Chapter 7 – Sofia
I threw myself into work the way I always did when something inside me needed to be ignored directly.
It was a coping mechanism I’d developed young. All of it became manageable when there was something concrete in front of me that needed solving. Something I could fix. Something where the answer existed and was simply waiting to be found by someone willing to look carefully enough.
Medicine had been that. Numbers had been that. The logistics and inventory work I’d inherited from Camila after her marriage had been, at minimum, that.
Gregory Kamarov’s voice saying, We scratched an itch; move on with your life, and then closing the door on his way out of my apartment—
That wasn’t something I could look at directly, so I worked.
***
Since Camila had married Yegor and stepped into a different version of herself—wife, mother, daughter-in-law of a world that had its own requirements—the operational side of our father’s business had quietly, steadily redistributed in my direction.
Not formally. Tomas Alvarez didn’t do things formally when informal was more efficient.
He simply began copying me on emails, forwarding me reports, asking me to take a look at things, knowing very well that I wouldn’t object.
Camila still came to work. But the day-to-day—the inventory, the logistics, the movement of goods through the layers of Alvarez Holdings’s import and distribution network—that had become mine.
I was good at it, which I resented and leaned into simultaneously.
The audit was routine.
That was the thing I kept coming back to in the days that followed, the detail that made the whole thing more unsettling rather than less.
It was the quarterly reconciliation I ran every three months, with the same attention I brought to everything, cross-referencing inventory movement against GPS data, delivery logs, and the sign-off sheets from receiving warehouses.
Routine.
And the trucks weren’t there.
Three of them. Flagged in the system as dispatched, logged out of the central facility, and then—nothing. No GPS trail. No delivery confirmation. No sign-off or return record.
As if they had driven out of the facility and evaporated somewhere between the loading bay and wherever they were supposed to be going.
I stared at the screen for a long moment, running the same cross-reference twice, then a third time, because the first assumption in any data discrepancy is input error, and I always checked my assumptions before acting on them.
The trucks were still missing after the third run.
I pushed back from the desk and went to make coffee, because I needed a minute that wasn’t in front of a screen, and because I had a feeling I was about to find something I wasn’t going to like.
I called the warehouse supervisor from my office with the door closed.
His name was Ruiz. He’d been with the company for eleven years, competent in an unremarkable way. I had no particular feeling about him before this call.
By the end of it, I had several.
“The trucks—”
“Yes, I saw the report, Miss Alvarez.” Too quickly. The answer was already assembled before I’d finished the question, which meant he’d been expecting the question. “It’s a system issue. We’ve had some GPS syncing problems with the fleet management software—”
“The GPS syncing issue would show incomplete data,” I said, keeping my voice easy, clinical. “Not zero data. These trucks have no trail at all from the moment they leave the lot.”
A pause. One beat too long.
“Like I said, it’s a—”
“Who signed off on the departures?”
Another pause. “I’d have to check—”
“You’re looking at the same system I am, Ruiz. The sign-offs are right there. I’m asking you to confirm them.”
He confirmed them. Three names I didn’t recognize from the regular driver manifest. Every answer created two new questions. By the time I ended the call, the cold feeling in my chest had sharpened into something considerably more focused.
I spoke to all three drivers individually, spacing the conversations across an afternoon, keeping my tone light and my questions embedded in the ordinary administrative language of a routine audit.
They gave me answers.
The answers were wrong.
Not obvious lies, they’d been prepared and rehearsed well enough that the performance was technically adequate.
Someone had coached them. Someone with access to enough of the operation to understand what a plausible cover story needed to address, and enough leverage over these three specific workers to make them go along with it without visible reluctance.
I went to my father after, framing it as a logistics concern, keeping my tone dry, almost clinical, the language of inventory and risk assessment doing the work for me while I left the implications deliberately unsaid.
He listened.
That was the first thing that caught me: He listened with his full attention, which my father gave to things he considered significant, and the fact that he considered this significant from the first two sentences meant he had already sensed something was wrong before I told him.
“Off-record deliveries,” he said. Quiet. Very still.
“The data points that way, yes.”
He looked at me across his desk with those deep hazel eyes that gave nothing away on the surface but were running something behind them—the five-moves-ahead calculation that was as natural to him as breathing. “I don’t know anything about off-record deliveries, mija.”
