I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and breathed through it—four counts in, hold, release—and when it passed, I sat and let myself think about my father for exactly one minute.
They needed the documentation. Which meant they didn’t have it. Which meant the drive was either in my apartment or somewhere Nico hadn’t found it, and which meant the information I’d assembled was still intact and still dangerous to them. That was something. That was the only piece of leverage I’d and it was still mine.
The hours moved. I ate what they brought—not because I’d forgiven myself for needing to, but because I’d made a decision that superseded every other consideration, and that decision was simply: survive. Everything I did in this room was in service of that single requirement. I ate. I drank the water. I breathed through the nausea and managed the fear and kept my spine straight in the chair even when no one was watching, because the habit of straightness was the only thing standing between me and the specific collapse that the room was designed to eventually produce.
I thought about Gregory less than I wanted to admit and more than I had the bandwidth for.
Nico’s words had settled into me like poison.He was watching you. Getting close to you was part of the operation.I’d been sitting with that for days, turning it over in the lightless air of the basement, testing it against everything I remembered—every moment I’d mistaken for genuine, every time his coldness had felt like restraint rather than strategy. The call to Matvey. The morning departures.
And yet, I didn’t know what to do with any of this. I was a woman in a basement who had been told the man she had been falling for was using her as a tool, and the evidence supported the accusation, and the accusation had been made by a man who had orchestrated my kidnapping, which was not a reliable narrator, and the whole tangled thing sat in my chest without resolution and I was tired—deeply, specifically tired—of carrying it in a room that gave me nothing to do except carry it.
Maverick came back in the afternoon. I identified it as afternoon by the sound of footsteps above me, which were heavier and more frequent at certain intervals that I’d been tracking as a proxy for time. He came in differently this time. The polished deliberateness was intact, but underneath it something had changed—a tightening, a compression, the specific quality of a man who had received information in the hours since his last visit and was managing its implications.
He stood near the door rather than pulling the chair. That shift in itself communicated something. He was not here to sit. He was here to communicate something quickly and leave.
“There’s movement,” he said. Not to me, exactly—more as though he was saying it into the room and I happened to be in it. “From the Bratva side.”
I looked at him. I kept my face neutral and my hands still in my lap, and I didn’t allow the thing that moved in my chest—rapid, electric, alive in a way nothing in the past days had felt alive—to reach my face.
“That has nothing to do with me,” I said.
He looked at me then, directly, and for the first time in all our interactions in this basement, there was something in his face that was not composed. It was brief—a flicker, a crack in the plaster—and it vanished almost immediately back beneath the surface, but I’d seen it, and he knew I’d seen it, and we both sat with that knowledge for a second before he turned and went back up the stairs.
The bolt slid home.
I let out a breath so slowly that my whole body moved with it.
I pressed my back against the chair, felt the cold plastic against my shoulder blades, and thought, very clearly and very deliberately:hold on.
The explosion, when it came, was nothing like I’d imagined.
I’d been bracing for something—for the sound of it, for the physical reality of an assault on a building I was trapped inside—but I’d imagined it as having a clear start and a clear progression that I could track. What actually happened was simultaneous and total: a concussion that moved through the building’s structure like a wave, knocking dust from the ceiling in a fine, continuous fall, rattling the single bulb in its fitting so that the light swung and the shadows lurched. The sound arrived as much through the floor and walls as through the air—a physical pressure as much as a noise, the kind of impact that you felt in your chest before your ears had finished processing it.
My hands gripped the arms of the chair, ankles puling instinctively against the zip ties, heart going at a rate my clinical training recognized as an acute stress response and my less clinical brain recognized asfinally, finally, finally.
The bolt slid. The door opened.
Maverick came in fast—not composed now, the suit rumpled at the shoulder where he had moved quickly through a door, his face frantic, almost scared.
He looked at me and he looked at the door and he looked at his phone, which was producing static where communication should have been, and I watched the calculations move across his face—rapid, visible in a way they never had been before—and I understood that the thing Maverick Wiese had not expected when he built this situation was that it would stop being contained.
He crossed the room in four steps, reached into his jacket, and came out with a knife. He crouched and cut the zip ties ay my ankles in two quick motions. Whatever came next, it was obvious he needed me mobile.
He stood, tucked the knife back into his jacket, then brought out a gun. The room changed temperature.
“We should’ve dealt with you immediately,” he said. The sentence was directed at me but not really meant for me; it was the thought of a man thinking aloud, talking himself toward a decision that he had apparently been postponing and had now run out of reasons to delay.
I looked at the gun. I looked at his face. I kept my breathing even through an act of pure and total will, and I said, calmly, “Killing me makes you the man who killed Tomas Alvarez’s daughter while the Bratva was breaching your front door. Think about what that does to your timeline.”
It bought me four seconds. I could see him thinking—the calculation, the weighing, the specific uncertainty of a man who was used to planning and was currently improvising—and in those four seconds the ceiling shook again with something that was not an explosion but was the sound of a structure being moved through quickly by people who knew how to move through structures, and Maverick’s jaw set and the four seconds ended.
“It would’ve been easier if you’d stayed out of the trucks,” he said, and raised the gun.
The door came off its hinges, and through the space where it had been, Gregory Kamarov came through with his Glock raised and his eyes already finding Maverick.
He looked like fury incarnate. He looked—even now, even in the flat yellow light of a basement with plaster dust still falling from the ceiling—like the most certain thing I’d seen in days.
Maverick reacted. He was fast—faster than a man his age should have been, faster than the suit suggested—and he had me before I could process that he was moving, one arm across my chest, the gun moving to my temple, and the specific cold of the barrel against my skin was a sensation I wouldn’t be describing further.