“How did he know about the warehouse?” I said.
“That’s what I’m trying to determine.” Kirill turned the tablet toward me. “Trace back on the route suggests someone inside had his number. Not Nico’s circle directly—someone adjacent, three contacts removed. Possibly someone who sold the location rather than gave it.” He paused. “He paid well.”
Damir was at the building itself, or what remained of it—the walls were intact, but the interior had gone completely, an accelerant fire designed to destroy inventory and send a message simultaneously. He stood at the threshold with his arms crossed and his jaw set in the particular configuration that meant he was deciding how angry to allow himself to be, which with Damir was always a careful calibration. When he turned at my approach, his grey eyes moved from me to the wreckage and back with the economy of a man who had said everything he needed to say through posture.
“Anyone unaccounted for besides the two?” I said.
“No. The others got out. Mikael and Ruslan—” He stopped. Started again. “They were doing the overnight shift. They would have been in the back.”
I looked at the building for a moment. Mikael had been twenty-nine. Ruslan, forty-four, with a daughter in Kraków, to whom he sent money twice a month and never mentioned.
Luka arrived in his car five minutes later, and Matvey two minutes after that in the black SUV that materialized at scenes like this with the inevitability of weather. His eyes moved across the ruins with a thoroughness that missed nothing, and his mouth was set in a line that communicated exactly how much territory Nico Calderon had just forfeited.
“Briefing. Now.” He didn’t wait for the gathering—he walked to the back of the SUV, and the rest of us moved.
The briefing was what briefings were in the Bratva—not a conversation but an allocation of force. Matvey mapped the response with the precision of a man who had been making decisions like this for twenty years, who understood that retaliation without structure was just noise and that noise didn’t hold a city. He identified three remaining political contacts of Maverick’s who would have remained loyal to Nico out of money and self-preservation. He gave Luka the first two and looked at me with the third.
“Alderman Przybylski,” Matvey said. “He took Maverick’s money for three years. He’ll know where Nico has been operating out of since the funeral.”
“I’ll handle it,” I said.
“I know you will.” Matvey’s eyes held mine for a moment. “Find his supporters. Politicians, factions, anyone who took his money. He can’t operate in this city without someone covering him, and whoever that is becomes our next address.”
I pulled out of the lot, and the thought arrived with the particular force of something that had been waiting to be acknowledged:the warehouse.
He had gone for the warehouse—a Bratva asset, a supply point, a message to the organization.
That was strategic. That was a man responding to what had been done to him in the same register it had been done—infrastructure for infrastructure, loss for loss.
But Nico Calderon had also, in the last few months, reached for the thing closest to the man who threatened him when strategy alone wasn’t satisfying. He had taken Sofia once already. Not for information. Not for leverage in the operational sense. Because she was the fault line, the pressure point, the place where something in the situation was exposed and could be pressed.
He knew about the baby. He’d been in that hospital corridor—or his people had, because Nico never operated without his people—and he knew that the baby was the one thing that had changed the calculation, the one thing that had moved a man who had spent twenty years carrying nothing he couldn’t put down.
I turned onto the highway and drove faster than I should have, and called Kirill.
“I need eyes on the penthouse,” I said the moment he picked up. “Now. I want movement alerts on every entry point—elevator, stairs, parking, roof access.”
A pause. Kirill’s pauses meant he was already working while he formulated what to say. “You think he’s pivoting targets.”
“I think he already has a target. I think the warehouse was his opening statement, not his main point.” I took the turn onto the expressway. “He went for infrastructure first because he’s methodical. But he’s also angry, and he knows where to hurt me.”
“Understood.” Kirill was already typing—I could hear it. “I’ll have eyes up in four minutes. I’ll loop to your phone directly.”
“Don’t loop to my phone. Put Illyana on monitoring and have her call me the moment anything moves.”
Another pause, shorter. “Gregory.” His voice shifted slightly—the particular shift of a man who was about to say something adjacent to personal concern and was going to dress it in operational language. “If he’s going for the penthouse, you should know—”
“I know.” I cut into the faster lane. “I’m already moving.”
I had something to lose. I’d known that last night, lying in the dark and listening to the city and the particular quality of her breathing. I’d identified it as a vulnerability, as the kind of exposure that men in my line of work were supposed to have long since learned to neutralize.
But somewhere between the warehouse and the highway, the calculation had shifted. The exposure wasn’t the problem. The problem was the thirty minutes it would take me to get back across the city to her.
Chapter 23 – Sofia
He’d saidI’ll call. He hadn’t called. He hadn’t texted. The morning had become afternoon, and the afternoon had bled into the amber hour when Chicago’s skyline caught the last of the daylight and held it while I was sitting on the couch with my knees pulled up, and my phone face-up on the cushion beside me, and the screen stayed dark.
I told myself it didn’t matter. I was very convincing.