Chapter 24 – Gregory
The meeting had been running for forty minutes, and I’d stopped processing it approximately thirty minutes ago.
Matvey stood at the head of the table with a map spread across it, two fingers tracing the industrial corridor where Nico’s network had been operating, and he was talking about containment.
About how the warehouse fire was a provocation designed to force a visible response, and how a visible response was exactly what Nico wanted because a visible response was traceable, and traceable meant political exposure for the Bratva at a moment when Maverick’s death had already introduced the kind of scrutiny that could not be managed from the shadows.
He was right. He was almost always right about this kind of thing.
I stood with my arms crossed and my back against the far wall, and I tracked the movement of his hand across the map, and I thought about the eggs Sofia had made that morning.
Not the eggs specifically. What the eggs meant.
The way she’d moved around his kitchen with the unselfconscious ease of someone who had been in a space long enough to stop performing in it, the hum under her breath that she’d cut off the moment she’d noticed me noticing.
The careful ordinariness of two people eating breakfast while pretending they didn’t remember what the night before had been.
I’d watched her from across the table and thought, with the distinct discomfort of a man who doesn’t enjoy being surprised by himself, that I didn’t want it to end.
Not the breakfast. Not the morning. Not the specific version of Sofia Alvarez-Kamarov who wore my shirt to make eggs and hummed without meaning to.
Then my phone had lit up and the morning had ended, and I’d spent the subsequent eight hours doing the work of not thinking about it.
Luka was talking now—logistics, something about the secondary route Nico’s surviving men would likely shift to, the way a disrupted supply chain finds new grooves within forty-eight hours.
I watched his mouth move, registered the sense of it, and said nothing.
Damir had pulled up a satellite image of the industrial district on his laptop.
Yegor stood slightly apart from the others, the way he always stood, reading something on his phone with the particular focused expression that meant it was Camila.
I felt a brief, sideways pull of recognition—Yegor’s marriage had not made him soft, but it had made him fast to reach for his phone in a way that the pre-Camila Yegor would have identified as weakness, and I’d watched him stop caring about that distinction. I hadn’t understood it at the time.
My phone vibrated in my pocket.
Sofia’s name on the screen.
The guilt was immediate—the guilt of a man who had said I’ll call and hadn’t called, who’d been standing in his boss’s office running tactical assessments while his pregnant wife sat forty-three floors above the city in an apartment that was still not really hers and waited.
I knew she’d been waiting. I didn’t need to be told.
I shifted away from the wall in my seat and leaned forward toward the door, already composing the apology, already calibrating whether to lead with the explanation or the acknowledgment that the explanation didn’t fully excuse it.
I answered on the second step.
The voice on the line was not Sofia’s.
“If you tell anyone where you’re going,” Nico Calderon said, with the deliberate, unhurried tone of a man who’d been rehearsing this, “your pregnant wife dies.”
The room continued its conversation behind me.
Maps and routes and forty-eight-hour projections.
Matvey’s hand moving across the corridor.
Everything exactly as it had been two seconds ago.
I stood in the middle of it and felt the floor perform a subtle, complete shift, the way the ground moved in that fraction of a second before you registered it as an earthquake.
My chair. It was moving backward, scraping against the floor, because I’d stood so sharply I’d sent it into the wall. Every face in the room turned toward me.
I looked at them and constructed a lie with whatever was still functioning in my upper brain. “Sofia’s not well,” I said. “I need to go.” My voice came out steady, which surprised some part of me that had stepped briefly outside the situation. “I’ll be reachable.”
I left before anyone could ask a follow-up question. I heard Yegor’s voice beginning something behind me, and I didn’t stop.
The city at night became an obstacle on a route I drove without thinking, muscle memory carrying me through it while the thinking part of my brain worked the problem.
He’d called from her phone, which meant he had her phone, which meant he wanted me to know exactly where she was—the penthouse, where he was already positioned, where he’d already determined I would come.
He’d constructed the invitation deliberately.
Either I came alone, isolated, walked into whatever he’d arranged, or I delayed while he had her.
The knife’s edge was that Sofia was the kind of woman who wouldn’t break easily, who would make him work for whatever he wanted to extract from her, and he would know that about her, and he would make her pay for it in proportion to how much work she made him do.
I drove faster.
Three blocks out, I cut the lights and the engine and coasted to the curb.
I sat in the dark for thirty seconds, breathing and running through it.
Single point of entry he’d expect—the elevator, the front door.
Stairwell on the northwest side, maintenance access through the building management level, the one I’d had Kirill map when I’d first moved in, because I made a habit of knowing the exits.
I knew my own apartment, every room and angle of it, every piece of furniture, the sight lines from the living room entry toward the kitchen and the hallway.
I thought about where Sofia would be positioned if Nico were using her as leverage—visible, somewhere central, accessible enough that the threat would be demonstrable when I walked in.
The living room. Maybe the kitchen. Not the bedrooms. He’d want the open space where I could see everything immediately.
I got out of the car. Didn’t slam the door.
Moved along the building’s blind side to the maintenance entrance and took the stairwell in the dark, thirty-eight floors on instinct, not breathing hard until the thirty-fifth and not letting myself slow down.
On the forty-third floor landing, I stopped and listened.
The building was quiet in the way expensive buildings were quiet—engineered silence, the noise of life muffled behind money and insulation.
My own pulse. The faint ambient presence of a city below.
