Chapter 4 – Gregory
I watched her walk away and told myself the tightness in my chest was irritation.
That was the story I was going with. Irritation—clean, functional, entirely justified.
I’d deviated from the mission parameters inside the first forty minutes of arriving at this event, inserted myself into a situation that had nothing to do with Tomas Alvarez’s alleged arms dealings, and somehow ended up standing in the middle of a fundraiser holding the hand of a twenty-two-year-old medical student while a string quartet played something mournful in the background.
Irritation was the appropriate response.
The fact that I could still feel exactly where her fingers had been in mine was irrelevant.
I turned away from the direction she’d gone—deliberately, the way you turn away from something you’ve decided not to look at—and pulled the comm from my jacket pocket.
Small, discreet, the kind of tech that Kirill had sourced from somewhere he never explained, and I never asked about, because asking Kirill where things came from was like asking the city where the lake came from.
It had always been there. The origin wasn’t the point.
I pressed it in and raised two fingers to adjust my collar, which was the gesture that meant I’m on.
Static. Then a click.
“Took you long enough.” A voice, low and dry. Female. Not Kirill’s flat baritone—which meant Illyana had drawn tonight’s surveillance shift, or Matvey had deployed them both, and they were trading off, which he did sometimes when the mission required it.
The secrecy of this particular operation meant I wasn’t entirely certain which of them had full visibility and which was operating on a need-to-know basis.
What I did know was that whoever was on the other end of this line had a direct line to Matvey, and that Matvey’s instructions had been explicit: clean, quiet, no trail.
“I need a confirmation on the man who was standing with Maverick Wiese,” I said, keeping my voice below the ambient noise of the room. “Dark suit, Latin, mid-thirties. He was with Sofia Alvarez.”
A brief pause.
Then my phone buzzed—a photo, sent to the separate encrypted line we used for visual confirms. I glanced at the screen.
Dark eyes, angular jaw, the kind of build that said functional strength rather than gym vanity.
The photo was recent, taken tonight from an angle that told me Illyana had eyes on the room from somewhere elevated, which meant she was either in the building or had accessed external surveillance feeds.
With Illyana, it could have been either.
“That’s him,” I said.
“Nico Calderon.” Kirill’s voice this time, cutting in from the secondary channel—so they were both on. “Maverick Wiese’s stepson. Different father, took the mother’s second husband’s name. He runs ops for Maverick’s political machine. The kind of ops that don’t appear in any official capacity.”
I processed that. Filed it. “Tomas and Maverick are arranging a match. Between Calderon and the younger Alvarez daughter.”
A beat of silence that felt longer than it was.
“Keep your eyes on Tomas,” Kirill said. His voice carried no inflection—it never did—but the instruction had a precision to it that communicated more than the words. Stay on the target. Don’t drift.
“Noted.”
“Gregory.” Illyana again. Lighter. Carrying the particular undertone of someone who had observed something they found amusing and was going to make you aware of it, without making it obvious that they were making you aware of it.
“You do remember why Matvey specifically chose you for this mission, yes?”
I said nothing.
Which she interpreted correctly as the confirmation it was.
“Mm.” The sound she made was entirely too satisfied.
“I’m focused on Tomas,” I said flatly. “Who is currently sitting across the room with a notoriously corrupt politician at a fundraiser that costs more per table than most criminal operations make in a quarter. Which seems relevant.”
“Tomas is no angel,” Illyana said, and the amusement dropped out of her voice, replaced by something crisper. “In fact, he is the reason for this secret mission. Don’t let the tailored suit confuse you.”
“Nothing about this situation is confusing me.”
A pause.
“Of course not,” Kirill said. Deadpan. In eleven years of working alongside Kirill Petrov, I’d heard him be deadpan approximately six thousand times, and I’d never once failed to recognize when it was doing the work of a sentence he’d decided not to say out loud.
I didn’t dignify it.
“Buy something during the auction,” Kirill added, back to operational. “You’ve been standing near that column for forty minutes. Cover requires participation.”
