Chapter 16 – Gregory
The first man who put his hands on me lasted approximately four seconds.
He came in fast—Tomas’s security, the broader of the two who had been stationed in my corridor an hour ago—grabbing my collar with both hands, and I broke his grip at the wrists, turned into his momentum, and had him face-first against my kitchen wall before his partner had fully registered that it was happening.
The second one moved in from the left, and I caught his forearm mid-swing, redirected, and put my elbow into his ribs with enough force to drop him onto one knee.
He didn’t stay there.
He came back up with a straight punch that clipped my jaw, and I tasted the familiar copper of split skin but didn’t stop moving.
We went into the kitchen island together, something ceramic shattering off the counter, and I got my arm around his throat from behind and held until his legs stopped working and lowered him to the floor with the particular care of a man who wants the other man unconscious and not dead.
The first one had peeled himself off the wall.
He had a knife now—a boot knife, short and practical—and he came in low with it, which told me he actually knew what he was doing, and that this was going to take longer than I wanted.
I took the cut across my forearm to get inside his reach, felt the sting of it as distant information, got the knife hand, broke his grip on it, and we traded three blows in close quarters that left us both bleeding and breathing harder than either of us would have preferred.
A fourth man came through my door. Then a fifth.
“Enough.”
Yegor’s voice. Yegor himself was a half-step behind it, filling the doorframe with the specific quality of stillness that very large men with very long memories projected when they had decided a situation was going to stop.
The men around me stopped. Even the one with the bleeding nose stopped, which said something about Yegor’s reputation that I filed away for a less urgent moment.
“Everyone, stand down,” Yegor said. Not loudly. He didn’t need to say it loudly.
I straightened. My forearm was bleeding steadily onto my kitchen floor. I noted this without particular feeling.
Tomas Alvarez had come in behind Yegor’s men, and he was standing near the door with his arms crossed and his face doing the thing it did when he had already reached a verdict and was performing the courtesy of appearing to weigh evidence.
He looked at the two men on the floor and then at me.
“Talk,” he said.
“There’s a chain,” I said. “Maverick to Nico to people inside your organization. The arms routes—the ones running through the eastern corridors that your ledgers don’t account for—they’re not Bratva.
They were never Bratva. Nico has been using corrupted members of your staff to run them and build a case that points back to us. To you.”
Tomas’s expression didn’t change. That was its own kind of information.
“That’s a significant claim,” he said.
“I know what it is.”
“You’re standing in your kitchen with two of my men on the floor—”
“Your men put their hands on me first,” I said. “I have a great deal more patience for this conversation than I just demonstrated. I need you to listen to me.”
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. The silence had the particular texture of a room full of armed men deciding collectively what to do next, which was one of the more dangerous silences there was.
“Matvey knows everything,” I said.
The room changed.
It wasn’t loud, the change—no one shouted, no one raised a weapon. It was quieter than that and therefore more significant. Every man in the room recalibrated in the space of a breath, the way men recalibrated when a name landed that rearranged the hierarchy of the situation.
Tomas looked at me for a long moment.
“Then we go to Matvey,” he said.
Matvey was in his office. Of course, he was—it was close to midnight and Matvey’s relationship with standard hours had always been largely theoretical.
He was at his desk with a glass of water and a folder open in front of him, and when we came through the door, he looked at Tomas Alvarez and then at me, and the shift in his expression was minute and deliberate, communicating a great deal in a very small space.
He closed the folder.
“Sit,” he said to Tomas. The allocation of the chair offered to Tomas, the rest of us standing, communicated hierarchy with the efficiency of a single syllable, and Tomas received it and sat with utmost composure.
I stood to Matvey’s left, and I told it. All of it.
The mission as it had been assigned—Tomas Alvarez suspected of arming rivals, investigate, gather evidence, do not engage—and then what the evidence had actually produced as I collected it.
The trucks running routes I hadn’t been able to explain at first. The endpoints resolving into Nico’s territory.
The pattern becoming visible over weeks of accumulated data, the shape of it clarifying: not Tomas directing the transfers, but someone inside his infrastructure using the cover of a legitimate name.
Maverick providing political protection.
Nico running the physical operation. The whole thing built to be invisible from the outside, using Alvarez Logistics’s clean reputation as armor against scrutiny.
And then Tomas coming home from Europe, and the trucks stopping the same day.
“The correct targets,” Matvey said, not as a question, “are Maverick Weise and Nico Calderon.”
“Yes,” I said. “Tomas’s operation was the access point. Tomas didn’t know.”
The room was very still for a moment. I heard Tomas breathe—a single, slow exhale, the kind that a man produced when his body had been holding something for a long time and had just received permission to release a fraction of it. I didn’t look at him. I kept my eyes on Matvey.
“There’s something else,” I said.
Matvey’s expression didn’t change, but something in his posture shifted—the particular quality of attention that meant he already knew there was more and was waiting for me to reach it in my own time.
“I saw Sofia leaving Nico’s office building,” I said.