I moved to the service corridor entrance to the penthouse. Secondary keypad. I had the code because I always had the code. I punched it in, pushed through, came in through the kitchen side, stopped just inside the threshold, back to the wall, and looked.
Sofia.
She was suspended—wrists bound with rope that ran up and over the arm of the chandelier, her feet barely grazing the top of the barstool beneath her, the whole arrangement deliberate in its cruelty.
Her face was wet. She was crying without sound, and the sight of it broke me in ways I couldn’t explain.
Nico was standing by her side. He heard me come in—or felt the shift in the room, the change in pressure—and turned with a smile that had been waiting for me.
“There he is,” he said. “Let’s see how much you love her, huh?”
I crossed the room.
He met me before I reached her, which was what he wanted—to keep me away from her, to use the distance between us as its own kind of weapon—and the fight that followed was not clean. It was never going to be clean.
“Stay back,” he said, low and sharp, already moving, already closing the space I needed.
He’d had time to prepare this room, and he used it; I barely got my guard up before he drove me sideways and I took a chair to the ribs in the first ten seconds.
I felt something crack, sharp and bright, and filed it away as irrelevant.
“Is that all?” I managed, breath tight, and swung back.
He blocked, fast, the impact reverberating up my arm.
Then we were too close for anything clean—hands, elbows, the brutal efficiency of it.
Glass came apart under our feet as I drove him into the table, a side table went over with a crash that split the air, and the sound of it was enormous in the high quiet of the penthouse.
He pivoted, caught my wrist, twisted; I felt the pull in my shoulder and slammed my forehead forward in response.
It connected. He staggered half a step, and I followed, because hesitation would get me killed.
He was good. Whatever grief had hollowed Nico Calderon out in the weeks since his father’s death, it hadn’t touched the part of him that knew how to hurt people.
He then drove his knee up hard enough to make my vision blur at the edges.
He fought like a man with nothing left to protect, which made him more dangerous than a man fighting to survive.
I caught his collar, dragged him down with me, and slammed him into the edge of the counter.
Something broke—glass, bone, I couldn’t tell—and he didn’t even flinch properly before he came back at me.
We went down together for a second, a tangle of force and momentum, then separated just enough to reset into something worse.
My side screamed when I moved; I ignored it.
“Move,” I snapped, trying to angle past him, toward her.
He didn’t. Of course, he didn’t. He shifted instead, fast, precise, cutting me off again. “No,” he said, and there was something final in it.
He got me down.
I don’t know exactly how—a shift in weight, the glass-slick floor, the cracked rib making my left side slow by a fraction—but I went down hard, breath punched out of me, and he was across me before I could recover.
My hand came up, caught his wrist, but he already had a shard of glass from something we’d broken, long and jagged and pressed to my throat with the particular steadiness of a man who had done this before and knew how little pressure it took.
“Don’t,” he said quietly, like a warning I should take seriously.
His face was very close to mine. His mouth was almost calm.
“Say goodbye,” he said.
I looked past him at Sofia. Her eyes were on me. She had stopped crying. She was watching me with an expression I couldn’t name. Her arms were still above her head, wrists bound. She was alive.
I thought of all the words I wouldn’t get to say to her, of the child I wouldn’t raise with her, of everything that would end here, unfinished and unsaid.
Then the door came apart.
Not the service entrance. The main door, off its hinges in one impact, and then Yegor was through it with two of Matvey’s men at his shoulders and Luka at the back, guns raised, the collective presence of them filling the room instantly.
I hadn’t told them where I was going. I hadn’t told anyone—I’d driven here alone because Nico had said alone, and something in me had resolved into a single point, and I hadn’t stopped to think about tactics or backup or anything except the distance between me and this room.
But this was the brotherhood. This was what it meant.
They hadn’t needed me to tell them. They never did.
Nico registered the guns. Registered the math of the room shifting entirely out of his favor. I watched it move across his face—the calculation collapsing, every remaining option closing—and then he made the last decision he would ever make.
He lunged toward Sofia.
The gun was in my hand. I fired once, then twice, then a third time—one was enough, the second wasn’t operational, and the third lived in the part of me that had heard him say the word pregnant on the phone in Matvey’s office and felt the world tilt permanently on its axis.
He went down.
The apartment was very quiet. The ringing in my ears and underneath it the quiet, and Sofia still suspended from the chandelier, her feet finding the barstool again now, her wrists still bound, her face turned toward me. Alive.
I got to her in three steps. I worked the rope until her hands were free and she came down against me.
I took her weight. She gripped the front of my shirt.
I held on with both arms. Neither of us said anything because the things that needed saying were not available in the immediate term.
She was shaking. I was not going to tell her she was shaking.
“You didn’t tell anyone,” Yegor said behind me. Not a question. The voice of a man who had pieced the whole sequence together and arrived at his conclusion before he’d fully crossed the threshold.
“I know,” I said.
I felt Sofia exhale against my chest—slow and unsteady, the breath of a woman who was already building the case she intended to make against me, brick by careful brick, and choosing for the moment to set it aside. Her arms tightened around me anyway.
“We’re going to talk about that,” she said. Her voice was wrecked and quiet, and it was the most beautiful thing I’d heard in an hour.
“I know,” I said. I pressed my mouth to her hair. “Not right now.”
“Gregory,” she said.
“I know,” I said, for the third time, because it was the only honest answer I had for most of what she might have said next.
She looked at me for a long moment.
She didn’t let go.