Chapter 19 – Sofia
I hadn’t intended to leave the hospital with him.
That had been my position: that getting into Gregory Kamarov’s car meant entering a logic that operated by his rules, on his timeline, in a direction he had already chosen before I’d had any say in the matter.
I’d intended to call Camila. I’d intended to ask my father to take me back to my apartment, to my things, to the silence of a space that was mine and had been mine before any of this.
And then the doctor had come back in.
I sat in the passenger seat of his car and watched the city slide past the window, pressed my hand against my abdomen, and tried to locate something like a plan.
The gesture had become reflexive in the last two days of the basement—arriving without permission, my palm finding that specific place the way it had learned to without being taught.
Camila had found me before we left the hospital, in the three minutes between the doctor’s departure and Gregory crossing the room to stand in front of me with his arms folded and that quiet, implacable certainty already arranged across his face.
“You have about a minute,” my sister murmured as she stepped in, leaning close, her dark hair brushing my cheek, her voice low enough that it was only for me. “Listen to me.”
“What is it?” I whispered back, already tense.
“If you’re pregnant with his child, nothing on earth can stop that man from taking you,” she said.
I went still. “Camila—”
She shook her head slightly, cutting me off before I could finish.
She pulled back just enough to look at me, those almost-black eyes fixed, assessing.
“You already know that,” she added, softer, not unkind.
“Don’t pretend you don’t.” She had always been able to read me from the next room, and she did it now.
She didn’t say “I’m sorry” or “be careful,” because Camila had never been a woman who apologized for the truth.
I hated that she was right. That was the thing sitting at the bottom of all of it—not the fear, not the anger or exhaustion of a woman who had been managing her own survival in a basement for six days and had not yet had a full night’s sleep or a proper meal or a single moment of genuine privacy in which to process any of it.
What was sitting at the bottom was the fact that I hated Camila being right, and I couldn’t find a version of any of this in which she wasn’t.
The penthouse was on the forty-third floor.
Floor-to-ceiling windows. The specific quality of Chicago at night seen from that altitude—the grid of lights, the dark band of the lake at the edge of it, the city operating at its usual indifferent scale below a life I’d not asked for.
The apartment itself was what I would have expected if I’d allowed myself to expect anything—clean, spare, nothing unnecessary, no softness anywhere that hadn’t been strictly required by function.
It looked like a man who had decided long ago that he didn’t need to be comfortable, only operational.
I stood in the living area with my hospital bracelet still on my wrist and my hair loose from whatever it had been when I arrived at the hospital, wearing clothes Camila had sent with Yegor because what I’d been in when they found me was not something she was going to let me leave in, and I looked at the apartment and I tried to locate the version of myself that knew what to do in this room.
Gregory set his keys on the counter. He shrugged off his jacket and laid it over the back of a chair, then he turned and looked at me, and for a moment we simply stood in the apartment and said nothing.
“Are you hungry?” he said.
“No,” Which wasn’t entirely true, but I wasn’t going to accept anything from him until I’d said the thing that needed to be said, because if I ate first, I would lose the edge of it, and I needed the edge.
He looked at me for a moment. Then he opened the refrigerator anyway and produced a glass of water, which he set on the counter between us. Not an imposition—just a presence. Available if I wanted it.
I looked at the glass. I looked at him. “Nothing changes,” I said.
The words came out steadier than I’d expected and flatter than I intended. He didn’t flinch. He stood with his hands at his sides, and he let the words settle, and he waited, which was somehow worse than if he’d responded immediately.
“I know what you did,” I said. “I know why you came to that fundraiser. I know why you kept coming back to my apartment, why you asked questions, why you—” I stopped.
I reorganized. “Nico told me. In the basement. He told me that you were working a mission against my father, that getting close to me was part of the operation.” I watched his face.
“He said you stayed around me to gather evidence. That I was a tool.”
Gregory’s jaw moved. Just a shift, a minute muscular change that in a man with his level of control communicated something larger than its size.
“He wasn’t wrong about all of it,” Gregory said.
The honesty hit harder than a denial would have. I’d prepared for a denial. I’d not prepared for him to admit it because a large part of me hoped it was all an elaborate lie by Nico to get inside my head.
“So it’s true,” I said.
“Part of it is true. I was investigating your father. Matvey believed Tomas was supplying arms to rival factions. I was assigned to gather evidence. Getting close to you—it started as access. That’s the part that’s true.”
“And the rest?” I said. My voice came out quieter than I wanted it to, which annoyed me, because quiet was not the register I was going for.
“The rest,” he said, “is that I have never once stayed when there was no reason to stay. Everything I did after the first night had no strategic value or use to the mission. That’s the rest.”
