Nico’s jaw shifted. “Sofia—”
“You said you wanted loyalty or silence forever.” I met his eyes. “I’m telling you which one you’re getting.”
The silence that followed was not comfortable. He looked at me with something that in another context might have been close to respect, but in this context was something colder—the reassessment of an obstacle that had been underestimated. He stood, picked up the water bottle from the floor, and set it directly in front of my chair instead.
“Drink the water,” he said. “It’s not charity. I need you alive.”
He left. The bolt slid home.
I waited until I was certain he wasn’t coming back, then picked up the water bottle and drank half of it in one long pull, because I did need to live, and spite was only useful when it didn’t actively damage me.
The nausea came again. I pressed the cold plastic of the bottle against my forehead and breathed.
On what I believed was the fifth day—though the certainty had become more architecture than fact, a structure I was maintaining through will rather than evidence—Maverick came instead of Nico.
“My son tells me you’re being difficult,” he said.
“Your son told you correctly.”
He stepped into the room and pulled the door shut behind him with a care that was somehow worse than if he had slammed it.
“You’re smarter than I expected,” he said. “Tomas’s daughters are decorative, typically. Camila has ambition, but it’s channeled into appropriate things. You were supposed to be similar.” He paused. “Instead, you went looking where you shouldn’t have gone and created a problem for people who do not have patience for problems.”
“Funny,” I said. “From where I’m sitting, you’re the one with the problem.”
“Your father will negotiate,” he said. “He’s a businessman. Businessmen understand that some situations require concession.”
“My father will go to the Bratva.”
It came out before I’d fully decided to say it, and the moment it landed in the room, I watched Maverick’s expression shift. He stood very still for a moment, then he turned and left, and this time the click of the bolt felt different—less like containment, more like retreat, and I sat in the flat yellow light and felt something that was not triumph because it was too fragile for that, but was adjacent to it. A small, cold satisfaction. Proof that I still had tools, even in this room.
Then the nausea came back, harder than before, and I grabbed the paper bag from the floor beside my chair and pressed it to my mouth, and the satisfaction dissolved into the miserable, grounding reality of my own body insisting on being attended to.
I had to get out of this room. That was the only thought that mattered.
***
On what might have been the sixth day, Nico came back alone and pulled his chair close enough that the distance between us was no longer safe. He sat with his elbows on his knees and looked at me with a neutral expression.
“Gregory Kamarov,” he said.
The name hit me the way he intended it to—a stone dropped into still water, and the ripples were immediate and visible no matter how much I tried to still the surface. I kept my face even. I looked back at him and said nothing.
“You know who he is,” Nico said. “He was watching your building, Sofia. He was watching you. Getting close to you was part of the operation.”
I breathed. In and out. Slow and deliberate.
“Everything he did,” Nico said, with a patience that suggested he was enjoying the delivery, “Every time he showed up, every conversation—it was all planned. You were the route to your father. A good fuck attached to a useful name.” He sat back. “He reported to Matvey Kamarov. His pakhan. The man who gave him the mission. And the mission was not you, Sofia—the mission was the family you belong to.”
The silence in the room was not comfortable. It was the silence of something being dismantled.
“I don’t believe a word you say,” I told him. My voice was steady. I was proud of that.
“I know,” he said. “But that doesn’t make it any less true.”
I pressed my hand flat against my abdomen. It was an unconscious gesture—I noticed it only after it had already happened—and I didn’t move my hand away.
I was furious at Gregory because I’d opened a door I’d kept locked my entire life, and I’d done it for a man who had been assembling a case against my family from the other side of it. Everything he had given me, he had given with a hand that was also taking something away. I’d known he was dangerous—I’d told myself I knew—but I’d thought the danger was the obvious kind. I hadn’t thought to look for this one.