Chapter 10 – Gregory
I’d been parked on the service road adjacent to the industrial district for three hours when the first one appeared—a standard freight truck, Alvarez Logistics stenciled on the side in clean white lettering, rolling through the gate of a storage facility that had no publicly registered tenants and no posted business hours.
I watched through the windshield with my engine off and my coffee going cold in the cup-holder and documented everything: arrival time, plate number, the two men who appeared from inside to meet the driver, the duration of the unloading.
Forty-seven minutes. Four crates. The second truck arrived twenty minutes after the first had left.
I’d seen enough by midnight to know that whatever was moving through this facility was substantial, regular, and completely invisible on the Alvarez books.
Which meant one of two things: Either Tomas was running a ghost operation sophisticated enough to fool his own daughter, or someone had built an entire shadow network inside his company without his knowledge.
I’d been operating on the first assumption for weeks. Sitting in the dark of that service road, watching the second truck back slowly into the loading bay, I started to feel the first real pull toward the second.
Then I saw where the trucks went when they left.
I followed the second vehicle at a careful distance—three cars back, lights off when the road was empty enough to risk it—and watched it navigate east through the city before turning into a district I recognized immediately.
Not because I had business there. Because I’d been watching the man whose name kept appearing in Matvey’s intelligence reports about Chicago’s political infrastructure, and this particular cluster of streets belonged, informally but unmistakably, to Maverick Wiese.
The truck didn’t stop at Maverick’s address.
It turned two blocks short and disappeared into an underground parking structure attached to a glass-and-steel office building that I’d no prior file on.
I drove past slowly, noted the building’s address, and kept moving.
Then I pulled over three blocks away and ran the address through the comm.
Kirill came back to me in under four minutes.
The building’s primary tenant was a consulting firm registered eighteen months ago. Shell company—clean on the surface, nothing underneath except the name of a holding entity that traced back, through three layers of incorporation, to Nico Calderon.
I sat with that for a moment. Then I picked up my phone and typed the address into the maps application and looked at the distance between this building and the storage facility. Eleven minutes by car. Close enough to be deliberate. Far enough apart to avoid obvious connection.
Nico Calderon. Maverick’s stepson. The man I’d watched Tomas try to push onto Sofia at the fundraiser.
Nico had access to Maverick’s political infrastructure and Maverick’s protection.
He needed a logistics network he could use without a paper trail.
Tomas Alvarez had one of the most established freight operations in Chicago.
A marriage between Nico and Sofia would have given Nico exactly that—access to the Alvarez name, the Alvarez network, and the Alvarez cover.
I almost reached for my phone to call Matvey. My hand was already moving toward it, then the front doors of the building opened, and Sofia walked out.
She moved the way she always moved when something had gotten under her skin—quick, purposeful, spine straight, jaw set—but there was something different underneath it. She was shaking. My first thought arrived before I could stop it, and it was ugly.
I thought, She was upstairs with him.
The thought hit me somewhere low and unreasonable, and I hated myself immediately for having it, and hated it even more because it didn’t leave.
It sat there in my chest and pressed. She had come out of Nico Calderon’s building, composed on the surface and fracturing underneath it, and my brain had assembled the most obvious explanation and handed it to me like a verdict.
My jaw tightened so hard it hurt.
Then the doors opened again.
Nico came out two seconds behind her. He wasn’t running, but he was moving with intent, closing the distance between them in long strides, calling her name.
“Sofia.”
She didn’t slow down.
I watched my knuckles go white around the steering wheel. I didn’t notice when I’d gripped it again, but there it was—both hands locked around the wheel, my body doing its own damage assessment while my mind tried to catch up with what I was actually seeing.
He caught her at the bottom of the steps.
His hand closed around her upper arm and he turned her, and I watched the moment she stopped—not because she wanted to, but because the grip was firm enough that stopping was easier than fighting it in public—and I watched her face go through something I recognized even from this distance.
My hand was on the door handle.
I didn’t open it.
I made myself not open it, which was one of the harder things I’d done recently, and I’d recently done several hard things.
Blowing my cover to break Nico Calderon’s grip on a woman he had no right to touch was not a calculated decision—it was an impulse, and I’d spent forty years learning that impulses in operational contexts got people killed.
The mission existed. My cover existed. The careful architecture of weeks of surveillance would collapse the moment I stepped out of this car and made myself visible.
I stayed where I was.
I watched Sofia look down at Nico’s hand on her arm.
Then she looked up at his face. Then she said something—I was too far to hear the words, but the posture was unmistakable—and she removed his hand from her arm with a look of disgust. She looked at him for one final moment with an expression that I would have described, if I was pressed, as I already know everything you’re about to say, and I’ve decided none of it is worth my time.
Then she turned and walked to her car.
Nico stood at the bottom of the steps and watched her go. His face did something complicated—something that moved through surprise and calculation and landed, finally, on a kind of cold, assessing stillness.
Whatever Sofia had done in that building, it had pissed him off.
The thought of what that meant for her made the back of my neck go tight.
***
She drove badly.
Not dangerously—she wasn’t reckless, and even in whatever state she was currently in, Sofia had too much control for that—but she drove like her body was managing the road while their mind was somewhere else entirely.
A little too fast through the yellow lights.
A lane change with slightly less buffer than usual. I kept three cars back and watched.
She took the route to her apartment—familiar by now, I’d driven it enough in my own mind to know each turn before she made it—and I tracked her through the night streets of Chicago while the city settled around us into its late-hour quiet. Fewer headlights. More empty intersections.
The particular quality of silence that a city got after midnight when the bars had thinned and the last trains had run.
I told myself I was following her for operational reasons. That she had just come out of Nico Calderon’s building, and Nico was now the primary person of interest, and it was entirely logical to track his known contacts when there was new information to gather.
I was lying to myself, and I knew it.
I followed her because I’d watched Nico’s hand on her arm, and something in me had gone very still and very cold in the way it only went when someone had touched something that I’d, without meaning to and entirely against my own better judgment, started to think of as mine.
She reached her building safely. Pulled into the underground garage.
I parked on the street across from the entrance and watched the lights come on in her apartment—third floor, corner unit, the window that faced south.
I’d noted which one was hers a while ago.
I told myself that was surveillance. I was aware of what it actually was.
I sat in the car.
A man like Nico didn’t recalibrate passively.
He had just been confronted—I was certain of that now, the more I turned it over—by a twenty-two-year-old woman who had apparently walked into his building with evidence and told him, to his face, to stop.
That kind of confrontation, from someone he would have underestimated, wouldn’t sit comfortably. It would require a response.
And Sofia had no idea what kind of response men like Nico were capable of.
I got out of the car.
I didn’t give myself time to talk myself out of it.
I’d tried that once before—had sat in a car outside her building giving myself reasons to leave—and I’d learned that the reasons didn’t hold, and the only thing worse than acting on an impulse was sitting in a car arguing with yourself about it for twenty minutes first. I crossed the street, went through the lobby with a nod to the security desk that said I belong here clearly enough that no one questioned it, and took the elevator to the third floor.
I stood outside her door for a moment. The hallway was quiet.
Through the door, I could hear nothing—no movement, no voice, just the particular absence of sound that meant she was somewhere inside, probably still in her coat, probably still in whatever state she had been in when she left that building.
Then I rang the doorbell.