None of that reached my expression.
I’d spent a long time learning to keep things out of my face, and I used every year of that now.
“Come in,” I said.
“Gregory.” Tomas’s voice had an edge under the control now—the sound of a man who had been holding something together through will alone for seven days and was beginning to calculate how much longer he could. “I need to understand what you were doing in her building. I need to know if you—”
“We’re not doing this here,” I said. Quiet. Even. The voice I used when the situation required a particular quality of certainty—not loudness, not force, but the specific register that communicated that the thing being said was not a position available for negotiation. “We’re not doing it in my corridor, and we’re not doing it in my apartment, and we’re not doing it without Matvey in the room.” I looked at him steadily. “Get your men back in the elevator. We’re going to Matvey.”
Tomas looked at me.
“Now,” I said.
Chapter 15 – Sofia
The light never changed.
That was the thing that unraveled me before anything else did. There were no windows in the room they kept me in—just a single bulb screwed into the ceiling that cast everything in the same flat yellow, indifferent to hour, indifferent to whether it was morning or the middle of the night or something in between. I’d tried to count the times they brought food to orient myself, but the intervals were irregular in a way that felt deliberate, as if someone had decided that if I couldn’t track time, I couldn’t track anything else either. After what I estimated was the third day, I stopped trying. The counting only made the disorientation worse.
The nausea had started sometime after that.
I’d attributed it initially to the food—whatever they slid through the gap under the door arrived in sealed containers, but sealed didn’t mean good, and I’d eaten it anyway because the alternative was refusing and I needed to be lucid. But the nausea persisted past what bad food would explain, arriving in waves that seemed tied to nothing external—rolling up through my stomach at random intervals, cresting, subsiding, leaving me acutely aware of every sensation in my body. At some point—day four, I thought, though I’d stopped trusting my estimates—Nico came down.
I heard him before I saw him: the sound of a bolt sliding, then the specific quality of light that changed when a door opened onto a lit corridor, a bar of warmer brightness falling across the floor for the two seconds it took him to enter and pull the door shut behind him. He had a bottle of water in one hand, which he set on the floor a few feet from me with the particular care of a man performing a gesture he wanted credited as generosity.
I looked at the water and didn’t move toward it.
He stood there for a moment, and in the flat light of the bulb I could see him clearly—suit jacket gone, shirt untucked at the hem, a tiredness around his eyes that he was managing but not hiding.
“You should drink,” he said. His voice was even. Not cruel, not particularly warm. The voice of a man who considered himself reasonable.
“I’m fine,” I said.
The words came out steadier than I felt, which I was grateful for. I’d made a decision somewhere during the long, lightless hours before his arrival—that I wouldn’t perform fear for him. Anger, I’d in quantity. Disgust, even more. Those I was willing to show.
He studied me for a moment with an expression I couldn’t fully read, then pulled the other folding chair from the corner and set it across from mine with the unhurried movements of a man who had all the time he required. He sat. He looked at me.
“You disrupted something that took years to build,” he said. Not an accusation—a statement offered as context, as if he wanted me to understand the scale of what I’d stumbled into before he explained the rest. “The routing, the contacts, the cover—all of it calibrated over time to be invisible. And then you went looking at truck manifests.”
I held his gaze. “Someone had to.”
Something moved across his face—not anger, something sharper. Closer to frustration. “Your father’s logistics company was the cleanest cover in the city. Clean name, established routes, workers who kept their heads down. We didn’t touch his accounts, didn’t redirect his revenue. We only used the infrastructure and left the business intact.” He paused. “You weren’t supposed to be in the business at all.”
“That’s a very specific complaint,” I said, “from someone who planted moles inside my family’s company.”
“They were already there,” he said, with a tone that suggested it mattered to him. “The workers I approached were already frustrated, already looking for supplemental income. I gave them a use.”
“What the fuck do you want?” I asked.
He turned the water bottle in his hands once, a slow rotation, then set it on the floor. “I want the investigation to stop. I want the documentation you removed from my office to be unverifiable—which means I need to know where you stored it, who you shared it with, and whether your father has seen it yet.”
“My father was in Europe,” I said.
“Was,” he said. “He landed yesterday.”
Something moved in my chest—relief and fear arriving simultaneously, tangled together. My father was back. My father was back, and I was not at the airport, and my phone was dead, and he would know something was wrong within hours, if he didn’t already. I kept my breathing even, held Nico’s gaze, and gave him nothing.
“Then he’ll find it himself,” I said. “He knows his own company.”