He disconnected first. Illyana a half-second after, and I was nearly certain I heard the beginning of something that might have been a quiet laugh before the line went clean.
I pocketed the comm.
***
The auction was already running when I crossed toward the outer edge of the crowd, taking a position where I’d have clean sightlines to both the stage and the tables.
The auctioneer’s voice moved through its practiced rhythms—an antique, provenance noted, significance emphasized, opening bid established with the gravity of a man who understood that the value of things was mostly a story you told well enough that everyone agreed to believe it.
I scanned the room with the peripheral efficiency of long practice.
Tomas at his table, composed and attentive, his posture the practiced openness of a man performing transparency.
Nothing in his body language suggested anything other than a wealthy businessman enjoying a charitable evening.
Which was either evidence of innocence or evidence of very good training, and at this stage of the investigation, I couldn’t determine which.
Maverick two tables over, carrying the particular stillness of a man who was always listening even when he appeared to be speaking.
His steel-blue eyes moved at intervals—assessing, the unconscious habit of someone who had been operating in rooms like this long enough that surveillance had become instinct.
Calderon, somewhere in the middle distance, having reassembled himself after the earlier interaction with the specific controlled blankness of a man who had processed what happened and filed it under deal with later.
I noted that. People who filed things under deal with later were worth watching, because they always came back to it.
And Sofia—
Sofia was at her father’s table, spine straight, hands in her lap, face turned toward the stage. She looked composed. She looked entirely present and attentive and appropriately engaged with the proceedings.
She was also, at irregular intervals that she clearly believed were less noticeable than they were, looking at me.
I caught the third one.
Held it for exactly one second—long enough to be deliberate, short enough to be deniable—and then looked back at the stage.
I was going to buy the watch.
Not because Kirill had told me to, though that was the official reason, and I was keeping it.
But because standing here with my hands empty and my chest doing things I’d no framework for and my eyes conducting their own unauthorized surveillance of a woman I’d touched for approximately thirty seconds was making me acutely aware that I needed to do something with my body that constituted a clear, purposeful action.
The auctioneer reached the piece in question. An antique watch, the kind with a history attached to make it worth more than its materials, which was, again, just a story told well, but the Bratva had spent enough on stranger things, and Kirill’s instruction was sound.
I raised my hand.
“Two million.”
The number landed in the room cleanly, the way a stone lands in still water—a single point of impact and then ripples moving outward in all directions. The auctioneer’s pause was professional, offering the room a courtesy beat to consider a counter.
Nobody countered.
Sold.
A staff member materialized with paperwork. I signed what needed signing, arranged for collection, did the administrative portion of spending two million dollars on something I would never wear with the same energy I applied to most things: efficiently and without visible feeling.
When I looked up, Sofia was watching me.
Not the quick, deniable glance she’d been deploying all evening.
A full, direct look, the kind that happened when someone momentarily forgot to be careful about what they were communicating.
Dark brown eyes, wide and expressive, and turning something over behind them with the methodical attention of a person trying to solve a problem.
Something in my chest pulled in a direction I didn’t appreciate.
I held her gaze for one moment.
Then I pocketed the paperwork and walked out.
I stood on the sidewalk outside the venue and breathed in through the nose and out.
The technique I’d been using since I was nineteen years old and had first been handed a situation my body didn’t know how to process, and my training hadn’t yet caught up to it. It had worked reliably for twenty-one years.
Tonight, it worked approximately fifty percent.
I hailed a cab instead of calling for a car because I didn’t want to talk to anyone, and cabs at this hour in this city carried the particular social contract of mutual disinterest that I found valuable.
The driver asked me nothing. I stared out the window at the city moving past and thought about the folder, and Tomas, and the investigation.
I thought about the investigation for maybe four minutes.
Then my brain, with the dedicated persistence of a thing I’d spent four decades training and apparently still couldn’t fully control, went back to her.
Tell me how you understood me so easily.