“Several days ago. She looked—” I stopped.
Chose the next words with the specific care of a man who understood that how he described something would communicate as much as the description itself.
“Shaken. Furious. Nico came after her in the street. He grabbed her arms. She pushed him off and drove away.”
I heard the sound Tomas made. I wouldn’t describe it. It was not a sound I’d ever heard from a man like him before, and I wouldn’t describe it.
“She found the same thing I was finding,” I said, “from the inside. She went looking at the trucks because the numbers didn’t add up, and she followed it to Nico, and she confronted him.
” The next part sat in my chest for a moment before I said it, because saying it meant saying what it implied, and what it implied was the only thing in this room that I could not make clean.
“She walked into his office with documentation and threatened to expose him, and then she walked out. And then someone ran her car off the road on her usual route.”
“She was protecting the company,” Yegor said from the corner. Not addressed to anyone specifically. It arrived as what it was—a statement of record.
I looked at him. He was looking at me with those grey-blue eyes that gave away nothing, but I’d known him for long enough to read the space around what he didn’t show, and what I read there was not anger at me.
It was something more complicated. Something that understood, without requiring an explanation, that the distance between where I’d stood six days ago and where I was standing now was the full distance of a mistake that had already been made and could not be unmade.
He wouldn’t say that in this room. But he knew it, and I knew he knew it, and that was sufficient.
Tomas reached into his jacket pocket and took out his phone. He set it on the desk and pressed play on a voicemail that filled the room with the sound of Sofia’s voice—and something in my chest that had been holding a specific shape for the last hour changed shape entirely.
She sounded careful. Controlled in the way she was controlled when she was managing something larger than the surface allowed for.
“Papa. I need to talk to you when you’re back.
There’s something with the trucks—I’ve been looking at the manifests, and I think someone’s been using our routes for deliveries that aren’t ours.
Call me when you land.” A pause on the recording. Then, quieter: “Come home soon.”
The voicemail ended. The room was very quiet.
I stood in it and held the full weight of what I’d done. She had been protecting what was hers, followed it until she understood it, and she had confronted it, because that was who she was, and I’d known that about her from the first night and I’d named her a traitor anyway.
I looked at Matvey. “The mission was assigned in error,” he said, tone apologetic. That was the closest thing Tomas would get to an apology from Matvey.
“I know where she is,” Tomas said.
Every head in the room turned.
“My assistant flagged a property,” he said.
“Registered to a shell company—Meridian Freight Solutions. No external camera coverage within half a mile, which means someone swept the area before selecting it. It’s three blocks from where her car was found.
” He looked at Matvey. “She’s there. She has to be there.
It’s the only location in his known network that’s been kept clean of surveillance, which means it’s the one he was saving for something he didn’t want seen. ”
“Then we go,” Matvey said. He was on his feet before the sentence was finished, and the composure he had been maintaining across the entire evening was still present, but it had changed quality.
He lifted one hand. “Tomas.” The single word carried everything that needed to be in it—not you, not tonight, not this way—and Tomas stopped.
His jaw worked. His hands closed at his sides and opened and closed again, and I watched him do the most difficult thing I’d seen him do in the last two hours, which was to stand still.
“Let my man do what I sent him to do,” Matvey said. His voice was low and certain, carrying the weight of a decision that had already been made and was not negotiating. “He will bring her back.”
Tomas looked at Matvey for a long moment.
Then he looked at me—directly, fully, with those hazel eyes that had been building a case for two hours and had now reached its conclusion—and what I saw in them was not trust, not yet, not exactly.
It was something more provisional and more demanding.
A conditional, extended with the full knowledge that I understood what would happen if I failed to meet it.
“Find her,” he said.
Two words. The simplest possible architecture for the most significant thing he had said all evening. I held his gaze and felt the full-dimensional weight of everything those two words contained, and I didn’t look away from any of it.
“I’ll find her,” I said.
I turned to Yegor. He was already moving toward his phone, already dialing. I heard him speaking in low Russian as he passed me, and I caught Camila’s name, which told me what he was prioritizing, and I was grateful for it in a way I didn’t have language for.
I walked to the door.
“Gregory.” Tomas’s voice. I stopped, hand on the frame, without turning around.
“If anything—” he started, then stopped himself, because he was a man who didn’t complete sentences of that kind, who didn’t put the worst possibility into words because naming it made it real. “She and Camilla are all I have left.”
I stood in the doorway for one breath. The silence around those words was the most honest thing I’d heard from Tomas Alvarez, and it was more honest than almost anything I’d heard from anyone in a very long time. I understood it in my chest before my mind had finished processing it,
“She’s all I have left too,” I said.
I didn’t wait to hear his response. I walked through the door, into the corridor, toward the stairwell and the street and the cold Chicago dark that was waiting on the other side of it.
Yegor fell into step beside me without a word, and the sound of our boots on the marble floor had the particular rhythm of men moving toward a thing rather than away from it, and that rhythm was the only sound that mattered now, and I followed it out into the night.