“Give me my phone,” I said.
Something crossed his face—surprise, maybe, or satisfaction at the compliance. He reached into my pocket himself, which I allowed because the knife was still there and the baby was still there, and some calculations made themselves. He held the phone out and kept the blade where it was, and his eyes didn’t leave my face.
I found Gregory’s name in my contacts. My thumb hovered over it for a fraction of a second—long enough to feel the full weight of what I was about to do, to understand it completely, and to do it anyway. Because Gregory would come. I knew that with a certainty that sat below everything else, below the anger and the unresolved hurt and the complicated architecture of what we were and weren’t to each other. He would come, and he would know it was a trap, and he would come regardless, and I needed him to know before he walked through that door that I was here and I was alive and he needed to be smarter than whatever Nico was planning.
I pressed call.
It rang once.
Chapter 24 – Gregory
The meeting had been running for forty minutes, and I’d stopped processing it approximately thirty minutes ago.
Matvey stood at the head of the table with a map spread across it, two fingers tracing the industrial corridor where Nico’s network had been operating, and he was talking about containment. About how the warehouse fire was a provocation designed to force a visible response, and how a visible response was exactly what Nico wanted because a visible response was traceable, and traceable meant political exposure for the Bratva at a moment when Maverick’s death had already introduced the kind of scrutiny that could not be managed from the shadows. He was right. He was almost always right about this kind of thing. I stood with my arms crossed and my back against the far wall, and I tracked the movement of his hand across the map, and I thought about the eggs Sofia had made that morning.
Not the eggs specifically. What the eggs meant. The way she’d moved around his kitchen with the unselfconscious ease of someone who had been in a space long enough to stop performing in it, the hum under her breath that she’d cut off the moment she’d noticed me noticing. The careful ordinariness of two people eating breakfast while pretending they didn’t remember what the night before had been. I’d watched her from across the table and thought, with the distinct discomfort of a man who doesn’t enjoy being surprised by himself, that I didn’t want it to end. Not the breakfast. Not the morning. Not the specific version of Sofia Alvarez-Kamarov who wore my shirt to make eggs and hummed without meaning to.
Then my phone had lit up and the morning had ended, and I’d spent the subsequent eight hours doing the work of not thinking about it.
Luka was talking now—logistics, something about the secondary route Nico’s surviving men would likely shift to, the way a disrupted supply chain finds new grooves within forty-eight hours. I watched his mouth move, registered the sense of it, and said nothing. Damir had pulled up a satellite image of the industrial district on his laptop. Yegor stood slightly apart from the others, the way he always stood, reading something on his phone with the particular focused expression that meant it was Camila. I felt a brief, sideways pull of recognition—Yegor’s marriage had not made him soft, but it had made him fast to reach for his phone in a way that the pre-Camila Yegor would have identified as weakness, and I’d watched him stop caring about that distinction. I hadn’t understood it at the time.
My phone vibrated in my pocket.
Sofia’s name on the screen.
The guilt was immediate—the guilt of a man who had said I’ll call and hadn’t called, who’d been standing in his boss’s office running tactical assessments while his pregnant wife sat forty-three floors above the city in an apartment that was still not really hers and waited. I knew she’d been waiting. I didn’t need to be told.
I shifted away from the wall in my seat and leaned forward toward the door, already composing the apology, already calibrating whether to lead with the explanation or the acknowledgment that the explanation didn’t fully excuse it.
I answered on the second step.
The voice on the line was not Sofia’s.
“If you tell anyone where you’re going,” Nico Calderon said, with the deliberate, unhurried tone of a man who’d been rehearsing this, “your pregnant wife dies.”
The room continued its conversation behind me. Maps and routes and forty-eight-hour projections. Matvey’s hand moving across the corridor. Everything exactly as it had been two seconds ago. I stood in the middle of it and felt the floor perform a subtle, complete shift, the way the ground moved in that fraction of a second before you registered it as an earthquake.
My chair. It was moving backward, scraping against the floor, because I’d stood so sharply I’d sent it into the wall. Every face in the room turned toward me.
I looked at them and constructed a lie with whatever was still functioning in my upper brain. “Sofia’s not well,” I said. “I need to go.” My voice came out steady, which surprised some part of me that had stepped briefly outside the situation. “I’ll be reachable.”
I left before anyone could ask a follow-up question. I heard Yegor’s voice beginning something behind me, and I didn’t stop.
The city at night became an obstacle on a route I drove without thinking, muscle memory carrying me through it while the thinking part of my brain worked the problem. He’d called from her phone, which meant he had her phone, which meant he wanted me to know exactly where she was—the penthouse, where he was already positioned, where he’d already determined I would come.
He’d constructed the invitation deliberately. Either I came alone, isolated, walked into whatever he’d arranged, or I delayed while he had her. The knife’s edge was that Sofia was the kind of woman who wouldn’t break easily, who would make him work for whatever he wanted to extract from her, and he would know that about her, and he would make her pay for it in proportion to how much work she made him do.
I drove faster.
Three blocks out, I cut the lights and the engine and coasted to the curb.
I sat in the dark for thirty seconds, breathing and running through it. Single point of entry he’d expect—the elevator, the front door. Stairwell on the northwest side, maintenance access through the building management level, the one I’d had Kirill map when I’d first moved in, because I made a habit of knowing the exits. I knew my own apartment, every room and angle of it, every piece of furniture, the sight lines from the living room entry toward the kitchen and the hallway. I thought about where Sofia would be positioned if Nico were using her as leverage—visible, somewhere central, accessible enough that the threat would be demonstrable when I walked in. The living room. Maybe the kitchen. Not the bedrooms. He’d want the open space where I could see everything immediately.
I got out of the car. Didn’t slam the door. Moved along the building’s blind side to the maintenance entrance and took the stairwell in the dark, thirty-eight floors on instinct, not breathing hard until the thirty-fifth and not letting myself slow down. On the forty-third floor landing, I stopped and listened. The building was quiet in the way expensive buildings were quiet—engineered silence, the noise of life muffled behind money and insulation. My own pulse. The faint ambient presence of a city below.
I moved to the service corridor entrance to the penthouse. Secondary keypad. I had the code because I always had the code. I punched it in, pushed through, came in through the kitchen side, stopped just inside the threshold, back to the wall, and looked.
Sofia.