He didn’t argue with that.
I turned away from him and walked to the window because I needed the physical distance and something to look at other than his face, which was making the accounting harder. I’d been in that basement with Gregory’s behavior as evidence, and Nico’s narration as the frame, and the combination had produced a conclusion that had sat in my chest for six days with the specific weight of something that felt true.
Now I was in a penthouse with Gregory three feet behind me, offering honesty I hadn’t asked for, and I wasn’t sure whether that was because it was less true or because I was less safe from him up here than I’d been in the basement with something I could be angry at.
“Nico said you never cared,” I said to the window. “He said I was naïve to think someone like you would.”
The silence behind me changed quality.
“Nico spent six days trying to break you in a basement and failed completely. He doesn’t get to tell you what I feel.”
I turned. He was still against the counter, but something had changed in his posture—he’d gone rigid, like he was bracing for impact.
I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and breathed. The nausea was still there—not as bad as it had been in the basement, but present, the reliable morning-weighted cycling of a body that was doing something significant and was not going to let me forget it. I’d been moving through the last two hours on the residual momentum of the hospital and the car and the confrontation I’d been building toward, and now it was moving through me, the wave of it, and I sat down on the arm of the nearest chair because my legs had made a unilateral decision about the conversation.
Gregory was across the room before I’d finished sitting. He didn’t touch me—he crouched at my level, which made him less large, which I understood was deliberate, and he looked at my face with worry.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You’re not fine. You’ve been in a basement for six days.”
“I’m alive,” I amended.
“That’s a lower bar than fine.”
I looked at him at close range and the exhaustion moved through me in a way I’d been holding at bay since the hospital, the specific dissolution of a woman who’d been managing her own fear very carefully and was now somewhere that felt, against all logic and against everything I’d been telling myself for six consecutive days, marginally safer than the last place she’d been.
I hated that. I kept a specific inventory of the things I hated about this situation, and I added it.
“You’re carrying my child,” he said. Quietly. Not as a power play—just the fact of it, stated with the same directness he had been using throughout the conversation, the honesty that I still could not find the seam in. “We’re getting married.” He watched my face as he said it, and I watched him watching, and I didn’t react at all because I was too tired to, and because my actual reaction was something I wasn’t yet ready to give him. “Not because of the mission. Not because of Matvey. Because I’m not the kind of man who lets his child come into the world without a name.”
“That’s not a reason to marry someone,” I said.
“No,” he agreed. “It’s not the only reason.”
The rest of that sentence existed in the space between us without being said. I could feel its shape from where I was sitting—could feel the specific weight of what he was not yet saying and what I was not yet ready to hear and what was going to need to be navigated eventually in this apartment between two people who had been circling a reckoning for weeks and had finally run out of distance to circle.
He walked away. I watched him go, held very still, and said nothing, because everything I could say was either more than I’d say or less than the situation deserved, and I was not going to choose wrong twice.
The door of his room closed. Quietly—not a retreat, not a statement. Just a door.
I reached over and picked up the water glass and drank half of it, because my body required it and because the promise I’d made in the basement about survival superseded every other consideration and always would. Then I sat with the remainder and I looked at the city and I let myself, for the first time, think about the ultrasound I hadn’t had yet, the specific reality of a thing that was six weeks along and real and mine—entirely mine, in the most fundamental sense—and whatever else this was and whatever it was going to become, that part was not something anyone had a strategic use for. That part was simply true.
I finished the water. I stood up. I went to the room he had pointed to, closed the door, lay down on a bed that was too large and too quiet, stared at the ceiling, and thought:I am not going to make any decisions tonight.
It was the most honest thing I’d managed all day.
Chapter 20 – Gregory
Maverick Wiese’s funeral was the most expensive lie I’d ever attended.
The cemetery was one of those North Shore institutions that cost more per square foot than most of Chicago’s living residents could afford—manicured grass, gray stone colonnades, a path lined with flower arrangements that probably ran four figures each and had been ordered by a publicist rather than anyone who had actually grieved. The autumn sky sat low and pale above it, the particular white-grey of a city that had decided to hold its weather in suspension, and the crowd that moved through the iron gates communicated everything about who Maverick Wiese had been in public and nothing at all about what he had been in practice. Politicians in dark wool. Lobbyists with the careful expressions of people calculating what this death meant for the arrangement of their own interests. A city alderman I’d personally watched take a Bratva-adjacent cash envelope three years ago, standing with his hat in both hands and his face arranged in the correct register of solemn civic mourning.
I stood near the back with Tomas. He stood the way he always stood—straight, composed, the golden-tan of his face carrying its usual careful polish even here, even now. But I’d learned to read Tomas Alvarez in the weeks since his daughter’s basement, and what I could read in him today was the specific stillness of a man who was not grieving. He was calculating. His eyes moved across the crowd in slow, methodical intervals, the way mine did, filing, and occasionally they landed on the same person mine did, and we wouldn’t look at each other when that happened because we didn’t need to.
Nico wasn’t here.
I’d been certain of that before we arrived—had told Tomas in the car on the way over and watched him absorb it with the same controlled neutrality he brought to everything—but being certain and confirming were different, and I’d spent the first fifteen minutes of the service verifying every face in the crowd and finding the absence where Nico Calderon should have been. His stepfather was in a box ten feet from the grave. There were flowers with his name on the card. There was no Nico.