I thought about what she had said.
Every time you walk out that door without saying anything real, you’re making a choice.
I dropped the cigarette and crushed it under my boot, and took my phone out.
Matvey answered on the second ring. He always answered on the second ring. Too fast was eagerness, too slow was carelessness, and Matvey Kamarov had been calibrating that interval for thirty years.
“You have something,” he said. Not a question.
“I have more than something,” I said. My voice came out flat and even. The function of professionalism—the only switch I’d ever reliably been able to flip, regardless of what was happening in every other part of me. “Tomas’s trucks. I’ve tracked six separate movements over the last three weeks, all deviating from standard Alvarez routes. They’re entering Nico Calderon’s territory and coming out lighter. Weapons transfer, most likely—the timing and the route patterns match the profile we’ve seen before.”
A pause. In the background, the particular silence of wherever Matvey was at six in the morning—controlled, contained, the silence of a man who had already been awake for hours.
“Calderon?” Matvey said.
“Maverick’s stepson,” I confirmed. “He’s been using Alvarez logistics as a shell. Running the transfers under Tomas’s name. Nico’s smart about it—nothing directly traceable back to him, everything appearing to originate from Alvarez Logistics.”
“And Tomas?” Matvey’s voice was measured. Precise. “Is he aware?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
A beat. Matvey let it breathe.
“You don’t know,” he repeated, in the particular tone he used when he was deciding whether to read something as incompetence or something more interesting.
“I have evidence of the trucks. I have Nico’s territory as the endpoint. What I don’t have is Tomas’s direct signature on any of it.” I paused, jaw tight. “There’s a chance the Alvarez name is being used without his knowledge—someone inside feeding Calderon, running logistics off-book.”
I exhaled. “Or someone whoisthe inside.” I looked up. “Sofia. Tomas’s daughter. If she’s working with Nico, it explains why nothing traces back. Why it all stays clean.”
“And you’re telling me this now,” he said. “Not two weeks ago.”
“I needed the pattern to hold before I brought it to you.”
“That’s a reasonable answer,” Matvey said. “Is it also the true one?”
I stood on the pavement with my hand tight around my phone and didn’t answer immediately, because Matvey Kamarov had known me for twenty years and was one of perhaps three people alive who could tell the difference between my silences.
“I wanted to be certain,” I said.
Another pause. Then, quietly: “Keep your distance, Gregory. From all of it. From the Alvarez operation, from Calderon, from”—a pause that was just deliberate enough to carry meaning—“anything that might cloud the work.” He let that land. “Get me something solid. Something I can act on without consequences that backfire. No retaliation until I have proof that holds. Understood?”
“Understood.”
He ended the call.
I lowered the phone and stood in the street and felt the last of his words settle into the space they were intended for.Stay controlled.Twenty years ago, that instruction would have been redundant. That arrangement had been working without disruption until approximately three weeks ago, when I’d walked into a fundraiser and watched a woman try to escape a conversation and made a decision that had nothing to do with control.
I looked up at her window. Third floor. The light was on now, and she was probably still standing in her kitchen.
I sat behind the wheel of my car with my hands loose in my lap and my eyes on the building and thought about Nico’s hand on her arm.
The cold in my chest had nothing to do with the temperature.
I started the engine and pulled away from the curb, and I drove, and the city opened up around me in the grey early morning with its traffic and its noise and its useful, familiar indifference—and I drove, and I told myself she had made her position clear, and so had I. Nico was my mission, and none of this was personal.
Chapter 13 – Sofia
I shut the door behind Gregory and breathed.