Chapter 14 – Gregory #2
Behind him: two men I recognized from Tomas Alvarez’s personal security detail.
Not Bratva. Ex-military turned private, by the way they analyzed me and the room simultaneously in the first half-second, cataloging threat and exit and the distance between themselves and everything else with the automatic efficiency of men for whom that kind of assessment had become involuntary.
They were good. I noted that they were good and filed it.
And behind them, at the back of the corridor in the shadow between two wall sconces, Tomas Alvarez himself.
Six feet of gold-tan skin and silver-templed hair and a jaw set so hard it looked architectural.
Dark suit, cufflinks in place, every surface of him polished and precise in the way that very controlled men were precise when they were working very hard to remain so.
He was looking at me with the expression of a man who had arrived at a conclusion he didn’t want and was holding it in both hands until someone told him he was wrong.
The suit was immaculate. His eyes were not.
Yegor spoke first.
“You want to tell me,” he said, with the quietness that in Yegor replaced volume entirely and was therefore more effective than volume, “why you were seen leaving Sofia’s building six days ago at six in the morning.”
The guilt arrived before I could manage it.
Not the slow kind—not the kind that crept in from the edges and could be addressed methodically, filed away, reasoned with.
The immediate kind. The kind that closed around the throat in the half-second before the rational mind could intervene, because yes.
I’d been there. I’d been in her building, in her apartment, in the specific warmth of her bed in the hour before dawn, and I’d left without answering the thing she hadn’t quite asked because I’d told myself that leaving was the responsible choice.
The right choice. The choice that kept the distance intact and the mission clean, and Sofia at a radius where she couldn’t be used against me.
All of that was true. All of it sat in my chest right now like a stone.
I didn’t look away from Yegor. I swallowed the guilt and filed it away for later examination.
“What happened?” I said.
Not his question. Mine.
Yegor’s jaw tightened. A fraction—barely visible, the kind of movement only readable on a face you knew well. Behind him, the two security men had shifted their weight in the subtle coordinated way of men receiving a silent cue from the person behind them.
And Tomas, at the back of the corridor, had moved forward.
One step. Just enough to make himself present in a way that changed the geometry of the hallway, that communicated with the specific eloquence of a large, controlled man finally closing distance, so that the polished exterior was a door, and whatever was behind it had stopped being patient some time ago.
“Answer me first,” Yegor said.
“No.” The word came out flat and absolute, without heat, the kind of no that was not a position being defended but a fact being stated. “Tell me what happened to her. Then I’ll answer every question you have. Every single one. You have my word on that. But tell me what happened first.”
Silence. The particular silence of three men deciding whether to push past it.
Then Tomas spoke.
“She didn’t come home.” His voice was controlled. Every syllable was measured and placed with the care of a man applying direct pressure to something that would otherwise come apart. “Her car was found on Meridian. Driver’s side impact. She wasn’t in it.”
The cold moved through my chest and kept moving.
I stood very still.
“How long?” I said.
“Six days ago.” Yegor this time. Flat in a way that told me what it was costing him to keep it flat—Sofia was Camila’s sister, and Yegor’s relationship to warmth was limited and specific, and Camila sat at the center of it, which meant anything that had happened to Sofia had been sitting inside him for six days like something he couldn’t put down.
“She was due at the hospital at nine in the morning. She didn’t arrive.
Police found nothing in the car. No sign of where she went.
Like she was there and then she wasn’t.”
Nico.
The cold in my chest became something else. Something that didn’t have a clean name because it was assembled from too many things at once—fury and guilt and the specific brutal clarity of a mistake laid out in its full dimensions without mercy or softening.
She had been alone because I’d left. She had been reachable because I’d decided the distance was good, was necessary, was a gift I was giving her.
And Nico Calderon, who had watched his operation get taken apart piece by piece in the dark and had known—or suspected, or been told—that someone had been watching, had decided at some point to find the thread that led back to the person watching.
The thread that led to me had only one face.
None of that reached my expression.
I’d spent a long time learning to keep things out of my face, and I used every year of that now.
“Come in,” I said.
“Gregory.” Tomas’s voice had an edge under the control now—the sound of a man who had been holding something together through will alone for seven days and was beginning to calculate how much longer he could. “I need to understand what you were doing in her building. I need to know if you—”
“We’re not doing this here,” I said. Quiet.
Even. The voice I used when the situation required a particular quality of certainty—not loudness, not force, but the specific register that communicated that the thing being said was not a position available for negotiation.
“We’re not doing it in my corridor, and we’re not doing it in my apartment, and we’re not doing it without Matvey in the room.
” I looked at him steadily. “Get your men back in the elevator. We’re going to Matvey. ”
Tomas looked at me.
“Now,” I said.