***
The penthouse was quiet when I came in.
Sofia was in the kitchen. She was standing at the counter with a glass of water and her phone, wearing one of the oversized shirts she had apparently decided she preferred to the things Camila had sent over in a bag two days after the hospital, and her hair was loose and slightly untidy, and she looked up when I came in with the expression she had been wearing for the last week.
I’d decided to respect that. Not because it didn’t cost me—it did, more than I was accustomed to anything costing me—but because Sofia Alvarez was not a woman you managed or maneuvered toward a conclusion, and I’d already done enough of both to last a lifetime, and what remained between us after all of it required something I’d very little practice giving: time that was not strategic.
“Funeral,” I said, in answer to the unasked question. I moved to the kitchen and poured water, because I’d learned in the last week that the small domesticities of arriving home with empty hands were their own kind of signal, and I was unlearning it. “Maverick’s.”
She watched me. “How was it?”
“Cold. Expensive. No sign of Nico.”
Something moved through her face at his name—a tightening, quick and controlled, the reflex of a woman who had been managing the aftermath of six days in a basement with the same methodical discipline she brought to everything. She had not said much about the basement. I’d not asked. There was a version of that conversation that needed to happen eventually and was not ready yet—for either of us—and I’d enough respect for the specific weight of what she had carried in that basement to let her determine the pace of when she put it down.
“He’ll come after us again,” she said. Not a question. She was too smart for questions she already knew the answer to.
“Not for long.” I set the glass down. I looked at her directly, because she deserved directness and had always preferred it over the performed calm of a man keeping things from her for her own supposed protection. “We move tonight. Kirill tracked his new supply route. We cut it, we cut his operational capacity, we cut the remaining cover from whatever’s left of his network.”
She held my gaze for a moment. “And Nico himself?”
“Wherever he is,” I said, “he’ll be considerably less difficult to find once he has no logistics, no allies, and no income.” I paused. “This ends soon.”
She turned the glass in her hands—a slow rotation, the movement of someone thinking rather than fidgeting—and I watched her profile in the kitchen light and thought about the woman in the hospital chair with the drip in her arm who had looked at me with exhausted, unguarded eyes and saidnothing changesand meant it as armor, and I thought about how much of what had happened since then had been the slow, incremental movement of two people who had both said things they meant and things they said because meaning them was inconvenient, trying to find the honest ground between. I was not a man who was good at finding honest ground. I was better at it than I’d been three weeks ago, which was a start.
“I’ll be back before morning,” I said. I moved toward the bedroom to change—the suit was not what I needed for tonight’s work, and tonight’s work needed to be clean and fast and finished.
“Gregory.” Her voice came from behind me, not loud. Not asking me to stop. Just my name, spoken in the particular register she used when she was about to say something she had decided to say regardless of how it landed.
I stopped.
“Come back,” she said. That was all. Two words. She said them with the same directness she’d said everything since the hospital—stripped of performance, landing exactly where they were aimed.
I turned to look at her. She was still at the counter, glass in her hands, eyes steady. There was nothing soft in her expression—Sofia’s directness was never softness, was always the controlled deployment of someone who had decided the truth was worth the exposure it required—but there was something in it that sat below all the managed layers of the last week, something I’d been watching gradually surface and was not going to name yet because naming it prematurely had always been how I damaged things.
“Yes,” I said.
She turned back to the counter. I went to change.
***
The industrial district at two in the morning was quiet. The warehouses along the rail corridor were large, anonymous, and well-suited to the kind of commerce that required darkness and loose documentation, and Nico Calderon had clearly done his homework thoroughly before choosing this particular artery.
Which meant he was careful. Which meant the operation needed to be faster than careful.
Luka was parked alongside the service road with his lights off when I arrived, and Damir was leaning against the passenger side with his arms crossed and the expression he wore when he was ready to be violent and had been waiting longer than he preferred. Stephen was a shadow further up the road—I registered his position by the faint orange ember of a cigarette that appeared briefly and vanished, because Stephen smoked exactly twice before any operation and not at all afterward, one of his numerous personal rituals that none of us had ever asked about.
“Three trucks confirmed,” Luka said, without greeting. He passed me the tablet—Kirill’s feed, clean and current, showing the heat signatures of a loading operation in the third warehouse from the east end. “Minimal crew. He’s running lean since we burned the last shipment—he doesn’t have the manpower to guard and load simultaneously, so half of them are inside, and half are on the perimeter.”
I studied the layout. “Perimeter is thinner on the north side.”
“We go north, we put them between the trucks and the rail line. They can’t reverse the trucks without coming through us.” Damir shifted his weight off the car. “Standard.”
“Standard,” I agreed. I handed the tablet back to Luka. “I want the lead driver out and talking before the first shot. He’ll know Nico’s next location if Nico has one. If he doesn’t know, the cargo still burns.” I looked at each of them in the flat ambient light of the service road. “Nobody dies who doesn’t need to. We’re making a point tonight, not starting a count.”
Damir said nothing. Luka nodded once, the nod of a man who had already allocated exactly as much consideration to that particular guideline as he was willing to. Stephen appeared from the darkness and fell into position without speaking, which was all Stephen ever did.
We moved.