I stared at the grain of the counter under my hand.
“I know you’re still angry,” she continued. “You have every right to be angry. What he did was—yes, it was wrong, and you don’t have to be done being angry about it just because you’re married now.” Her voice was careful and steady, the voice of a woman who’d had her own version of a complicated love and had learned to stop requiring it to be simple. “But don’t tell yourself a story about what he wants that lets you off the hook for what you want. That’s not fair to him, and it’s not fair to you.”
I didn’t say anything for a long moment. The city lights were coming on outside, the grid of them appearing in the early dark like something being assembled in real time, and the penthouse held the quiet it always held, and I stood in it and sat with what she’d said and didn’t particularly enjoy the experience.
“When did you get wise?” I said finally.
“I married Yegor Kamarov,” she said, and I could hear the smile in it. “Wisdom was a survival requirement.”
I almost laughed. I wanted to say more—to keep her on the line because her voice was the most familiar thing currently available to me and the apartment was very quiet—but I heard something then. A sound from the entryway. The sound of the front door opening.
“He’s back,” I said, relief moving through me faster than I could manage it. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Sofia—”
I ended the call and moved toward the hallway, already adjusting the shape of what I was going to say, already deciding whether to lead with the fact that he hadn’t texted or whether to let it go because Camila was probably right and demonstrating that I’d been waiting was its own kind of vulnerability that I wasn’t sure I was prepared to hand over yet.
I stepped out of the hallway.
And stopped.
The man standing in my penthouse was not my husband.
Nico Calderon looked like something that had clawed its way back from a place it had no business returning from. He was thinner than I remembered—the weeks since his father’s funeral had taken something from him, stripped the careful polish that had always been part of his presentation, left something rawer and more dangerous underneath it. His shirt was marked with drying blood at the cuffs and collar, but it was his eyes that struck hardest—dark, fixed, and unnervingly alive, the way eyes became when whatever lay behind them had narrowed to a single point of focus. And that point was here. It was me.
He smiled at me. It was the most frightening thing in the room.
“Hello, Sofia.” His voice was conversational, almost pleasant, the tone of someone arriving at a social occasion. “Miss me?”
My body processed the danger before my mind fully caught up to it—a cold drop in the stomach, a prickling along my arms, the medical student part of my brain already running through what the blood on his shirt meant, and the rest of me already measuring the distance between us and the door and understanding that it was not enough distance. I didn’t answer him. I didn’t move. I stood very still and looked at him, thought about the phone I’d just put in my pocket and the sister I’d just ended a call with, and thought about the baby, and kept my face exactly as neutral as I could manage.
He crossed the room in four steps. I stepped back, and it didn’t matter because his hand found my arm before I could make the distance I needed, fingers wrapping around my wrist with a grip calibrated to control rather than injure—the grip of a man who’d done this before and knew exactly how much pressure was necessary. With his other hand, he brought up the knife. I saw it in my peripheral vision before I felt it—the cold flat edge of the blade against my abdomen, angled with a precision that made clear it was exactly where he intended it.
Against my stomach. Where the baby was.
Something flooded through me that wasn’t quite fear and wasn’t quite rage and was more fundamental than either—the animal certainty that this was the one threat that rearranged every other priority, that every calculation in my head now had to route through this single inescapable point. I went very still. I made myself breathe.
“There she is.” His voice was quiet, almost approving, like he’d been waiting for me to understand the geometry of the situation. “See, I knew you’d be smart about it. You’ve always been smart. It’s actually what made you such a problem.” He tilted his head, studying me with the detached attention of someone evaluating something he owned. “Where’s your husband, Sofia?”
I said nothing.
The blade shifted, just slightly. I felt the movement register in my entire body, every nerve ending wired to that small steel edge. “I’ll ask once more,” he said. The pleasantness was still there in his voice, which was worse than if it had been gone. “Where is Gregory?”
“Not here,” I said. My voice came out level. I didn’t know how. “I don’t know where he is.”
Nico looked at me for a long moment, reading something in my face, and then he did something unexpected—he laughed. It was a short, quiet sound, almost private, the laugh of a man recognizing an irony he hadn’t expected. “You actually don’t know,” he said. “He didn’t tell you.” Something moved across his face, an expression I couldn’t fully read before it was gone. “Interesting.”
“What do you want, Nico?”
“What do I want?” He repeated it like he was considering the question fresh, like it was a philosophical inquiry rather than the only thing currently between me and whatever came next.
He released my wrist, and I immediately wanted to move and didn’t, because the blade was still there, still in contact, and I was not willing to take a risk with what was on the other side of it.
He stepped back half a pace—enough to look at me fully, not enough to change anything material. “I want Gregory Kamarov to understand what it costs to take things from people.”
His voice had lost its pleasantness now. Underneath it was genuine grief and fury wound together in the weeks since his father’s death into a focused, consuming thing.
“He took my father from me. He destroyed everything we built. He thought burning a shipment and making a statement was the end of it.” His jaw moved. “So I burned his warehouse. And now I’m going to use his wife to make him watch something he can’t fix.”