Chapter Twenty-One
Sofia
I noticed the coverage on Thursday morning.
Not Viktor’s—or not Viktor’s the way it had been before, the known surveillance of a man who had told me he was watching and had meant it as both warning and protection.
This was different. It was the footprint of people who were trying not to be noticed rather than people who had decided they didn’t need to bother.
The car on the east side of the building was not the grey sedan.
Different make, different plates, parked at a different angle, but the angle was wrong, being that it was chosen for sightlines rather than parking convenience.
I had spent enough days being surveilled by professionals that I had developed, without intending to, a sensitivity to the difference between a parked car and a positioned car.
I noted it and kept walking.
Cruz’s people, following through on the Monarch Club’s implicit message about knowing my movements.
Or Viktor’s people, reinstated after the confrontation, which would be either protection or monitoring, depending on what Viktor had decided.
I did not know which. I had no way of knowing. Or maybe I didn’t want to.
I bought coffee. I walked three blocks and went back inside and sat in the penthouse that no longer felt like mine. I thought about the deadline and the plan I had been building since the Monarch Club, and the problem of executing it in a city that had eyes I couldn’t fully count.
The plan was not complicated because complicated plans failed at the points of complexity.
The principle was simple: misdirection. Give Cruz’s people something that looked like cooperation—surface information, nothing precise, nothing that could be used to hurt anyone—while buying the time required to make myself genuinely hard to find.
Not permanently. Long enough. Long enough for ‘what’ exactly, I was still working out, but the working out felt less urgent than the buying of time.
The execution was harder than the principle.
The information had to be real enough to satisfy without being actionable.
Cruz’s people were not amateurs—they had been running assets for years, they knew the difference between genuine intelligence and a fed narrative, they had the context to cross-reference what I gave them against what they already had.
Giving them something too convenient would register as deception.
Giving them nothing would trigger the documentation release.
The margin between those two outcomes was narrow and required precision I did not currently have because my knowledge of Viktor’s current operations was exactly what it should be, given that he had told me I was no longer inside his protection: limited.
Which was, from a certain angle, useful.
I could give them limited information credibly.
I could give them the information of a woman who had been cut off—who had been told she was outside the structure—and whose access had therefore narrowed to what was visible from the outside.
That was not a fabrication. That was true.
The information I could provide was genuinely less than what they had been hoping for, which meant I was not constructing a lie but simply delivering the truth of my reduced position.
The trick was making the reduced position look like an asset still trying rather than an asset burning her own usefulness.
I spent several hours working on the framing.
I did not contact Isla. I had not been in contact with Isla for four days, which was the longest gap in our communication since I had started working at the Golovin Casino.
I also did not contact Elena.
Elena had sent two messages in two days, both in the tone she used when she was concerned but was choosing not to escalate—light in tone, heavily loaded in subtext.
“Mikhail is making borsch, which means he’s either stressed or nostalgic, I can never tell which. Are you eating? Tell me you’re eating.”
And then, twelve hours later:
“Viktor seems like he’s working a lot. Is everything okay?”
The careful innocuousness of those messages made them harder to ignore than direct questions would have been. I read them both, typed, and deleted three different responses and closed the thread.
I could not bring Elena into this. Elena was Mikhail’s, and Mikhail was Viktor’s brother, and whatever I was doing in the next 24 hours was going to have consequences that I could not fully map, and I was not going to route those consequences through Elena.
The isolation was heavy in a way I had not expected.
I had lived alone for years, had been self-sufficient as a structural component of daily functioning.
I had been good at being alone. I had, at various points, preferred it.
The preference had been real: the specific peace of a life that did not require management of anyone else’s needs or presence, that existed cleanly within its own parameters.
This was not that kind of alone.
This was the ‘alone’ of someone who had had something and had lost it—or broken it, or been part of breaking it, the causality still not fully untangled—and was now in the absence that followed.
I ate because I needed to eat. I slept in short intervals because my body required them. I worked on the plan because the plan was the only instrument I currently had, and instruments required maintenance.
The next meeting with Cruz’s network was all I had to look forward to, as ironic as that sounded.
*****
I went back to the penthouse on Friday afternoon.
I had been in and out over the two days.
Technically, it was still where I was staying, the departure I had packed for on Wednesday night having been postponed indefinitely by the Monarch Club meeting and the subsequent reconfiguration of what was available to me.
But Friday afternoon felt different from the ordinary returns.
I came in through the lobby with my bag, and I stood in the entrance of the main room and looked at it.
The penthouse had always looked like Viktor, and I had thought that from the first night. I stood in it now with the awareness of someone visiting rather than inhabiting, with the regard of a person who understands that the context of a place has changed.
I almost hoped he would be there.
I missed him.
