Chapter 17 – Sofia
I’d stopped counting days.
I let time become formless, and I focused instead on what my body was telling me and what the room was telling me and what the sounds above my head were telling me, because those were the things I could actually use.
What was in front of me, on the morning I believed was day six or seven, was Maverick Wiese.
He came down the stairs with each step measured, that he was here not because he needed to be, but because the situation had developed to a point that required his presence.
He was in a suit. Even in an industrial basement that smelled of concrete and damp, Maverick Wiese wore a suit the way some men wore armor, because for a man like him, there was no meaningful distinction between the two.
He looked at me, and I looked at him, and the room settled into the particular stillness that preceded negotiations in which one party believed they held all the leverage.
“You look terrible,” he said. It wasn’t unkind, exactly—it was observational, delivered with the mild interest of a man noting a weather condition.
“I’ve been living in a basement,” I said. “What’s your excuse?”
Something moved across his face. He pulled the folding chair from the corner and sat in it with the unhurried deliberateness of a man who had never sat anywhere without first assessing whether the seat was appropriate to his status and deciding to grant it approval.
He crossed one leg over the other. He looked at me with those steel-blue eyes that I’d sat across from at fundraiser tables and charity dinners and thought were the eyes of my father’s trusted friend, and I felt the particular temperature of a betrayal that had been true for longer than I’d known it.
“I want to know what you gave Kirill,” he said.
I blinked. “Who?”
His jaw shifted. “Don’t do that.” His voice carried the particular patience of a man who had decided he would sit here for as long as required and was communicating that decision through his posture, his stillness, the controlled absence of urgency.
“You confronted Nico. You had documentation. You’ve been investigating for weeks.
The question is what you shared with whom and in what form, and the answer to that question is the only thing that determines how long you stay in this room. ”
I looked at him. I held his gaze with the steadiness of a woman who had been building that steadiness for six days specifically for a moment like this one, and I said, “I don’t know anyone named Kirill.”
Which was technically true. I knew of Kirill—Camila had mentioned the name once, briefly, in the context of the Bratva’s infrastructure, but I’d never spoken to him.
I’d never given him anything. The documentation I’d assembled was on a drive that was either still in my apartment or in Nico’s possession after he’d had my things searched, and whatever I hadn’t given Nico in the confrontation was still out there in forms he hadn’t found yet.
I wasn’t going to tell Maverick any of this.
He studied me for a moment, deciding whether to believe me. Then he said, “Your father is looking for you.”
I held my face still. He was watching for the reaction—the relief or hope—and I gave him none of it, because giving him any of it meant giving him something to use, and I was out of things to give.
“What else did you expect?” I said. “He’ll find me soon.”
“We’ll see.” Maverick said, with a lightness that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “He’s also a pragmatic man. He knows when a situation requires negotiation rather than force.”
“You don’t know my father very well,” I said. “He’ll burn this city down to the foundation if that’s what it takes. Block by block. He’ll start with everyone who ever touched me and work from there, and he won’t stop until he kills you.”
Something shifted in Maverick’s eyes — a quick readjustment as he realized things could change suddenly. He covered it up fast.
“Nico will come down later,” Maverick said, standing with the same measured deliberateness with which he had sat.
He straightened his jacket, then adjusted a cufflink—an almost comically polished gesture in a basement, a reflex so deeply embedded it operated without conscious direction.
“We need the remaining documentation. Whatever you didn’t bring to his office.
The drive, the copies, the sources.” He looked at me with a directness that was the closest he came to dropping the surface entirely.
“This ends when you give us what we need, Sofia. The longer it takes, the less comfortable your situation becomes.”
He went to the door. I watched him go, and I said nothing. I held the coal in my chest and breathed.
The nausea came back the moment the bolt slid home.
I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and breathed through it—four counts in, hold, release—and when it passed, I sat and let myself think about my father for exactly one minute.
They needed the documentation. Which meant they didn’t have it.
Which meant the drive was either in my apartment or somewhere Nico hadn’t found it, and which meant the information I’d assembled was still intact and still dangerous to them.
That was something. That was the only piece of leverage I’d and it was still mine.
The hours moved. I ate what they brought—not because I’d forgiven myself for needing to, but because I’d made a decision that superseded every other consideration, and that decision was simply: survive.
Everything I did in this room was in service of that single requirement.
I ate. I drank the water. I breathed through the nausea and managed the fear and kept my spine straight in the chair even when no one was watching, because the habit of straightness was the only thing standing between me and the specific collapse that the room was designed to eventually produce.
I thought about Gregory less than I wanted to admit and more than I had the bandwidth for.
Nico’s words had settled into me like poison.
He was watching you. Getting close to you was part of the operation.
I’d been sitting with that for days, turning it over in the lightless air of the basement, testing it against everything I remembered—every moment I’d mistaken for genuine, every time his coldness had felt like restraint rather than strategy.
The call to Matvey. The morning departures.
And yet, I didn’t know what to do with any of this.
I was a woman in a basement who had been told the man she had been falling for was using her as a tool, and the evidence supported the accusation, and the accusation had been made by a man who had orchestrated my kidnapping, which was not a reliable narrator, and the whole tangled thing sat in my chest without resolution and I was tired—deeply, specifically tired—of carrying it in a room that gave me nothing to do except carry it.
Maverick came back in the afternoon. I identified it as afternoon by the sound of footsteps above me, which were heavier and more frequent at certain intervals that I’d been tracking as a proxy for time.
He came in differently this time. The polished deliberateness was intact, but underneath it something had changed—a tightening, a compression, the specific quality of a man who had received information in the hours since his last visit and was managing its implications.
He stood near the door rather than pulling the chair. That shift in itself communicated something. He was not here to sit. He was here to communicate something quickly and leave.
“There’s movement,” he said. Not to me, exactly—more as though he was saying it into the room and I happened to be in it. “From the Bratva side.”
I looked at him. I kept my face neutral and my hands still in my lap, and I didn’t allow the thing that moved in my chest—rapid, electric, alive in a way nothing in the past days had felt alive—to reach my face.
“That has nothing to do with me,” I said.
He looked at me then, directly, and for the first time in all our interactions in this basement, there was something in his face that was not composed.
It was brief—a flicker, a crack in the plaster—and it vanished almost immediately back beneath the surface, but I’d seen it, and he knew I’d seen it, and we both sat with that knowledge for a second before he turned and went back up the stairs.
The bolt slid home.
I let out a breath so slowly that my whole body moved with it.
I pressed my back against the chair, felt the cold plastic against my shoulder blades, and thought, very clearly and very deliberately: hold on.
The explosion, when it came, was nothing like I’d imagined.
I’d been bracing for something—for the sound of it, for the physical reality of an assault on a building I was trapped inside—but I’d imagined it as having a clear start and a clear progression that I could track.
What actually happened was simultaneous and total: a concussion that moved through the building’s structure like a wave, knocking dust from the ceiling in a fine, continuous fall, rattling the single bulb in its fitting so that the light swung and the shadows lurched.
The sound arrived as much through the floor and walls as through the air—a physical pressure as much as a noise, the kind of impact that you felt in your chest before your ears had finished processing it.
My hands gripped the arms of the chair, ankles puling instinctively against the zip ties, heart going at a rate my clinical training recognized as an acute stress response and my less clinical brain recognized as finally, finally, finally.
The bolt slid. The door opened.
Maverick came in fast—not composed now, the suit rumpled at the shoulder where he had moved quickly through a door, his face frantic, almost scared.