I walked to the door.
“Gregory.” Tomas’s voice. I stopped, hand on the frame, without turning around. “If anything—” he started, then stopped himself, because he was a man who didn’t complete sentences of that kind, who didn’t put the worst possibility into words because naming it made it real. “She and Camilla are all I have left.”
I stood in the doorway for one breath. The silence around those words was the most honest thing I’d heard from Tomas Alvarez, and it was more honest than almost anything I’d heard from anyone in a very long time. I understood it in my chest before my mind had finished processing it,
“She’s all I have left too,” I said.
I didn’t wait to hear his response. I walked through the door, into the corridor, toward the stairwell and the street and the cold Chicago dark that was waiting on the other side of it.
Yegor fell into step beside me without a word, and the sound of our boots on the marble floor had the particular rhythm of men moving toward a thing rather than away from it, and that rhythm was the only sound that mattered now, and I followed it out into the night.
Chapter 17 – Sofia
I’d stopped counting days.
I let time become formless, and I focused instead on what my body was telling me and what the room was telling me and what the sounds above my head were telling me, because those were the things I could actually use.
What was in front of me, on the morning I believed was day six or seven, was Maverick Wiese.
He came down the stairs with each step measured, that he was here not because he needed to be, but because the situation had developed to a point that required his presence. He was in a suit. Even in an industrial basement that smelled of concrete and damp, Maverick Wiese wore a suit the way some men wore armor, because for a man like him, there was no meaningful distinction between the two.
He looked at me, and I looked at him, and the room settled into the particular stillness that preceded negotiations in which one party believed they held all the leverage.
“You look terrible,” he said. It wasn’t unkind, exactly—it was observational, delivered with the mild interest of a man noting a weather condition.
“I’ve been living in a basement,” I said. “What’s your excuse?”
Something moved across his face. He pulled the folding chair from the corner and sat in it with the unhurried deliberateness of a man who had never sat anywhere without first assessing whether the seat was appropriate to his status and deciding to grant it approval. He crossed one leg over the other. He looked at me with those steel-blue eyes that I’d sat across from at fundraiser tables and charity dinners and thought were the eyes of my father’s trusted friend, and I felt the particular temperature of a betrayal that had been true for longer than I’d known it.
“I want to know what you gave Kirill,” he said.
I blinked. “Who?”
His jaw shifted. “Don’t do that.” His voice carried the particular patience of a man who had decided he would sit here for as long as required and was communicating that decision through his posture, his stillness, the controlled absence of urgency. “You confronted Nico. You had documentation. You’ve been investigating for weeks. The question is what you shared with whom and in what form, and the answer to that question is the only thing that determines how long you stay in this room.”
I looked at him. I held his gaze with the steadiness of a woman who had been building that steadiness for six days specifically for a moment like this one, and I said, “I don’t know anyone named Kirill.”
Which was technically true. I knew of Kirill—Camila had mentioned the name once, briefly, in the context of the Bratva’s infrastructure, but I’d never spoken to him. I’d never given him anything. The documentation I’d assembled was on a drive that was either still in my apartment or in Nico’s possession after he’d had my things searched, and whatever I hadn’t given Nico in the confrontation was still out there in forms he hadn’t found yet.
I wasn’t going to tell Maverick any of this.
He studied me for a moment, deciding whether to believe me. Then he said, “Your father is looking for you.”
I held my face still. He was watching for the reaction—the relief or hope—and I gave him none of it, because giving him any of it meant giving him something to use, and I was out of things to give.
“What else did you expect?” I said. “He’ll find me soon.”
“We’ll see.” Maverick said, with a lightness that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “He’s also a pragmatic man. He knows when a situation requires negotiation rather than force.”
“You don’t know my father very well,” I said. “He’ll burn this city down to the foundation if that’s what it takes. Block by block. He’ll start with everyone who ever touched me and work from there, and he won’t stop until he kills you.”
Something shifted in Maverick’s eyes—a quick readjustment as he realized things could change suddenly. He covered it up fast.
“Nico will come down later,” Maverick said, standing with the same measured deliberateness with which he had sat. He straightened his jacket, then adjusted a cufflink—an almost comically polished gesture in a basement, a reflex so deeply embedded it operated without conscious direction. “We need the remaining documentation. Whatever you didn’t bring to his office. The drive, the copies, the sources.” He looked at me with a directness that was the closest he came to dropping the surface entirely. “This ends when you give us what we need, Sofia. The longer it takes, the less comfortable your situation becomes.”
He went to the door. I watched him go, and I said nothing. I held the coal in my chest and breathed.
The nausea came back the moment the bolt slid home.