Chapter 18 – Gregory
She was too light, lighter than she had been in the dark of her apartment with her hair against my jaw and her weight settled into me like she’d decided I was worth trusting, and that difference—the distance between that weight and this one—registered somewhere in my chest as an accusation.
Six days. I’d been building a case file, mapping delivery routes, and sitting in Matvey’s office talking operational strategy while she was in the basement getting smaller.
I held her against my chest and looked at her face and told myself to breathe.
Behind me, Maverick was on the floor, making sounds I had no attention left to give to. Tomas and his men were coming through the stairwell—I could hear them, the thunder of boots on concrete, the barked orders.
“She’s breathing,” I said, to nobody in particular, or to myself. I said it again anyway. “She’s breathing.”
Tomas hit the bottom of the stairs at a speed I hadn’t expected from a man his age, and the sound that came out of him when he saw her wasn’t a word. It was something that existed below language,
“What did they do to her?” Tomas said.
“She passed out.” I shifted my grip so he could see her face. “Exhaustion. She’s—they didn’t—” I stopped. Recalibrated. I was not a man who stumbled over sentences, and I was not going to start now. “She’s physically intact, Tomas. She’s going to be fine.”
“Hospital,” he said. To his men, to me, to the room.
“My car,” I said. Because it wasn’t a negotiation.
***
I held her the entire ride.
She was unconscious in the back seat, and I was in the back seat with her.
My hand was pressed against the side of her neck, where her pulse moved with the steady, reliable rhythm of something that didn’t know it had recently been at considerable risk.
I sat with that pulse against my fingers and breathed.
Yegor was in the passenger seat. He said nothing. He understood, at some level I hadn’t examined closely, that anything he said right now would produce a response from me that neither of us would enjoy.
Tomas followed in his own vehicle. I could see his headlights in the rear window—close, closer than was strictly necessary at these speeds, the following distance of a man who needed visual confirmation at all times that his daughter was still in the car in front of him.
Sofia made a sound somewhere in the dark near my shoulder.
Not words—just a sound, a small thing that could have been discomfort or the beginning of consciousness or simply her body rearranging itself in whatever internal way bodies did when they were coming back from somewhere.
I looked down at her. Her lashes were dark against her face, her breathing had steadied, and the gray had faded from her skin to something closer to her actual color, the warm olive I’d been cataloging without permission since a fundraising event that felt like a different life.
“We’re almost there,” I said quietly. To the top of her head. She didn’t respond, which was fine. I hadn’t said it for a response.
The hospital moved fast when we came through—which was, I’d always found, the precise advantage of arriving at an emergency entrance with a Bratva enforcer carrying an unconscious woman and Tomas Alvarez walking two steps behind.
Doctors appeared. A gurney appeared. I transferred her weight from my arms to it with a care I was not examining too closely, and stepped back because she was in the right hands now, and I was not going to be useful in a treatment room.
I stood in the hallway.
Yegor stood beside me. He had his arms crossed and his jaw set, and he was looking at the wall in the way he looked at things when he was thinking and didn’t want you to know what he was thinking. After a moment, he said, “When did you last eat?”
I looked at him. “That’s what you’re asking?”
“You look like you’ve been awake for thirty-six hours and running on spite.”
“Forty-two,” I said. “And yes.”
He nodded like this confirmed something. He reached into his jacket and produced a protein bar, the slightly smashed kind that had clearly been living in that pocket for some time, and held it out to me without comment.
I stared at it. I took it. I ate it standing in a hospital hallway while the fluorescent light did its particular damage to everyone underneath it, and it was the worst thing I’d eaten in recent memory, and I was grateful for it in a way that I was not going to express to Yegor.
Camila arrived twenty minutes later. She came through the entrance at a speed that communicated everything about what Yegor had told her on the phone, and she looked at me—one sharp, full assessment, the look of a woman taking inventory—and then she was past me and through the door of Sofia’s room before anyone could suggest that the doctors might prefer she wait. Nobody suggested it.
Tomas sat in one of the hallway chairs with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.
He sat that way for a long time. I stood across from him, and I didn’t sit down because sitting felt like conceding something—some particular version of the waiting I was not willing to accept—and I put my back against the wall, looked at the floor, and tried to organize my interior into something functional.
“I didn’t know about the investigation,” Tomas said.
Not defensively—flatly, like a man making a record.
“When you and Matvey believed I was the one running arms. I didn’t know.
My trucks, my name, my reputation—all of it being used and I didn’t know.
” He paused. “And my daughter was the one who found it.”
“She found it before anyone,” I said. And meant it.
And hated, specifically and precisely, that I’d stood in Matvey’s office, identified her as part of a chain she had been actively dismantling, looked at her face in the loading bay, and constructed a narrative from the outside in, the way a man does when he has already decided what he’s looking at and is simply collecting evidence to confirm it rather than to question it.
Tomas looked at me for a long moment. “You’re going to tell me you were doing your job.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I’m not going to tell you that.”
He studied me. Something shifted in his expression—not warmth, not yet, but the specific removal of the hardest layer of the hostility he’d brought with him to my apartment door six days ago when he’d come looking for who had last been seen leaving her building.
“Camila told me,” he said. “About the two of you.”
I didn’t respond.
“Sofia didn’t know that we knew. No one was supposed to; that was the whole arrangement.
” He paused. “Camila didn’t trust you to keep her safe, so she told me herself.
