My father was due back from Europe in three days. I had everything I needed. I would present it to him systematically, and together we would decide what to do next.
I started walking toward the parking garage.
Three days. I just needed three days.
Chapter 10 – Gregory
I’d been parked on the service road adjacent to the industrial district for three hours when the first one appeared—a standard freight truck, Alvarez Logistics stenciled on the side in clean white lettering, rolling through the gate of a storage facility that had no publicly registered tenants and no posted business hours. I watched through the windshield with my engine off and my coffee going cold in the cup-holder and documented everything: arrival time, plate number, the two men who appeared from inside to meet the driver, the duration of the unloading.
Forty-seven minutes. Four crates. The second truck arrived twenty minutes after the first had left.
I’d seen enough by midnight to know that whatever was moving through this facility was substantial, regular, and completely invisible on the Alvarez books. Which meant one of two things: Either Tomas was running a ghost operation sophisticated enough to fool his own daughter, or someone had built an entire shadow network inside his company without his knowledge.
I’d been operating on the first assumption for weeks. Sitting in the dark of that service road, watching the second truck back slowly into the loading bay, I started to feel the first real pull toward the second.
Then I saw where the trucks went when they left.
I followed the second vehicle at a careful distance—three cars back, lights off when the road was empty enough to risk it—and watched it navigate east through the city before turning into a district I recognized immediately. Not because I had business there. Because I’d been watching the man whose name kept appearing in Matvey’s intelligence reports about Chicago’s political infrastructure, and this particular cluster of streets belonged, informally but unmistakably, to Maverick Wiese.
The truck didn’t stop at Maverick’s address. It turned two blocks short and disappeared into an underground parking structure attached to a glass-and-steel office building that I’d no prior file on. I drove past slowly, noted the building’s address, and kept moving. Then I pulled over three blocks away and ran the address through the comm.
Kirill came back to me in under four minutes.
The building’s primary tenant was a consulting firm registered eighteen months ago. Shell company—clean on the surface, nothing underneath except the name of a holding entity that traced back, through three layers of incorporation, to Nico Calderon.
I sat with that for a moment. Then I picked up my phone and typed the address into the maps application and looked at the distance between this building and the storage facility. Eleven minutes by car. Close enough to be deliberate. Far enough apart to avoid obvious connection.
Nico Calderon. Maverick’s stepson. The man I’d watched Tomas try to push onto Sofia at the fundraiser.
Nico had access to Maverick’s political infrastructure and Maverick’s protection. He needed a logistics network he could use without a paper trail. Tomas Alvarez had one of the most established freight operations in Chicago. A marriage between Nico and Sofia would have given Nico exactly that—access to the Alvarez name, the Alvarez network, and the Alvarez cover.
I almost reached for my phone to call Matvey. My hand was already moving toward it, then the front doors of the building opened, and Sofia walked out.
She moved the way she always moved when something had gotten under her skin—quick, purposeful, spine straight, jaw set—but there was something different underneath it. She was shaking. My first thought arrived before I could stop it, and it was ugly.
I thought,She was upstairs with him.
The thought hit me somewhere low and unreasonable, and I hated myself immediately for having it, and hated it even more because it didn’t leave. It sat there in my chest and pressed. She had come out of Nico Calderon’s building, composed on the surface and fracturing underneath it, and my brain had assembled the most obvious explanation and handed it to me like a verdict.
My jaw tightened so hard it hurt.
Then the doors opened again.
Nico came out two seconds behind her. He wasn’t running, but he was moving with intent, closing the distance between them in long strides, calling her name.
“Sofia.”
She didn’t slow down.
I watched my knuckles go white around the steering wheel. I didn’t notice when I’d gripped it again, but there it was—both hands locked around the wheel, my body doing its own damage assessment while my mind tried to catch up with what I was actually seeing.
He caught her at the bottom of the steps.
His hand closed around her upper arm and he turned her, and I watched the moment she stopped—not because she wanted to, but because the grip was firm enough that stopping was easier than fighting it in public—and I watched her face go through something I recognized even from this distance.
My hand was on the door handle.
I didn’t open it.