The next forty minutes were the part of this work I understood best. Luka took the tire of the lead truck with a shot that sounded like a crack of frozen timber in the dark air. Damir moved on the cab before the driver had processed what had happened to his vehicle, and the man was on the ground with a gun at his throat in a space of time that was shorter than most people could identify that they were afraid.
I let the fear work for a minute. Then I crouched.
The driver was young—younger than I expected, which meant that Nico was scraping the bottom of his available workforce, pulling in people who needed money badly enough to ask fewer questions. He looked up at me with the whites of his eyes showing and his breath coming fast and shallow, and I held his gaze and said, without raising my voice, “One question. Where is Nico Calderon tonight?”
He gave me an address in eleven seconds. Fear, as I’d always observed, made men honest.
I stood, then looked at Damir. He nodded and zip-tied the driver’s wrists with impersonal efficiency.
Stephen had already reached the warehouse.
The shipment burned high, a message written in light that every faction watching Chicago’s night sky would be able to read from their various positions of interest. We stood at the appropriate distance and watched it for exactly as long as was necessary, then walked back to the vehicles because the point had been made, the night was cold, and there was nothing left here that required our presence.
In the car, driving back through the city grid, I thought about the address the driver had given me. It was temporary—a place Nico was using this week that he would abandon as soon as he understood what had happened to his supply line tonight, which would be within the hour. The address itself was less important than what it confirmed: Nico was mobile, which meant he was afraid, and his decision-making was deteriorating.
Desperate men didn’t stay rational. They reached for whatever leverage they still had.
I pressed Yegor’s contact, and he picked up on the second ring. “Done,” I said.
“Tomas is waiting,” he said.
“Tell him. Then tell Kirill I need eyes on that address by tomorrow morning. Round the clock.” I turned onto the highway, the city opening up ahead of me in its light-grid expanse. “He’s going to move again soon. When he does, I want to know before he’s finished deciding to.”
Yegor said, “Understood,” and ended the call, because Yegor never used the phone for anything beyond its operational minimum.
I drove back to Sofia.
Chapter 21 – Sofia
The wedding dress had been Camila’s idea.
White, Sofia. You’re still wearing white. Don’t let him take that from you too.She’d said it like it was an act of defiance, like the cut of the fabric meant something, and I’d let her believe it did because she needed to and because arguing would have cost me energy I didn’t have.
The ceremony was small. Tomas had arranged it with the same quiet efficiency he brought to every decision he’d made since the hospital. Gregory’s people. My father’s people. A priest who had clearly done enough Bratva-adjacent ceremonies to know that certain questions were rhetorical. Camila beside me in blush silk, her hand finding mine once and squeezing hard enough to ground me. Yegor standing on Gregory’s side with the expression of a man who was choosing not to have opinions about this.
I kept my eyes on the middle distance through most of it. It was the only way I could manage.
The reception, such as it was, lasted two hours. Long enough to satisfy the minimum requirements of legitimacy, not long enough for the situation to breathe into something it wasn’t. I ate almost nothing and drank water and watched Gregory from across the room the way I’d spent the last week watching him—with the careful attention of someone trying to understand a threat without letting it understand them. He moved through his people easily, that controlled stillness he carried everywhere like armor, and occasionally his eyes would find me across the space between us and rest there for a moment with an unreadable weight before he looked away.
I never looked away first. It was the only territory I’d left.
By the time we got back to the penthouse, the city had gone dark outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, and the silence between us had become unbearable. I set my small bag on the chair near the bedroom door and stood in the middle of the room, trying to locate the version of myself that knew what to do next, and couldn’t find her.
The dress was the problem. It had thirty-two buttons running down the back—I’d counted them—and I hadn’t considered, in all of Camila’s well-intentioned preparations, that there would be a moment at the end of the night when I would be standing alone in a room with my husband and unable to reach them.
Gregory had poured himself a glass of water in the kitchen and was standing at the counter, jacket already off, the collar of his white shirt open at the throat. He wasn’t looking at me. He was giving me the room, in the particular way he’d learned over the last week—not absence exactly, but a careful management of his own presence that I hadn’t expected from him and still didn’t entirely know what to do with.
“I can’t reach the buttons,” I said.
The words came out flatter than I intended. Not a request, exactly. More like stating a logistical problem that happened to require his involvement.
He set the glass down and crossed the room, and I turned before he reached me so he wouldn’t see my face. I heard him stop behind me, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him in the air, and then there was a pause—brief, two seconds at most—that felt like him deciding something.
His fingers found the top button.
He was careful. That was the thing I wasn’t prepared for. I’d spent a week building architecture against Gregory Kamarov and his particular brand of taking up space in a room, and the architecture had assumed a certain consistency—the controlled remove of a man who had decided I was a situation to be managed. What his hands were doing now didn’t fit the architecture. He worked down the row of buttons with a slowness that wasn’t efficient, his knuckles barely grazing my spine as the fabric parted, and the care in it was worse than anything else he could have done to me right then because I didn’t have a wall built for care.
“Thirty-two,” I said, because the silence was becoming something I couldn’t hold without speaking into it.