" Another pause. “My daughter couldn’t tell me she was…involved with someone—you. I don’t know if that concerns me more or less than everything else. ”
“She was protecting you from having to think about it,” I said. “That’s just who she is: selfless.”
Tomas was quiet. He looked at the door of her room. “She’s twenty-two,” he said.
“I know how old she is.”
“And you’re forty.”
“I know how old I am.”
He looked back at me, and I held it, because I wasn’t going to flinch from this particular accounting. Whatever I was, whatever this was, I was not a man who looked away when someone needed to look at him clearly.
He held my gaze for another long moment, and then he looked at the floor, and he said nothing more, and we sat with that in the hallway—the specific architecture of a reckoning that was not finished, and both of us knew it, and neither of us had the energy to continue right now.
The doctor came out thirty minutes after Camila went in.
She was young, efficient, with the manner of someone who had delivered a broad range of news in this hallway and had developed a specific kind of steadiness as a result.
She told Tomas—to Tomas, because he was the father, because that was the correct protocol—that Sofia was dehydrated, malnourished, showing signs of sleep deprivation and acute stress, that her blood pressure was lower than they’d like but climbing, that there were no structural injuries, no signs of violence.
That she was awake and stable and asking for her sister and her father.
“Gregory.” Yegor’s voice, quiet.
“I heard her,” I said.
“Yes.” A pause. “You should probably go in.”
“Tomas—”
“Tomas isn’t going to stop you,” Yegor said. And he said it with a certainty that told me he and Tomas had had a conversation at some point in the last six days that I hadn’t been present for and that had reached conclusions I wasn’t fully informed about. “Go in.”
I pushed off the wall.
The room was quiet and very white, with the specific antiseptic brightness of a hospital that illuminated things clearly.
Camila was standing at the left side of the bed with her arms wrapped around herself, and she looked at me when I came in with an expression that was not quite welcoming and not quite hostile.
Sofia was sitting up against the pillow. She had an IV in her arm and a hospital gown that was too large for her.
Her hair was loose, and the olive warmth of her skin was coming back under the fluorescent light, and she looked—
She looked at me.
Not with the expression I’d been bracing for.
Not with the anger, the hard-edged composure she deployed when she was managing her own vulnerability, and I was the specific source of what she needed to manage it against. She looked at me with something that was very tired and very wary and entirely unguarded in a way that hurt more than anything else would have, because unguarded meant she was too exhausted to perform distance, and that meant I was getting the actual thing, the actual Sofia beneath all the ways she’d learned to defend herself—including from me.
She looked at me like she had been not-thinking about me for six days and had not entirely succeeded.
I moved to her bedside. I stopped two feet away because I was not going to assume anything about what she wanted right now, what she could tolerate, or what proximity meant after everything that had been said, done, and withheld between us.
I put my hands at my sides, looked at her face, and didn’t say any of the things queued behind my teeth—the explanations, the apologies, the accounting I owed her for every morning departure, every strategic silence, and every moment I’d used what was between us as a lens instead of understanding that it was the point.
She looked at my face for a long moment, reading something there. Then she looked at Camila.
Camila said, with a timing that I was fairly certain was deliberate: “I’ll be right outside.” She patted Sofia’s hand once, quick and warm, and moved toward the door, and as she passed me, she said, at a volume intended only for me, “Don’t make this worse.”
The door clicked shut.
Sofia looked at her hands in her lap. The drip moved its slow, clear fluid into her arm. The monitor beside her beeped with the patient, indifferent regularity of a machine that had no stake in anything.
I sat in the chair beside her bed. Not standing over her.
Not filling the room with myself the way I usually did, the way I’d been told my whole adult life I did simply by being the size I was in a space.
I sat in the chair, and I leaned forward slightly, and I looked at her face in profile, and I waited, because she had earned the right to set the pace of this, and I was done taking things from Sofia Alvarez that she hadn’t decided to give.
She turned her head and looked at me directly, her eyes tired and dark.
Underneath everything was the same thing I’d seen in the basement when I was lowering my gun and she was looking at me across the length of the room—something that had no strategic use, something that had been surviving in a basement for six days on the same fuel I’d been running on through forty-two hours of operational fury.
The door opened behind us.
“Sorry,” the doctor said as she stepped back in, voice calm, measured. “I just need a moment.” She glanced between us, taking in more than she commented on, then checked the chart in her hand. “I wanted to confirm your results.” A small pause. “You’re pregnant.”
Her gaze flicked to Sofia, softer now. “It’s early, but everything looks consistent so far.”
Sofia didn’t respond. Not immediately.
“Do you…understand what that means?” the doctor added, gently.
“Yes,” Sofia said.
Silence settled differently after that.
“All right,” the doctor said, professional again, but not unkind. “We’ll go over next steps shortly. Take a minute.” She gave us one last look, then stepped out, closing the door softly behind her.
The doctor’s voice lingered anyway, reaching us both from memory as much as from the room, and neither of us pretended we hadn’t heard it.
I looked at her face. She looked at mine.
“We have a lot to talk about,” I said. Quietly. The words landed somewhere between a statement and the beginning of the only negotiation that had ever mattered.
Her chin moved. Not quite a nod. The edge of one. And her hands, folded in her lap, loosened slightly from the grip they’d been holding each other in—something so small I almost missed it, something that a man who wasn’t watching very closely would have missed entirely.
I’d been watching her closely since the first night. I was done pretending otherwise.