Chapter 15 – Sofia
The light never changed.
That was the thing that unraveled me before anything else did.
There were no windows in the room they kept me in—just a single bulb screwed into the ceiling that cast everything in the same flat yellow, indifferent to hour, indifferent to whether it was morning or the middle of the night or something in between.
I’d tried to count the times they brought food to orient myself, but the intervals were irregular in a way that felt deliberate, as if someone had decided that if I couldn’t track time, I couldn’t track anything else either.
After what I estimated was the third day, I stopped trying.
The counting only made the disorientation worse.
The nausea had started sometime after that.
I’d attributed it initially to the food—whatever they slid through the gap under the door arrived in sealed containers, but sealed didn’t mean good, and I’d eaten it anyway because the alternative was refusing and I needed to be lucid.
But the nausea persisted past what bad food would explain, arriving in waves that seemed tied to nothing external—rolling up through my stomach at random intervals, cresting, subsiding, leaving me acutely aware of every sensation in my body.
At some point—day four, I thought, though I’d stopped trusting my estimates—Nico came down.
I heard him before I saw him: the sound of a bolt sliding, then the specific quality of light that changed when a door opened onto a lit corridor, a bar of warmer brightness falling across the floor for the two seconds it took him to enter and pull the door shut behind him.
He had a bottle of water in one hand, which he set on the floor a few feet from me with the particular care of a man performing a gesture he wanted credited as generosity.
I looked at the water and didn’t move toward it.
He stood there for a moment, and in the flat light of the bulb I could see him clearly—suit jacket gone, shirt untucked at the hem, a tiredness around his eyes that he was managing but not hiding.
“You should drink,” he said. His voice was even. Not cruel, not particularly warm. The voice of a man who considered himself reasonable.
“I’m fine,” I said.
The words came out steadier than I felt, which I was grateful for. I’d made a decision somewhere during the long, lightless hours before his arrival—that I wouldn’t perform fear for him. Anger, I’d in quantity. Disgust, even more. Those I was willing to show.
He studied me for a moment with an expression I couldn’t fully read, then pulled the other folding chair from the corner and set it across from mine with the unhurried movements of a man who had all the time he required. He sat. He looked at me.
“You disrupted something that took years to build,” he said.
Not an accusation—a statement offered as context, as if he wanted me to understand the scale of what I’d stumbled into before he explained the rest. “The routing, the contacts, the cover—all of it calibrated over time to be invisible. And then you went looking at truck manifests.”
I held his gaze. “Someone had to.”
Something moved across his face—not anger, something sharper.
Closer to frustration. “Your father’s logistics company was the cleanest cover in the city.
Clean name, established routes, workers who kept their heads down.
We didn’t touch his accounts, didn’t redirect his revenue.
We only used the infrastructure and left the business intact.
” He paused. “You weren’t supposed to be in the business at all. ”
“That’s a very specific complaint,” I said, “from someone who planted moles inside my family’s company.”
“They were already there,” he said, with a tone that suggested it mattered to him. “The workers I approached were already frustrated, already looking for supplemental income. I gave them a use.”
“What the fuck do you want?” I asked.
He turned the water bottle in his hands once, a slow rotation, then set it on the floor.
“I want the investigation to stop. I want the documentation you removed from my office to be unverifiable—which means I need to know where you stored it, who you shared it with, and whether your father has seen it yet.”
“My father was in Europe,” I said.
“Was,” he said. “He landed yesterday.”
Something moved in my chest—relief and fear arriving simultaneously, tangled together.
My father was back. My father was back, and I was not at the airport, and my phone was dead, and he would know something was wrong within hours, if he didn’t already.
I kept my breathing even, held Nico’s gaze, and gave him nothing.
“Then he’ll find it himself,” I said. “He knows his own company.”
Nico’s jaw shifted. “Sofia—”
“You said you wanted loyalty or silence forever.” I met his eyes. “I’m telling you which one you’re getting.”
The silence that followed was not comfortable.
He looked at me with something that in another context might have been close to respect, but in this context was something colder—the reassessment of an obstacle that had been underestimated.
He stood, picked up the water bottle from the floor, and set it directly in front of my chair instead.
“Drink the water,” he said. “It’s not charity. I need you alive.”
He left. The bolt slid home.
I waited until I was certain he wasn’t coming back, then picked up the water bottle and drank half of it in one long pull, because I did need to live, and spite was only useful when it didn’t actively damage me.
The nausea came again. I pressed the cold plastic of the bottle against my forehead and breathed.
On what I believed was the fifth day—though the certainty had become more architecture than fact, a structure I was maintaining through will rather than evidence—Maverick came instead of Nico.
“My son tells me you’re being difficult,” he said.
“Your son told you correctly.”
He stepped into the room and pulled the door shut behind him with a care that was somehow worse than if he had slammed it.
“You’re smarter than I expected,” he said.
“Tomas’s daughters are decorative, typically.
Camila has ambition, but it’s channeled into appropriate things.
You were supposed to be similar.” He paused.
“Instead, you went looking where you shouldn’t have gone and created a problem for people who do not have patience for problems.”
“Funny,” I said. “From where I’m sitting, you’re the one with the problem.”
“Your father will negotiate,” he said. “He’s a businessman. Businessmen understand that some situations require concession.”
“My father will go to the Bratva.”
It came out before I’d fully decided to say it, and the moment it landed in the room, I watched Maverick’s expression shift.
He stood very still for a moment, then he turned and left, and this time the click of the bolt felt different—less like containment, more like retreat, and I sat in the flat yellow light and felt something that was not triumph because it was too fragile for that, but was adjacent to it.
A small, cold satisfaction. Proof that I still had tools, even in this room.
Then the nausea came back, harder than before, and I grabbed the paper bag from the floor beside my chair and pressed it to my mouth, and the satisfaction dissolved into the miserable, grounding reality of my own body insisting on being attended to.
I had to get out of this room. That was the only thought that mattered.
***
On what might have been the sixth day, Nico came back alone and pulled his chair close enough that the distance between us was no longer safe. He sat with his elbows on his knees and looked at me with a neutral expression.
“Gregory Kamarov,” he said.
The name hit me the way he intended it to—a stone dropped into still water, and the ripples were immediate and visible no matter how much I tried to still the surface. I kept my face even. I looked back at him and said nothing.
“You know who he is,” Nico said. “He was watching your building, Sofia. He was watching you. Getting close to you was part of the operation.”
I breathed. In and out. Slow and deliberate.
“Everything he did,” Nico said, with a patience that suggested he was enjoying the delivery, “Every time he showed up, every conversation—it was all planned. You were the route to your father. A good fuck attached to a useful name.” He sat back.
“He reported to Matvey Kamarov. His pakhan. The man who gave him the mission. And the mission was not you, Sofia—the mission was the family you belong to.”
The silence in the room was not comfortable. It was the silence of something being dismantled.
“I don’t believe a word you say,” I told him. My voice was steady. I was proud of that.
“I know,” he said. “But that doesn’t make it any less true.”
I pressed my hand flat against my abdomen. It was an unconscious gesture—I noticed it only after it had already happened—and I didn’t move my hand away.
I was furious at Gregory because I’d opened a door I’d kept locked my entire life, and I’d done it for a man who had been assembling a case against my family from the other side of it.
Everything he had given me, he had given with a hand that was also taking something away.
I’d known he was dangerous—I’d told myself I knew—but I’d thought the danger was the obvious kind. I hadn’t thought to look for this one.
I breathed. I counted my own heartbeat—steady, present, insistently alive.
Then I straightened my spine against the cold wall, lifted my chin in a room where no one could see me do it, and waited.