Chapter 4 – Gregory #2
I’d said it to wrong-foot her. That was what I’d told myself in the moment—a destabilizing question, the kind that puts someone on the defensive and gives you the upper hand in an exchange you hadn’t planned. I was good at that. I’d been doing it since before she was born.
Except I’d said it quietly. And close. And I’d looked at her like—
Like I actually wanted to know the answer.
I pressed the heel of my hand against my jaw and stared at the passing streetlights and had the extremely uncomfortable experience of being honest with myself about something I would have preferred to leave unexamined.
She was the daughter of a man I’d been assigned to investigate for crimes that, if confirmed, would end with her father at the bottom of the same lake her city sat beside.
She was soft and warm and intelligent and entirely, catastrophically, dangerously unaware of what she had walked into when she’d collided with my chest in a gold-lit room and looked up at me with those unguarded eyes.
She trusted me.
Not fully, not yet—she was too sharp for that, too observant, the kind of careful that came from being raised in a world where taking things at face value was a liability.
But she had taken my hand. She had walked away from Nico Calderon and into step beside me, and the implicit trust of that gesture had done something to the center of my chest that I was still, forty-five minutes later, trying to locate and eliminate.
I was not a man who felt things.
That was documented. Evidenced. Confirmed by twenty-one years of operational record and by Matvey Kamarov himself, who had looked me in the eye inside a dark SUV and called me someone who lacks emotions with the confidence of a man stating a known fact.
So whatever was currently happening in my chest was clearly a malfunction.
And malfunctions got fixed.
I drank half a bottle of whiskey that night.
Not recklessly. I didn’t do anything recklessly, including self-destruction, which I conducted with the same methodical precision I applied to everything else.
One glass, then another, then the bottle on the counter beside me and the apartment’s overhead light on and the folder closed on the table because I’d looked at it for an hour and retained nothing, which was a first.
The whiskey helped with the noise, but not with the quiet underneath it.
I went to sleep at four in the morning.
***
I spent the next two days alone.
This was not unusual in itself. I’d always operated well in solitude, had never needed the kind of constant proximity that some men required to feel like themselves.
The others had their rhythms, their noise, their way of filling space with presence.
I’d always been better in the gaps. Cleaner. More myself.
But these two days had a different quality.
I ran in the mornings for longer than I needed to, pushing past the point where the body finds its rhythm and into the territory where it starts arguing, because physical argument had always been more manageable than the mental kind.
I cleaned my weapons, which didn’t need cleaning.
I read the file on Tomas three more times and came away with the same conclusions and zero new clarity.
I sat in my kitchen at midnight on the second night with a glass of water—not whiskey, I was done with the whiskey experiment, it had produced no useful results—and I thought about the problem the way I thought about all problems.
Clinically. Structurally. What was the issue, what was causing it, what was the solution.
The issue: I was distracted. Specifically, I was distracted by a woman I’d spoken to for approximately four minutes at a fundraiser and would need to speak to again as a functional component of an active mission.
The distraction was operational interference.
Operational interference had one solution.
Remove the interference.
I’d done this before—once, years ago, early in my time with the Bratva, when a woman at a bar had gotten further under my skin than was acceptable and I’d handled it the way men handle things they don’t know what to do with, which was to find someone else and redirect the energy until the original interference lost its signal.
It had worked then.
It would work now.
The logic was sound. The execution was simple. I knew exactly where to go.
I stood up. Put on my jacket—the leather one, not the suit, because the suit had complicated things and I was done with the suit for the foreseeable future. Picked up my keys.
And drove to Volkov.
***
The club was exactly what I needed it to be.
Loud. Smoky. Operating according to rules I understood—the simple, transactional rules of a place where people came for specific things and left with what they’d come for, and nobody asked questions about the in-between.
The bass lived in the floor, the way it always did.
The air smelled like every other night I’d survived there.
I sat at the bar and ordered vodka and didn’t drink it and scanned the room with the automatic attention of a man who had spent enough time in spaces like this that the scan happened without requiring conscious direction.
There were women. There were always women at Volkov—some Bratva-adjacent, some simply drawn to the particular energy of a place that operated outside normal social architecture, some looking for exactly what I was looking for, which was the specific, uncomplicated comfort of someone else’s warmth for a few hours and then the clean, simple relief of returning to your own life afterward.
I’d done this many times.
It had always been enough.
I looked at the nearest woman—dark-haired, confident, returning my look with the direct ease of someone who knew what they wanted and wasn’t performing uncertainty about it.
She was attractive. Objectively, measurably. She smiled, and it reached her eyes, which were—
Brown.
Not dark chestnut. Not large and expressive and doing the work of a full conversation before a word was spoken. Not the specific warm shade that had looked up at me from a collision and gone completely unguarded for exactly one second before the composure slid back into place.
Just brown.
I picked up my vodka, drank it in one movement, and set the glass back down.
The woman’s smile tilted, reading my expression with the accurate instinct of someone practiced at this—and she looked away, correctly, toward easier ground.
I stared at the bar.
Someone who lacks emotions.
Matvey had said it like a compliment. Like a qualification. Like the thing that made me the right tool for the job.
I pressed my knuckle against the bar’s edge until I felt the pressure of it, which was the closest I came to centering techniques, and I thought about the folder and the mission and Tomas Alvarez and everything that needed to happen in the correct order for this investigation to produce the truth that Matvey needed.
The access point. That’s what she was. A means, not an end. A door I needed to walk through to get to what was on the other side.
She was not a brown-eyed problem I’d developed in the span of four minutes and two days of self-enforced isolation.
She was not the reason I was sitting at a bar, unable to redirect my attention toward a perfectly suitable alternative.
She was absolutely not the reason I was about to order another vodka and go home alone for the third night in a row.
I ordered another vodka.
The bartender didn’t comment. Barmen at Volkov never commented. Another thing I’d always appreciated about this place—the specific, practiced indifference of people who had seen enough that nothing qualified as remarkable anymore.
I drank it.
Sat with the empty glass.
And accepted, with the cold, clear precision of a man who had been honest with himself about difficult things for four decades and wasn’t going to stop now—
That the interference had not been removed.
That it was, if anything, louder in a crowded room than it had been in the quiet of my apartment.
That Matvey Kamarov, who saw everything and planned accordingly, had sent me to a fundraiser with a photograph of a girl not looking at the camera and a directive to get close to her.
And had known, with the certainty of a man who had been running the most feared criminal organization in Chicago for twenty years, exactly what would happen if I did.
I didn’t know yet whether that made me a fool or a weapon.
I suspected, sitting in the noise and smoke of Volkov with an empty glass and a chest full of something I couldn’t name, it made me both.