I looked at him for a long time. I was looking for the seam—the place where the honesty ended and the management began, because a man who was still managing you could deploy honesty the same way he deployed everything else, as a tool, and I’d been a tool in this situation already, and I was not going to be one again.
But his face held the specific quality I’d been watching it acquire in the basement, through the gun and the shot and the arms that had caught me—something unguarded, something that had lost its operational cover—and I could not find the seam because I was not sure it was there.
“You called Matvey,” I said. “After the morning you left my apartment. You told him you thought I was involved.”
Something moved through his face. Fast, deep, the specific movement of a man absorbing something he had already been sitting with in his own interior and finding it no less heavy the second time. “Yes,” he said.
“You thought I was helping him run arms.”
“I thought—” He stopped. Started again. “I made a decision based on what I’d seen rather than what I knew.
I saw you at the loading bay. I saw Nico come after you at his building.
I constructed a story from the outside, and I put you in it without—” His jaw set.
“Without giving you the benefit of the doubt I should have.”
“Without giving me any benefit at all,” I said.
He didn’t argue with that.
I turned away from him and walked to the window because I needed the physical distance and something to look at other than his face, which was making the accounting harder.
I’d been in that basement with Gregory’s behavior as evidence, and Nico’s narration as the frame, and the combination had produced a conclusion that had sat in my chest for six days with the specific weight of something that felt true.
Now I was in a penthouse with Gregory three feet behind me, offering honesty I hadn’t asked for, and I wasn’t sure whether that was because it was less true or because I was less safe from him up here than I’d been in the basement with something I could be angry at.
“Nico said you never cared,” I said to the window. “He said I was na?ve to think someone like you would.”
The silence behind me changed quality.
“Nico spent six days trying to break you in a basement and failed completely. He doesn’t get to tell you what I feel.”
I turned. He was still against the counter, but something had changed in his posture—he’d gone rigid, like he was bracing for impact.
I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and breathed.
The nausea was still there—not as bad as it had been in the basement, but present, the reliable morning-weighted cycling of a body that was doing something significant and was not going to let me forget it.
I’d been moving through the last two hours on the residual momentum of the hospital and the car and the confrontation I’d been building toward, and now it was moving through me, the wave of it, and I sat down on the arm of the nearest chair because my legs had made a unilateral decision about the conversation.
Gregory was across the room before I’d finished sitting. He didn’t touch me—he crouched at my level, which made him less large, which I understood was deliberate, and he looked at my face with worry.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You’re not fine. You’ve been in a basement for six days.”
“I’m alive,” I amended.
“That’s a lower bar than fine.”
I looked at him at close range and the exhaustion moved through me in a way I’d been holding at bay since the hospital, the specific dissolution of a woman who’d been managing her own fear very carefully and was now somewhere that felt, against all logic and against everything I’d been telling myself for six consecutive days, marginally safer than the last place she’d been.
I hated that. I kept a specific inventory of the things I hated about this situation, and I added it.
“You’re carrying my child,” he said. Quietly.
Not as a power play—just the fact of it, stated with the same directness he had been using throughout the conversation, the honesty that I still could not find the seam in.
“We’re getting married.” He watched my face as he said it, and I watched him watching, and I didn’t react at all because I was too tired to, and because my actual reaction was something I wasn’t yet ready to give him.
“Not because of the mission. Not because of Matvey. Because I’m not the kind of man who lets his child come into the world without a name. ”
“That’s not a reason to marry someone,” I said.
“No,” he agreed. “It’s not the only reason.”
The rest of that sentence existed in the space between us without being said.
I could feel its shape from where I was sitting—could feel the specific weight of what he was not yet saying and what I was not yet ready to hear and what was going to need to be navigated eventually in this apartment between two people who had been circling a reckoning for weeks and had finally run out of distance to circle.
He walked away. I watched him go, held very still, and said nothing, because everything I could say was either more than I’d say or less than the situation deserved, and I was not going to choose wrong twice.
The door of his room closed. Quietly—not a retreat, not a statement. Just a door.
I reached over and picked up the water glass and drank half of it, because my body required it and because the promise I’d made in the basement about survival superseded every other consideration and always would.
Then I sat with the remainder and I looked at the city and I let myself, for the first time, think about the ultrasound I hadn’t had yet, the specific reality of a thing that was six weeks along and real and mine—entirely mine, in the most fundamental sense—and whatever else this was and whatever it was going to become, that part was not something anyone had a strategic use for. That part was simply true.
I finished the water. I stood up. I went to the room he had pointed to, closed the door, lay down on a bed that was too large and too quiet, stared at the ceiling, and thought: I am not going to make any decisions tonight.
It was the most honest thing I’d managed all day.