Chapter 2 – Gregory
The suit was Kirill’s idea.
Not the wearing of one—I knew how to dress for an event when the mission required it—but the specific one: charcoal grey, Italian cut, the kind that cost enough to make a statement without being loud about it.
You need to look like you belong there, Kirill had said, sliding it across the table without looking up from his laptop.
Not like you’re about to break someone’s fingers.
I’d taken the suit without commenting on the implication.
He wasn’t wrong.
The fundraiser occupied the top floor of a building on Michigan Avenue that existed specifically to make money feel like culture, where Chicago’s elite came to congratulate themselves on their generosity while the city below them did what it always did: survive without their help.
Crystal everywhere. Flowers that cost more than groceries.
A string quartet playing something European and mournful in the corner, as if the music was apologizing for the room.
I moved through it like I belonged.
That was the first skill you learned in this life: how to occupy a space without disturbing it.
How to make your size and your face and the particular energy you carried read as authority rather than threat, depending on who was looking.
In the Bratva, I was the blade. Here, among the tailored suits and the champagne flutes, I was just another wealthy man with a quiet manner and nowhere in particular to be.
I accepted a glass of something sparkling from a passing tray and didn’t drink it.
Three days ago, Matvey had handed me a folder.
I’d opened it that night at my kitchen table with the overhead light on and the apartment silent around me, which was the only way I ever worked through anything—alone, lit clearly, no ambient noise to push conclusions I hadn’t reached yet.
The folder held four things: the event invitation, already arranged under a name that didn’t belong to me.
A dossier on Tomas Alvarez—financials, known associates, a timeline of suspected transactions mapped against the rival factions’ expansion dates.
A photograph of Tomas himself, taken from a distance at some prior public event, his posture that of a man comfortable with being the most important person in any room.
And Sofia.
Her photograph was the last thing in the folder, and I’d looked at it for longer than necessary, which I noted and immediately attributed to professional assessment. She was my access point. Understanding what she looked like was part of understanding the mission. That was all it was.
I’d closed the folder.
Opened it again.
Looked at the photograph one more time with the particular feeling of a man trying to convince himself of something he was already losing the argument about.
She was stunning. That was just an objective fact, as neutral and unambiguous as reading a temperature or a distance.
Warm olive skin, dark chestnut hair, eyes that even in a still photograph managed to look like they were in the middle of thinking something.
She was looking past the camera again—that same unguarded expression, that slight tilt of her chin toward something off-frame.
I understood then why Matvey had said what he said.
Someone who lacks emotions.
Because anyone with a functional one would have already complicated this mission inside the first ten seconds of looking at her face.
And Matvey, who had been running this organization for over two decades, who could read a room the way other men read a menu, had factored that in.
Had handed the assignment to the one man he trusted not to feel things.
I’d closed the folder, then I’d spent three days reminding myself, at intervals, that Sofia Alvarez was an access point. A means to a truth that needed uncovering. A variable in a mission I’d accepted and would complete with the same efficiency I brought to everything.
That was it.
That was all.
***
Tomas arrived at seven forty-three.
I knew because I’d been watching the entrance with the relaxed, peripheral attention of someone who wasn’t watching it at all—glass in hand, positioned near a column that gave me sightlines to the door and the main floor both, visibly interested in nothing, actually interested in everything.
He walked in at his own pace, like time adjusted itself around him rather than the other way around. Tomas Alvarez proved nothing. He simply arrived, and the room subtly reorganized itself around him the way rooms did around men who had enough money and presence that their gravity preceded them.
He was everything the file had suggested: commanding, polished, silver at the temples in a way that read as distinguished rather than aged. His suit was immaculate. His smile, when he deployed it, was calibrated to the exact degree of warmth that cost him nothing and communicated everything.
He was also not alone.
She was beside him.
And I—
I lost the thread.
Not permanently. Not even for long—a handful of seconds at most, the kind of interruption you could chalk up to recalibration, to adjusting for the difference between a photograph and a person. That was the rational explanation, and I was a rational man, and I filed it under that and moved on.
But for those few seconds, the mission simply wasn’t there. The room wasn’t there. Tomas, the folder, the rival factions, the arms-dealing allegations, Matvey’s careful voice in a dark SUV—none of it was there.
Just her.
In person, she was…different. Not more or less than the photograph, exactly, but other.
Three-dimensional in a way that photographs couldn’t prepare you for.
The navy dress fit her like it had been made specifically for her.
Her hair was down, dark chestnut waves catching the chandelier light as she moved.
She kept her chin slightly lifted—not arrogantly, but with the particular awareness of a woman who had learned early that a room like this would look for any excuse to find her less than she was, and had decided not to give it one.
Her eyes were even more expressive in motion.
That was the thing. That was the detail the photograph hadn’t warned me about—the way her face moved when she was thinking, the way her eyes did the work of a full conversation before she said a word.
I caught myself and looked away.
Six months, I thought, which was the last time I’d been with a woman, which was the only charitable explanation for what had just happened in my chest. Six months of nothing and then a photograph and then a navy dress under chandelier light, and apparently, my discipline had limits that nobody had bothered to inform me about.
I looked back at Tomas.
He had his hand at the small of Sofia’s back, guiding her toward a cluster of guests near the far side of the room, and the gesture—proprietary, practiced—told me something about their dynamic that the file hadn’t. He was comfortable using her as a social instrument. She was used to being one.
I watched them cross the room with the neutral attention of someone doing nothing at all.
Maverick was already in position.
I recognized him from the opposition research Kirill had pulled: six feet of curated charm and cold calculation wearing a suit the color of deep water.
He moved with the practiced ease of a man who had been performing sincerity for long enough that he’d almost forgotten it was a performance. Almost.
He and Tomas met the way men meet when they know each other well enough that the greeting is shorthand—a handshake, a brief word, the minimal choreography of people with history.
Beside Maverick stood someone younger, in his mid-thirties, dark and angular in a midnight suit, with the stillness of a man who watches more than he speaks.
I didn’t know him.
I noted him.
Within two minutes, the arrangement had been executed with the smooth efficiency of something planned well in advance of the evening.
Both older men drifted—casually, convincingly, in opposite directions—leaving the younger man and Sofia standing in the engineered proximity of a setup that both of them clearly recognized for what it was.
I watched Sofia’s face.
There it was—the smile she put on, practiced and pleasant and utterly disconnected from what was happening behind her eyes. She was somewhere else entirely. Present enough to be polite, absent enough that the whole performance cost her nothing because she was not genuinely in it.
She was bored.
Not rudely. Not dismissively. But the particular, bone-deep boredom of a person enduring a situation they had no hand in creating and no real interest in sustaining, going through the required motions with the efficiency of someone who had done it before and would do it again and had stopped expecting it to become anything other than what it was.
Something in my stomach pulled tight.
I had not expected that. The pulling. It arrived without announcement and sat there while I processed it with the uncomfortable awareness of a man who has just discovered a draft in a room he thought was sealed.
I didn’t feel things on missions. That was the point of me. That was why Matvey had put my name on the folder.
And yet.
I set my untouched glass on the nearest surface and started moving before I had a plan.
That was the other thing I hadn’t expected: the absence of a plan.
I was not an impulsive man. Every movement I made in this life was calculated, considered, executed with the precision of someone who understood that in his world, impulse was just another word for mistake.
I didn’t move toward things without knowing exactly why.
But I was moving.
Threading through the crowd with the unhurried ease of someone who belonged everywhere he stood, keeping them in my peripheral vision as I closed the distance, not looking directly at her because looking directly at things you were trying to approach was amateur, and I’d not been an amateur in a very long time.