The apartment looked the same as it always did in the early morning—the low lamp still burning amber in the corner because I’d forgotten to switch it off last night, the folder on the kitchen counter exactly where I’d left it, the two mugs from the water we had never drunk still sitting side by side on the counter with the specific closeness of things placed that way by accident. Everything identical, everything slightly wrong.
He had walked out again. I’d given him the clearest possible ultimatum, not because some part of me hadn’t been hoping, but because the alternative was continuing to stand in my own kitchen watching him choose silence over and over while I pretended it didn’t hollow something out in me each time he did it. I’d given him the choice, and he had taken the door, and I needed to treat that like the answer it was.
I went to the bathroom and turned the shower on, hot enough to feel from across the room, and I stood under it for longer than was strictly necessary, letting the water ease the tension sitting between my shoulder blades.
I got dressed on autopilot. Scrubs. Sneakers. Hair back. The silver bracelet my mother had left me, because I put it on every day, and today was not going to be the day I stopped doing that. I picked up the folder from the counter and tucked it into my bag—I was meeting my father tomorrow, and I needed it within reach.
The drive to the hospital was twenty minutes on a good morning. I’d done it enough times that my hands knew the route without particular instruction—left on Meridian, straight through the light at Calumet, the long stretch of Lakeshore with the water grey and enormous to the east. I’d driven it in scrubs and in panic. I knew every light, every merge, and every section of road near the hospital district where the lane markings faded, and you had to know from memory where to position yourself.
I was reaching for my phone when the other car hit me.
It came from the left—fast, deliberate, with an impact that shook me to my core, literally—and the world became noise. My hands locked on the wheel, trying to steady myself as the car spun. I heard something structural give way somewhere in the body of the vehicle, and then my head met the steering wheel with a blunt, enormous pain that made the edges of my vision go soft and unreliable.
My arm moved slowly, and the seat felt like it was tilting while the gray morning outside the windshield was doing something that it shouldn’t be doing—contracting, the light at its edges going dark.
I thought:Call someone.
I thought:Gregory.
And then the dark took me completely, and I didn’t think anything at all.
***
I came back to consciousness in pieces.
Sound first, then cold, which was total and immediate, then the pain, which arrived in a rush that made me go still instinctively. The medical student in me cataloguing before the rest of me had processed enough to panic: head pain, blunt force, possible concussion, no sharp neurological indicators yet. Neck stiff. Wrists behind me—that registered last, the restriction of it, the rough texture of whatever bound them to the chair beneath me.
I opened my eyes.
The room was a cellar. That was the most accurate word for it—an underground room that had been constructed without windows, one bulb, bare, hanging from the ceiling on a short cord and throwing a yellow circle of light that didn’t quite reach the walls. Concrete floor. Concrete walls with moisture on them. A drain in the floor near the far corner that I didn’t look at for longer than I had to because of what drains in rooms like this tended to mean.
Two chairs—mine, and the one across from me, which was empty.
A door to my right, metal, no visible handle from this side.
My ankles were bound behind the chair with what felt like zip ties—tight but not cutting—and my bag, phone, and bracelet were all gone.
The accident hadn’t been an accident. Someone had been waiting for me on that route, which meant someone had known my route, and this had been planned with enough advance notice to require surveillance. Not impulsive. Operational.
Nico.
I breathed through the knowledge of it carefully, because I needed to be sharp right now in a way I’d never needed to be before. My father was in Europe. Camila was—Camila was in a Bratva household, which meant she was protected, which was the one piece of this that allowed me to breathe more evenly. If this were about silencing me, Nico would need to be careful about Camila and the Bratva connection.
That was leverage, even if it was leverage I couldn’t access from a concrete room.
The door opened.
He had changed since yesterday. He was wearing a dark shirt now, sleeves rolled to the forearms, and he looked rested, like he’d slept well after doing something that should have cost them sleep. He carried two cups of coffee, which was so calculated in its casual domesticity that I felt my jaw tighten before I’d decided to react at all.
He set one cup on the floor near my feet. He kept the other and settled into the chair across from me with the particular relaxed posture of someone who had all the time in the world and was aware that the other person didn’t.
He looked at me for a moment. Then he said, “You look better than I expected.”
“Disappointed?” My voice came out even. I was grateful for that.
Something shifted at the corner of his mouth—not quite a smile, the shadow of one. “No,” he said. “Relieved, actually. I need you functional, Sofia. That was never about hurting you.”
“The car that hit me would disagree.”