Chapter 26
Chapter
Twenty-Six
GRACE
It took nine hours for Dvorak to finally crack.
Nine. Hours.
Eleven if you counted the two hours after dinner they’d left Dvorak to stew in the dark silence of the reinforced laundry room.
Then, hours involving him sweating through the zip cuffs, hours of Bones and Voodoo tag-teaming him like it was a sport, nine hours of me sitting in the corner looking deliberately bored out of my mind.
That last part was actually the hardest—holding still, holding quiet, pretending the whole thing wasn’t picking at me like sandpaper under the skin.
The best part of it all was studying how they worked the man’s arrogance against him.
Bones paced in front of him, arms crossed, muttering insults in that deadpan way that made them sound like clinical diagnoses.
Voodoo followed it with his brand of slow-burning menace, talking almost softly while he poked holes straight through Dvorak’s defenses.
They didn’t rush. They didn’t need to. They’d both smelled blood in the water from hour one.
Legend and AB were in reserve. AB would research any data we received and Legend just made silent appearances with food or drinks for us.
He played the role of manservant in his own way.
Each time he came and went without so much as acknowledging Dvorak whether he was speaking or not, seemed to agitate the man even further.
It was almost funny.
Through it all, I watched. That was my job today—sit, stare, and be forgettable.
Except Dvorak kept glancing at me.
Not often. Not obvious. Just enough for the back of my neck to prickle every time he did it.
“Let’s start again,” Bones drawled around hour eight, leaning his hip against the table. “You keep telling us you’re important, but so far all I’ve heard is hot air and a tragic understanding of modern deodorant.”
That earned a twitch. The vein in Dvorak’s forehead throbbed more frequently now. A traitor that confessed how on edge no matter how he tried to play it.
Voodoo grinned like he’d been waiting for it.
“Don’t fade on us now, blbec. You insist that La Madrina’s been pulling everyone’s strings.
Which strings, exactly?” He paused then, switching his attention to Bones, a faintly disgruntled look on his face.
“But how much could an errand boy really know?”
Simple pleasure burned in me at Voodoo’s spot-on pronunciation.
He’d asked me for a couple of words for dumbass or jackass, in Czech.
Insulting a man in his own language was another way to knock his pride down.
I’d boiled it down to one word, it was a rough translation and not as vulgar as some of the others, but Voodoo nailed it.
Bones merely shrugged. “Depends on what errands they sent him out on, I suppose. But considering how easily we snared him and how lax his security…” He didn’t even bother to finish the comment, because his tone held nothing but contempt.
Dvorak puffed up, his arrogance blooming like mold. “You Americans think you understand anything,” he sneered. “La Madrina’s network reaches farther than you can imagine. Korkov aligned with us because he saw power—real power. And the syndicates—“ He caught himself, too late.
Bones lifted his brows. “Syndicates plural. Good to know.”
“Huh,” Voodoo said, affecting real surprise. “Maybe we’re getting somewhere.”
Awareness of his slip hit Dvorak’s expression like cold water. He leaned back, chin high, masking it with derision. “It doesn’t matter. None of this concerns you.”
“No?” Bones jerked a thumb at me without looking. “What about her?”
I stayed slumped in the chair, arms folded, face neutral. My eyelids felt heavy from the act—boredom as a weapon.
Despite his attempt to ignore me, Dvorak failed—at least briefly—when his gaze flicked toward me once more. “Castillo business is irrelevant,” he said dismissively. “You are irrelevant. Whatever storm you people bring among yourselves, it has nothing to do with La Madrina.”
Nothing to do with La Madrina. Nothing to do with me.
That should’ve been reassuring.
It wasn’t.
Because when he looked at me—really looked—there was something sharp underneath. Not recognition, not exactly. More like he was trying to place a smell or a taste he almost knew. It was uncomfortable, being relegated to a thing instead of a person.
I tapped my fingers against my thigh to keep the unease contained.
So, he indicated he didn’t know me and logically, fine, that made sense.
His comments on the Castillos were vague, surface-level.
Nothing personal. Nothing specific. Also, fine.
Madrina and Castillo were named separately by Sinclair based on what the guys said.