I studied his face.
He was not lying.
My father was not a man who got blindsided.
And he was blindsided.
That scared me more than anything the data had shown me.
I left his office and stood in the hallway for a moment with my back against the wall and the clipboard against my chest, and I thought: if someone is using our operation without my father’s knowledge, then someone has access that they shouldn’t have.
Access deep enough, sustained enough, and careful enough that it had gone undetected for at least three weeks and possibly longer.
And if the trucks were carrying what the industrial destination near Maverick’s territory suggested they might be carrying—
I pushed off the wall and went back to my office.
***
It took me four days.
Four days of staying late, of cross-referencing shipping schedules against GPS blackout windows against the shift rotation patterns of the three workers, of building the picture piece by piece, the way you built a differential diagnosis—ruling out, narrowing down, following the evidence where it pointed, even when it pointed somewhere uncomfortable.
The dashboard was where I finally found it.
Not the main system—the logistics dashboard had a secondary layer—a debugging interface that I’d accessed months ago while troubleshooting a syncing issue and had never had occasion to return to. It retained cached receipt data that bypassed the primary record-keeping.
The receipts were there.
An industrial facility. East side of Chicago, in the territory that abutted Maverick Wiese’s known operational area.
A location that appeared nowhere in Alvarez Holdings’s vendor database, had no relationship to any of our legitimate distribution networks, and had received deliveries from our fleet—three confirmed, possibly more—over the past month.
Our trucks.
Someone else’s deliveries.
Maverick’s territory.
I thought about the fundraiser. About Maverick’s calibrated smile and my father’s hand at my back and Nico standing beside his stepfather with those watchful dark eyes that gave nothing away and never stopped recording.
I thought about how neatly our names would appear in any investigation of those trucks. Then I shut down my computer, gathered my things, and went to find my sister.
***
The club was its usual loud self—that particular late-night energy of a space that existed outside the ordinary rules of the city, the bass in the floors and the smoke in the air and the presence of men who occupied rooms differently than other men, who carried a specific gravity that had nothing to do with size and everything to do with what they were capable of and didn’t need to announce.
Camila listened without interrupting, not reassuring before she understood, just present and focused and giving me the full weight of her attention while I laid out the missing trucks, receipts, the industrial location, and our father’s genuine, unsettling confusion.
When I finished, she was quiet for a moment.
“You think someone’s using our trucks to move weapons,” she said. Not a question.
“I think someone is using our trucks to move something they don’t want traced to themselves,” I said. “And they’ve structured it so that if anyone finds the trail, the trail leads to us.”
Camila’s jaw tightened. A small movement, controlled, but I knew her face the way I knew my own.
“Papá doesn’t know.”
“Papá doesn’t know,” I confirmed.
She reached across the table and covered my hand briefly—the same gesture she’d always used when something mattered, and words weren’t quite enough—and then she sat back and looked at me with a sharp, but worried expression on her face.
“Be careful,” she said. “Who you talk to. What you document. How visible you make yourself in this.”
I knew what she meant. I knew the architecture she was describing—the danger of being the person who sees too much before the right people know you’ve seen it.
“I know,” I said.
We sat with it for a while, the club loud around us, the conversation contained in the noise.
When I finally stood to leave—jacket on, bag on my shoulder, the weight of everything I knew and didn’t know settling into its familiar position behind my sternum—I moved through the crowd toward the exit, and something made me look up.
Gregory was across the room.
He was standing near the far wall—not lounging, not restless, just present with his eyes on me.
They had been on me before I looked up. I understood that immediately.
He wasn’t coming over.
He wasn’t looking away either.
Just watching me with that cold blue gaze that did the thing it always did—that complete, focused attention that made the rest of the room go slightly out of focus, as if the space between us had its own quality distinct from everything around it.
I looked at him for exactly three seconds, then I walked to the door, letting the cold air hit me like the correction it was.
As I walked to my car with the folder of receipts in my bag and the weight of four days of careful, methodical discovery behind my eyes, I thought about patterns and trails and the specific danger of seeing things before you understand what they mean.
I thought about a man across the room who watched me like he wanted to say something.
And couldn’t.
Or wouldn’t.
I still didn’t know which it was.
I wasn’t sure which answer was worse.