Chapter 23 – Sofia
He’d said I’ll call. He hadn’t called. He hadn’t texted.
The morning had become afternoon, and the afternoon had bled into the amber hour when Chicago’s skyline caught the last of the daylight and held it while I was sitting on the couch with my knees pulled up, and my phone face-up on the cushion beside me, and the screen stayed dark.
I told myself it didn’t matter. I was very convincing.
I picked up my phone, then put it down. I stood and went to the kitchen for water I didn’t particularly want, stood at the counter for a moment looking out at the city turning orange and gold outside the glass, and thought very deliberately about how little I was thinking about him.
I called Camila at ten past six.
She answered on the second ring with the ease of someone who had been expecting it, which, with Camila, was functionally the same thing.
I could hear her heels on a hard floor, the faint background noise of wherever she was, and her voice when she came on had the particular warmth she reserved for me, lower and less polished than the version she wore in rooms with other people.
“Finally,” she said. “I was giving you until seven.”
“I wasn’t going to call,” I said.
“And yet.” She paused. The heel-clicking stopped—she’d settled somewhere. “What happened?”
I tried to organize it into something reportable.
Gregory left this morning. There was a warehouse fire.
Two people died. He hasn’t contacted me since.
All of those things were true, and none of them explained the actual problem, which was less about the waiting and more about what the waiting was revealing about me.
“Nico retaliated,” I said. “Something with a warehouse. Gregory left, and I’ve heard nothing. ”
Camila was quiet for a moment, which meant she already knew—Yegor would have told her, and Yegor told her everything that he decided wasn’t classified, and their line on classified was different from most people’s. “I know,” she said. “Yegor was out most of the day too.”
“Did he call you?”
“Twice.”
I looked at the skyline.
“Sofia.” Her voice shifted—not unkind, but direct, the register she used when she’d decided she was going to say something true whether I wanted her to or not. “Ask me what you actually want to ask me.”
“I don’t want to ask you anything.”
“Then why did you call?”
I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth for a moment, irritated with myself in the specific way I’d been irritated with myself since approximately the first night I let Gregory Kamarov through my door. “I just wanted to know he was okay,” I said. “That’s it. It’s not complicated.”
“It’s not complicated at all,” Camila agreed, with the warmth of someone who found it extremely complicated and was choosing, for once, not to make that point. Another pause. “He’s fine, Sofia. Yegor saw him at Matvey’s two hours ago. He’s fine.”
The thing that moved through me at that was embarrassingly acute—a loosening, a breath I hadn’t known I was holding releasing itself without my permission.
I straightened against the counter and looked at the window and hated, very specifically, how much relief felt like information about myself. “Good,” I said. “That’s good.”
“Is that all you wanted to know?”
I should have said yes. I should have said yes and made a comment about Camila’s evening and ended the call with my dignity mostly intact. Instead, I stood in his kitchen in his apartment, wearing a borrowed sweater, and said, “He should have called.”
Camila made a sound—not quite a laugh, something warmer and more careful than a laugh. “That’s your husband, not Yegor,” she said. “They’re different.”
“I’m aware they’re different.”
“Gregory Kamarov has spent twenty years not answering to anyone.” Her voice carried something that wasn’t criticism—more like the even assessment of a woman who’d spent years watching Bratva men and had developed calibrated expectations.
“One day of marriage isn’t going to teach him to check in.
That takes time. It takes—” She paused. “It takes him believing someone wants him to come back.”
“He knows I want him to come back.”
“Does he?”
I closed my mouth. The question settled in the space the silence made, and I turned it over, and I thought about last night.
He had said it was real, and I’d believed him because he’d said it the way I said things I didn’t want to say but couldn’t in good conscience withhold.
I’d believed him, and I’d let the distance between us close, and I’d held onto the night with both hands.
But believing something in the dark and demonstrating you believed it in the daylight were not the same act, and I was not sure I’d managed the second one before he’d walked out with his phone and his jacket.
“We don’t have that kind of marriage,” I said, and heard immediately how it sounded. “I mean—it’s not—we didn’t build this the normal way. We didn’t date, we didn’t—” I stopped. “He married me because I’m pregnant.”
The silence that followed was Camila not saying everything she could have said, which was its own kind of answer.
I heard her exhale slowly. “Sofia.” Her voice was quiet now, the way she spoke when she was being careful with me in the way only she knew how to be.
“I watched that man sit in a hospital hallway for four hours. I watched him pace until the floors should have worn through. He wasn’t there because of the baby.
” A pause. “He didn’t even know about the baby yet. ”
I stared at the grain of the counter under my hand.
“I know you’re still angry,” she continued.
“You have every right to be angry. What he did was—yes, it was wrong, and you don’t have to be done being angry about it just because you’re married now.
” Her voice was careful and steady, the voice of a woman who’d had her own version of a complicated love and had learned to stop requiring it to be simple.
“But don’t tell yourself a story about what he wants that lets you off the hook for what you want.
That’s not fair to him, and it’s not fair to you. ”
I didn’t say anything for a long moment.
The city lights were coming on outside, the grid of them appearing in the early dark like something being assembled in real time, and the penthouse held the quiet it always held, and I stood in it and sat with what she’d said and didn’t particularly enjoy the experience.