Maybe they were all competitors and one really did not have anything to do with the other. The whole thing gave me a headache. I increased the pace of my tapping, trying to keep myself in check. Particularly because each time he glanced at me, it was like fingers brushing the back of my neck.
Voodoo must have noticed, because he tilted his head, flicking a glance at my hand as he shifted position and placed himself between me and Dvorak. It was so smooth, I almost missed it.
Relief spread through me at the interruption of Dvorak’s gaze. I blew out a breath and let my expression relax minutely. The contradicting sensation of pretending to be bored when I just wanted to scream at the man to get answers was stretching me taut.
“You’re doing great,” Voodoo said, cheerfulness bordering on suspicion. His emotional whiplash routine was getting absurd—skeptical, theatrical, grim, dismissive, repeat. “No, really. Keep monologuing. We’ll have a full organizational chart by dinner.”
Dvorak snarled.
“Clock’s ticking.” Bones deadpanned. “And we’ve got nowhere else to be.”
Nine hours. Nine grinding, strategized hours.
And finally—finally—after all of that, Dvorak broke. It didn’t happen slowly, even if we’d been wearing him down. After those initial slips, he’d grown almost stone-faced, refusing to say a word
He talked about La Madrina’s expansion, about Korkov’s role, about the syndicates she was stitching together like a patchwork empire.
It wasn’t a full picture—just enough to confirm they weren’t working alone, that the consortium was growing because they were taking over areas where other syndicates and cartels were waning.
It was kind of sickening, really, how proud he was of all his “successes,” like undercutting his competition before muscling them out. How he negotiated deals on fucking price control and market share. How they were utilizing new forms of advertising to get the message out.
The worst part was he could have been talking about cars or appliances for all the weight he put on the people who were their product. Beneath all of the nauseating details was the way he kept glancing at me. Particularly when Voodoo or Bones let him see me amidst their circling.
Their path confused and needled him because they didn’t allow him to control the narrative or hold their gazes. Literally, they took all of his agency. On some level, I’m sure that ate away at him without him even understanding that they were reducing him to “product” the same way he did others.
I kept my face blank. My pulse wasn’t.
When he finally sagged back in his chair, silent and shivering with exhaustion and fury, I rose. My legs were stiff from being still too long, but I kept it casual, stretching like this had all been tedious.
Bones shot me a question with his eyes.
I answered with a tiny shrug.
Because I didn’t know either.
But as I drifted out like I didn’t have a care in the world, something cold settled in my chest. Dvorak didn’t know me, but somehow he recognized me on some level? At this point, I didn’t know what was worse. Because if he didn’t know me, then he didn’t know Am.
That hurt a lot more than I expected it to. Because after that conversation, I should be much happier about the idea he didn’t know her.
The second the door sealed behind us, the silence hit different. Thicker. Cleaner. As if the air out here hadn’t been scraped thin by Dvorak’s voice and his arrogance and the nine-hour tug-of-war over his ego.
The soundproofing swallowed the last of him, and I hadn’t realized how tight my shoulders were until they dropped all at once.
The hallway outside the laundry room was washed in early sunrise—those pale, washed-out colors right before the sky decided what mood it wanted to have. Pink, blue, soft gold bleeding slowly through the reinforced windows like someone had dialed the saturation up too fast.
It was almost too bright.
I blinked against it, lifting a hand to shade my eyes. After hours in that dark, the light felt invasive.
Legend stood waiting for us, leaning against the wall with a tray balanced on one forearm. Breakfast sandwiches, bottled water, steaming coffee. Before anyone else could move, he crossed to me and put the coffee in my hands. Hot. Painfully so. Perfect.
He took the empty space in front of me without asking and wrapped me in a hug that was long and warm and grounding. I let my forehead rest briefly on his shoulder, inhaling the scent of soap and something faintly herbal.
“I got you,” he murmured. Not loud. Not for anyone else.
Then he stepped back, eyes scanning me once before he nodded like I’d passed some invisible assessment.
Bones and Voodoo grabbed their food automatically, both more tired than they’d admit. Bones’ jaw twitched. Voodoo scrubbed a hand over his face. Nine hours had to weigh on them too.
AB emerged as we reached the kitchen from the room he’d turned into a makeshift office, tablet in hand, bags under his eyes that were the perfect complement to our own.