The plainness of that, the simple, specific accuracy of it, settled into my chest with the weight of something true.
I missed the feel of a space when Viktor occupied it.
I missed the footsteps I had learned. The coffee pot at its morning level.
The study door that had felt like privacy and then felt like punishment.
I missed the forehead kiss. That was the most specific thing I was not going to examine too closely—that had been the most uncomplicated thing he had ever done with me.
He was not there.
He had been here this morning, or recently, the coffee pot not at its overnight level. He had been here and had not been here when I arrived.
That absence made something clear in me that the presence might not have.
I had been building a plan that was about disappearing.
Surface information to Cruz’s people, a misdirection, then gone—out of Las Vegas, out of the network’s reach, out of the geometry of this war that I had walked into through a wrong hallway and a worse series of subsequent decisions.
Gone was clean. Gone was outside the blast radius.
Gone was the version of this that didn’t end with someone I could not afford to lose being damaged by the consequences of my choices.
Standing in the empty penthouse, I understood that gone was also the version that did not require anything from Viktor.
That did not require me to bring to him what I knew, what I had been told, what the Monarch Club meeting had revealed about the Friday deadline and Cruz’s escalating demands.
That did not require me to walk back into the weight of what I had done and ask for something I had been told I no longer had access to.
Gone was easier. Gone was the option that kept the confrontation in the past, where it had happened, rather than requiring a new one.
I sat on the edge of the sofa.
I took out my phone.
I opened a new recording. Voice memo. Held the phone and looked at the wall.
“I was wrong,” I said.
My voice came out quiet in the penthouse’s silence. I kept going.
“The anger was real. My father was real. What happened to him was real, and the people who ran the system that did it to him were real. All of that is true.” I sighed slowly.
“And I took that truth, and I used it to give myself permission for choices that were not about my father; they were about me. About having something that was mine in a situation where everything felt like it had been taken.” A pause.
“The footage. The reception.” I stopped.
“You did not build the thing that killed my father. You are not innocent—I’m not going to say that, it wouldn’t be honest. But you didn’t kill him.
And I came into your house, and I used what you gave me as a weapon and told myself it was justice. ”
I looked at my left hand. At the ring.
“I don’t know what this is,” I said. “What we are. What it would have been if I hadn’t—” I stopped.
“I know what it was becoming. I know what the desert was, and what the night after the wedding was, and what it meant that I kept the ring. I know those things. And I also know I chose something else alongside them, and I can’t make those two things coexist in a way that makes me the person I want to be. ”
I held the phone for a moment.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s what I mean.”
I looked at the recording. My voice in a penthouse that had briefly been mine, saying the things I had been accumulating in my mind since the night when Viktor had walked out.
I held my thumb over the delete button.
An apology was not what this required. Honesty was for after. If there was an after. Honesty was for the version of this that had survived to the point where things could be said to the person they were meant for rather than into a voice memo in an empty room.
I deleted it.
I stood up. Picked up my bag. Looked at the penthouse one more time.
I left.
*****
The text to Cruz’s contact went out at 6 pm.
“Confirmed meeting tomorrow. I have what you asked for.”
What I had was not what they had asked for.
What I had was the surface-level configuration of Viktor’s publicly visible schedule—information that was available through the casino’s promotional channels, that any observer could have assembled—dressed in the language of insider access.
The framing would matter more than the content.
The framing needed to look like a woman delivering what she had managed to gather from a reduced position, doing her best with limited access, still cooperative enough to be worth the continued patience Cruz’s network was deciding whether to extend.
It would buy me time.
The plan was not to attend the noon meeting.
The plan was to send the surface information ahead of time—enough to satisfy the immediate compliance check—and use the window to make the kind of movement that was difficult to follow when done correctly.
Not disappearing from Las Vegas permanently, not with Elena here and Isla here.
But disappearing from the network’s immediate reach.
Breaking the contact rhythm, breaking the monitoring pattern, inserting myself into a configuration that required them to find me again before they could use me again.
The gap between being found and being useful might be enough.
Enough for ‘what,’ I still did not have the answer to.
I stepped out of the elevator into the lobby and kept my face directed forward, my stride even, and my shoulders back.
I did not look for the covered position on the east side of the building because looking for it would tell the watcher I had found it, and I needed the watcher—whoever the watcher was—to believe they still had the version of me that didn’t know.
I turned right.
The plan was mine. The execution was mine.
I had built it out of what I had, which was incomplete information, a suitcase I’d repacked, and the stubbornness of someone who had been portable her whole life and had not lost the skill of it even after two weeks of believing, briefly, that she had found somewhere she could stop moving.
I was moving again.
I walked in the direction of the bus stop and did not look back at the building.
I’ll have to face whatever comes out of this.