to make sure of that.