Someone who lacks emotions.
I’d been called worse. I’d been called nothing at all, which was somehow more accurate. I was the Bratva’s blade. I’d accepted that the way you accept anything inevitable—without drama, without protest, with just the quiet recognition that this was the shape of the thing and no amount of looking at it differently was going to change the shape.
A blade doesn’t need to understand itself. It only needs to be sharp.
I looked down at the folder.
At the corner of it, just barely—the edge of her photograph.
An unguarded face. A girl not looking at the camera because she had no reason to suspect she was being looked at.
Sofia.
I tucked it under my arm and walked.
The mission was clean. Simple. Get close. Learn the truth. Walk away.
I was exceptional at all three.
What I didn’t know—standing there on that empty street, the lake wind at my back and the city humming its indifferent hum all around me—was that I’d already made the mistake. Before the first step. Before the first word. Before I ever stood in the same room as her and told myself I was in control of what happened next.
The mistake wasn’t in the mission.
It was in the moment I looked at her photograph and filed it away and moved on—and then, without meaning to, without understanding what that meant yet—
Found it again.
Somewhere I hadn’t put it.
I walked back toward the club, and the city swallowed the sound of my footsteps, and somewhere across Chicago, in an apartment I didn’t know yet, in a life that hadn’t collided with mine yet—
A girl was sleeping.
She didn’t know my name.
She didn’t know that I already knew hers.
And she had absolutely no idea that tomorrow, everything she thought was safe was going to start coming apart at the seams.
Neither did I.
Not yet.
Chapter 1 – Sofia
The dress was the first argument.
Not because it was ugly; it wasn’t. It was deep navy, fitted, and looked effortless on a hanger, but deliberate on a body. My father had sent it to my room that afternoon with a note that said,“Wear this tonight,”and absolutely nothing else, because Tomas Alvarez didn’t ask. He decided, and then he waited for the world to arrange itself accordingly.
I wore the dress.
But I made him wait an extra twenty minutes, which was the only rebellion I could afford on a Wednesday.
Now I sat in the back of his car with my hands folded in my lap and the city sliding past the window in long smears of gold and black, and I was doing the thing I’d learned to do in these situations—the thing where I kept my face perfectly neutral while everything underneath it moved like weather.
My father sat beside me, reading something on his phone without a care in the world. Tomas Alvarez took up space the way expensive furniture did—not loudly, but completely, in a way that made everything around him seem like it was arranged to accommodate him rather than the other way around.
He hadn’t looked at me since we got in the car.