I made myself not open it, which was one of the harder things I’d done recently, and I’d recently done several hard things. Blowing my cover to break Nico Calderon’s grip on a woman he had no right to touch was not a calculated decision—it was an impulse, and I’d spent forty years learning that impulses in operational contexts got people killed. The mission existed. My cover existed. The careful architecture of weeks of surveillance would collapse the moment I stepped out of this car and made myself visible.
I stayed where I was.
I watched Sofia look down at Nico’s hand on her arm. Then she looked up at his face. Then she said something—I was too far to hear the words, but the posture was unmistakable—and she removed his hand from her arm with a look of disgust. She looked at him for one final moment with an expression that I would have described, if I was pressed, asI already know everything you’re about to say, and I’ve decided none of it is worth my time.
Then she turned and walked to her car.
Nico stood at the bottom of the steps and watched her go. His face did something complicated—something that moved through surprise and calculation and landed, finally, on a kind of cold, assessing stillness.
Whatever Sofia had done in that building, it had pissed him off.
The thought of what that meant for her made the back of my neck go tight.
***
She drove badly.
Not dangerously—she wasn’t reckless, and even in whatever state she was currently in, Sofia had too much control for that—but she drove like her body was managing the road while their mind was somewhere else entirely. A little too fast through the yellow lights. A lane change with slightly less buffer than usual. I kept three cars back and watched.
She took the route to her apartment—familiar by now, I’d driven it enough in my own mind to know each turn before she made it—and I tracked her through the night streets of Chicago while the city settled around us into its late-hour quiet. Fewer headlights. More empty intersections.
The particular quality of silence that a city got after midnight when the bars had thinned and the last trains had run.
I told myself I was following her for operational reasons. That she had just come out of Nico Calderon’s building, and Nico was now the primary person of interest, and it was entirely logical to track his known contacts when there was new information to gather.
I was lying to myself, and I knew it.
I followed her because I’d watched Nico’s hand on her arm, and something in me had gone very still and very cold in the way it only went when someone had touched something that I’d, without meaning to and entirely against my own better judgment, started to think of as mine.
She reached her building safely. Pulled into the underground garage. I parked on the street across from the entrance and watched the lights come on in her apartment—third floor, corner unit, the window that faced south. I’d noted which one was hers a while ago. I told myself that was surveillance. I was aware of what it actually was.
I sat in the car.
A man like Nico didn’t recalibrate passively. He had just been confronted—I was certain of that now, the more I turned it over—by a twenty-two-year-old woman who had apparently walked into his building with evidence and told him, to his face, to stop. That kind of confrontation, from someone he would have underestimated, wouldn’t sit comfortably. It would require a response.
And Sofia had no idea what kind of response men like Nico were capable of.
I got out of the car.
I didn’t give myself time to talk myself out of it. I’d tried that once before—had sat in a car outside her building giving myself reasons to leave—and I’d learned that the reasons didn’t hold, and the only thing worse than acting on an impulse was sitting in a car arguing with yourself about it for twenty minutes first. I crossed the street, went through the lobby with a nod to the security desk that saidI belong hereclearly enough that no one questioned it, and took the elevator to the third floor.
I stood outside her door for a moment. The hallway was quiet. Through the door, I could hear nothing—no movement, no voice, just the particular absence of sound that meant she was somewhere inside, probably still in her coat, probably still in whatever state she had been in when she left that building.
Then I rang the doorbell.
Chapter 11 – Sofia
I locked the door and stood with my back against it and waited for my heartbeat to slow down.
It didn’t.
The apartment was exactly as I’d left it—coat thrown over the back of the kitchen chair, folder on the counter, the low lamp in the corner still burning amber against the dark—and standing inside it should have felt like safety, like the particular exhale that came from closing the world out and returning to the only space that was entirely mine. It didn’t feel like that either. It felt like a container that was slightly too small for everything I’d brought back inside it with me.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and breathed.
The scene in Nico’s office replayed itself again and again. His face when I walked in. The careful composure giving way to something more calculating underneath when I spread the documents across his desk. The way he had stood when I turned to leave—not alarmed, not defeated, butrecalibrating, and then his hand on my arm in the street. The grip of a man who was accustomed to things not slipping away from him.
The buzzer went off, sharp and insistent. I turned toward the intercom panel by the door and felt something cold move through me, because my first thought, completely unbidden and completely reasonable given the last three hours of my life, was Nico.