Chapter 8 – Gregory
I watched Tomas Alvarez move product through channels that didn’t exist on paper, using a fleet of trucks that left his facility with full manifests and arrived at their destinations with empty ones, through a network of handoffs so carefully constructed that, if you looked at only one piece of it, you saw nothing.
You had to look at all of it simultaneously, hold the whole structure in your mind at once, to understand what you were actually seeing.
I was good at holding things in my mind.
I was less good, it turned out, at holding only the things that were relevant to the mission.
The evidence was clean. There was actual confirmation of Tomas’s trucks, his routes, and his people making drops at locations that fed directly into the supply chains of three separate factions operating against the Bratva within Chicago.
The financial routing Kirill had flagged at the beginning had found its physical expression in delivery schedules and handoff points and a pattern of movement so deliberate it could only have been designed by someone who understood exactly what they were doing and why.
It was damning.
It was, by every professional measure, exactly what a successfully executed covert mission looked like from the inside—three weeks of careful observation condensed into a body of evidence that would give Matvey everything he needed to make a decision.
And then I’d seen Sofia at the loading bay.
It was a Tuesday afternoon, overcast, the lake wind doing its usual indifferent damage to the temperature.
I’d been parked two streets back with a direct sightline to the facility entrance—one of several observation positions I rotated through on a schedule designed to avoid pattern recognition from anyone watching for surveillance.
She had walked out of the main building at 2:47 in the afternoon with a clipboard like she was conducting a routine check, and the sight of her had hit me in the chest like a stab to the heart.
I’d watched her move through the loading bay—checking logs, examining camera angles, stopping to ask questions of workers who shifted their weight when she approached, which was a tell if you knew how to read it.
She was investigating.
That was the first thing I understood, watching her from two hundred meters away, with everything I’d spent three weeks learning sitting in my chest like a verdict.
The second thing I understood arrived immediately after, colder and considerably more complicated.
She was investigating the same operation I was. Which meant one of two things. Either Tomas had sent her—his own daughter, his own operation’s logistics manager—to audit the very activity he was conducting, as a kind of internal cover maintenance. Or she had found something on her own.
I knew that by the time I walked into the club that evening, because the anger that had been my companion for the past three weeks had shifted into something with different edges. Something sharper and less clean.
She was already at the bar when I spotted her—half-turned on her stool, one hand around a glass of something clear, staring at the middle distance with the particular expression of a woman working through something in her head that she hadn’t resolved yet.
Her hair was loose. The cross pendant at her throat caught the light.
She registered my presence with a slight stiffening of her posture, a fractional sharpening of her expression, like she had a Gregory Kamarov early warning system that she’d developed and deeply resented.
“You look tired,” I said as I sat down on the stool beside her.
The look she gave me could have cured concrete.
“You look like someone I don’t want to talk to,” she said.
“And yet here we both are.” Then: “Hard week?” I kept my voice easy. Light. The register of a man making casual conversation and not trying to read anything off her response.
“I’m not doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Whatever this is.” She gestured between us with two fingers in a small, precise movement. “The showing up, the—whatever expression that is on your face right now, all of it.”
“I’m just sitting here.”
“You’re never just sitting anywhere, Gregory.”
“Busy lately? At work?”
Her head turned slightly. Not looking at me fully—a fraction of a turn, the involuntary attention of someone who has heard something in a tone that didn’t match the words.
“Why?”
“Curious.”
“You’re not curious about people, Gregory.
You’re suspicious of them.” She did look at me then, and those dark eyes were doing the assessment thing, running the rapid evaluation of someone who had spent four years in medicine learning to determine what the actual problem was underneath the presenting complaint. “What are you actually asking?”
“Well?” she said.
Her eyes were dark and entirely steady and about eight inches from mine, and I was acutely aware of every individual detail of her—the slight elevation in her breathing, the set of her jaw, the way her pupils had done the thing I’d noticed before, that fractional widening that had nothing to do with the lighting and everything to do with proximity and the current that moved between us with the reliability of something that had been established and couldn’t be unestablished.
I saw it.
She knew I saw it.
Neither of us addressed it, because addressing it would have required stopping, and the momentum of the moment had its own logic that neither of us was quite managing to override.
“You’re not going to answer me,” she said, and her voice had dropped slightly, the anger underneath it mixing with something else that made it more complicated and considerably more difficult to maintain professional distance from.
“You’re not going to like the answer.”
“I don’t like most things you say. I survive.”
I reached out and caught her wrist when she turned to leave.
The touch was immediate and reflexive—not planned, not strategic, just the instinct of a man who had decided he wasn’t done with this conversation and whose hand had acted on that decision before his judgment could weigh in.
Her wrist was warm. Small in my grip, though I held it loosely enough that the only thing keeping her there was the same thing that had been keeping her in every conversation we’d had—her own decision to stay.
She stopped.
Looked down at my hand around her wrist.
I kissed her.
It was full of buried anger at the sight of her at the loading bay with her clipboard and the way she looked at me with those completely honest eyes and said, Ask directly, like she had no idea that direct was exactly what I couldn’t afford to be.
She kissed me back, and for approximately fifteen seconds, the mission and the folder and Tomas Alvarez’s name were all somewhere else entirely.
Then I pulled back.
She stared at me, breathing slightly elevated. Eyes bright. The composure partially reassembled, but not all the way there yet, which was the version of her I found the most—
I stopped that thought.
“If all this is about scratching the itch,” she said, and her voice was controlled and even and carrying something underneath it that I recognized because I’d put it there once before and was apparently doing it again, “then we shouldn’t meet again.”
The words were quiet. Final-sounding. The voice of a woman drawing a line and meaning it.
I said nothing.
She picked up her bag. Smoothed the front of her sweater with one hand, and then she walked away from the bar without looking back, and I sat there and watched her go and said nothing, because nothing I could say in that moment was honest, and I’d apparently reached some threshold below which I was unwilling to lie to her directly.
That threshold was new.
I didn’t examine it.
I ordered a drink. Sat with it. Ran through the practical architecture of what came next—the mission, the decision I’d arrived at, the thing I’d been moving toward since the loading bay and had now committed to fully by sitting down on this stool and opening this conversation.
Get close to Sofia.
Use the access.
Get the evidence that confirmed or denied what I thought I knew.
Report to Matvey.
Clean. Linear. Mission-shaped.
I’d been here before—at the edge of using someone, looking at the cost of it with clear eyes and proceeding because the mission required it and the mission was what I was. I’d done it without flinching. I was not a man who flinched at the requirements of the work.
I picked up the glass.
Set it down without drinking and walked to the exit with the mission in my head and her name underneath it.
Use her.
Get close.
Get the evidence.
I pushed through the door, and the Chicago night received me, cold and indifferent and entirely unsympathetic, and I walked to my car with the weight of three weeks of evidence and one relief I hadn’t asked for and couldn’t seem to put down.
The story I was telling myself—the one where this was just a mission, just access, just the professional proximity required to do a job I’d been assigned by a man I’d never refused—was getting harder to tell.
I drove anyway.