“When did you get wise?” I said finally.
“I married Yegor Kamarov,” she said, and I could hear the smile in it. “Wisdom was a survival requirement.”
I almost laughed. I wanted to say more—to keep her on the line because her voice was the most familiar thing currently available to me and the apartment was very quiet—but I heard something then. A sound from the entryway. The sound of the front door opening.
“He’s back,” I said, relief moving through me faster than I could manage it. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Sofia—”
I ended the call and moved toward the hallway, already adjusting the shape of what I was going to say, already deciding whether to lead with the fact that he hadn’t texted or whether to let it go because Camila was probably right and demonstrating that I’d been waiting was its own kind of vulnerability that I wasn’t sure I was prepared to hand over yet.
I stepped out of the hallway.
And stopped.
The man standing in my penthouse was not my husband.
Nico Calderon looked like something that had clawed its way back from a place it had no business returning from.
He was thinner than I remembered—the weeks since his father’s funeral had taken something from him, stripped the careful polish that had always been part of his presentation, left something rawer and more dangerous underneath it.
His shirt was marked with drying blood at the cuffs and collar, but it was his eyes that struck hardest—dark, fixed, and unnervingly alive, the way eyes became when whatever lay behind them had narrowed to a single point of focus. And that point was here. It was me.
He smiled at me. It was the most frightening thing in the room.
“Hello, Sofia.” His voice was conversational, almost pleasant, the tone of someone arriving at a social occasion. “Miss me?”
My body processed the danger before my mind fully caught up to it—a cold drop in the stomach, a prickling along my arms, the medical student part of my brain already running through what the blood on his shirt meant, and the rest of me already measuring the distance between us and the door and understanding that it was not enough distance.
I didn’t answer him. I didn’t move. I stood very still and looked at him, thought about the phone I’d just put in my pocket and the sister I’d just ended a call with, and thought about the baby, and kept my face exactly as neutral as I could manage.
He crossed the room in four steps. I stepped back, and it didn’t matter because his hand found my arm before I could make the distance I needed, fingers wrapping around my wrist with a grip calibrated to control rather than injure—the grip of a man who’d done this before and knew exactly how much pressure was necessary.
With his other hand, he brought up the knife.
I saw it in my peripheral vision before I felt it—the cold flat edge of the blade against my abdomen, angled with a precision that made clear it was exactly where he intended it.
Against my stomach. Where the baby was.
Something flooded through me that wasn’t quite fear and wasn’t quite rage and was more fundamental than either—the animal certainty that this was the one threat that rearranged every other priority, that every calculation in my head now had to route through this single inescapable point.
I went very still. I made myself breathe.
“There she is.” His voice was quiet, almost approving, like he’d been waiting for me to understand the geometry of the situation.
“See, I knew you’d be smart about it. You’ve always been smart.
It’s actually what made you such a problem.
” He tilted his head, studying me with the detached attention of someone evaluating something he owned. “Where’s your husband, Sofia?”
I said nothing.
The blade shifted, just slightly. I felt the movement register in my entire body, every nerve ending wired to that small steel edge. “I’ll ask once more,” he said. The pleasantness was still there in his voice, which was worse than if it had been gone. “Where is Gregory?”
“Not here,” I said. My voice came out level. I didn’t know how. “I don’t know where he is.”
Nico looked at me for a long moment, reading something in my face, and then he did something unexpected—he laughed.
It was a short, quiet sound, almost private, the laugh of a man recognizing an irony he hadn’t expected.
“You actually don’t know,” he said. “He didn’t tell you.
” Something moved across his face, an expression I couldn’t fully read before it was gone. “Interesting.”
“What do you want, Nico?”
“What do I want?” He repeated it like he was considering the question fresh, like it was a philosophical inquiry rather than the only thing currently between me and whatever came next.
He released my wrist, and I immediately wanted to move and didn’t, because the blade was still there, still in contact, and I was not willing to take a risk with what was on the other side of it.
He stepped back half a pace—enough to look at me fully, not enough to change anything material. “I want Gregory Kamarov to understand what it costs to take things from people.”
His voice had lost its pleasantness now. Underneath it was genuine grief and fury wound together in the weeks since his father’s death into a focused, consuming thing.
“He took my father from me. He destroyed everything we built. He thought burning a shipment and making a statement was the end of it.” His jaw moved. “So I burned his warehouse. And now I’m going to use his wife to make him watch something he can’t fix.”
“Give me my phone,” I said.
Something crossed his face—surprise, maybe, or satisfaction at the compliance.
He reached into my pocket himself, which I allowed because the knife was still there and the baby was still there, and some calculations made themselves.
He held the phone out and kept the blade where it was, and his eyes didn’t leave my face.
I found Gregory’s name in my contacts. My thumb hovered over it for a fraction of a second—long enough to feel the full weight of what I was about to do, to understand it completely, and to do it anyway.
Because Gregory would come. I knew that with a certainty that sat below everything else, below the anger and the unresolved hurt and the complicated architecture of what we were and weren’t to each other.
He would come, and he would know it was a trap, and he would come regardless, and I needed him to know before he walked through that door that I was here and I was alive and he needed to be smarter than whatever Nico was planning.
I pressed call.
It rang once.