5. Sofia
SOFIA
Callahan handed me a phone case in an empty parking garage like we were trading state secrets, which, in a sense, we were.
"It's a phone case," I said, turning it over in my hands. It felt heavier than plastic had any right to feel.
"It's a phone case that also happens to record everything within thirty feet and transmit it to a server three federal agencies pretend they don't monitor. Snap it on your actual phone. Nobody looks twice at a phone case."
"And if someone does look twice?"
"Then you tell them it was a gift from your mother, who has terrible taste, and you change the subject.
" He leaned against the concrete pillar behind him, arms crossed, watching me the way he watched every piece of evidence before deciding whether to trust it.
"I need it inside Kuznetsov's office within the week.
A drawer, a shelf, anywhere it'll pick up a conversation that isn't about crane maintenance. "
"That's not a lot of runway."
"Eighty-three days left, Reyes. I'd rather not spend ten of them waiting on you to find your nerve."
"I have plenty of nerve."
"Then use some of it on this." He nodded at the case in my hand, and something in his voice went quieter, less procedural. "How was the dinner?"
The question landed harder than he probably meant it to, and I took a second longer than necessary to answer, aware of exactly which second I was choosing to leave out.
"Informative. His crew respects him, or fears him, or both. A debtor showed up drunk and got walked out in under two minutes without anyone raising a voice."
"That tracks with everything else we've got on him. Controlled. Efficient. No mess." Callahan studied me for a beat longer than the report required. "Anything else?"
"His brother called. Sounded normal. Worried, even."
"Bratva bosses have families too, Reyes. Doesn't make them any less dangerous when the phone's not ringing."
"I know that."
"Good. Keep knowing it." He pushed off the pillar, done with the conversation the way he was always done, all at once and without warning. "The wire, this week. Don't make me ask twice."
"Where does it go once it's transmitting? Who's listening?"
"A room full of people whose job is exactly that, and none of them care what his laugh sounds like. Just the deal, the names, the money. That's all this needs to be for you too."
"I know how the job works, Frank."
"I know you do. I'm just reminding you, because reminders are cheap and mistakes on this one won't be." He softened, barely, the way he did maybe twice a year. "You're good at this, Reyes. Don't let good turn into comfortable. Comfortable is how people miss the exit."
He left before I could tell him about the ten minutes before Andrei's call, the hand at my jaw, the half inch of nothing that had felt like the loudest thing that happened all night, and the excuse I'd given when my phone lit up with Callahan's name at exactly the wrong moment.
Maxim hadn't asked about the name on the screen. He'd just watched me silence it, walked me the rest of the way to my car without another word about it, and said good night like nothing had almost happened at all.
That should have reassured me. It didn't.
Some details didn't belong in a debrief. I told myself that was tradecraft and not cowardice, and mostly believed it.
My cover apartment sat two neighborhoods from the real one I hadn't slept in for close to a month, sparse enough that it still smelled like paint, most of the boxes from the move still taped shut because unpacking them felt like admitting I planned on staying.
I had exactly one kitchen drawer that opened without sticking. Everything else in the apartment fought me for one reason or another, drawers that jammed, a stove burner that only lit if you swore at it first, a closet door that had opinions about being closed.
I stood in the kitchen a long time holding the phone case, running through the logistics Callahan had given me: get inside the office, find a shelf, a drawer, a bookend, anything with enough cover to hide a listening device from a man who noticed everything.
I put it in my working drawer instead, underneath a stack of takeout menus I'd never call, and closed it.
That wasn't the plan. I knew that wasn't the plan the second I did it, and I did it anyway, some quiet, stubborn part of me choosing not to think too hard about why a week suddenly felt like it needed the whole week.
Nina texted before I'd finished convincing myself the delay meant nothing: lunch, now, don't argue.
I met her at the diner two blocks from the precinct, not the one Callahan liked, because some days a person needed a location that didn't carry any weight at all.
"You look like you haven't slept," she said, sliding into the booth across from me before I'd even set my bag down.
"I've slept."
"You've slept the way people say they've eaten when what they actually did was skip breakfast and call it fine." She flagged the waitress, ordered for both of us without asking, and turned the full weight of her attention on me like a spotlight. "Talk."
"There's nothing to talk about."
"Reyes. I've known you four years. I know what your face looks like when there's nothing to talk about, and this isn't it." She leaned forward, elbows on the table, delighted in the specific way she only got when she smelled a story. "Is it the hot boss? Tell me it's the hot boss."
"There's no hot boss."
"The hot boss. The one old enough to have a mortgage paid off.
" She said it with the perfect deadpan of a woman who had been saving the line for days, and something about the exact phrasing, mortgage paid off, so far from anything either of us would say about a target, cracked me open enough that I laughed for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit.
"He's not that old."
"So there is a hot boss."
"I didn't say that."
"You laughed. You never laugh at my jokes unless I've accidentally hit something true." She sat back, victorious, and softened when she saw whatever was actually on my face underneath the laugh. "What happened?"
"Dinner. His family. His crew. It was..." I searched for a word that wouldn't give away more than I meant to. "Complicated."
"Complicated like you like him, or complicated like the case is a mess?"
"Complicated like I'm not supposed to know what his laugh sounds like, and I do."
Nina went quiet at that, quiet enough that I knew she'd heard the whole thing underneath the sentence, and reached across the table to squeeze my hand once, no jokes left in it.
"Be careful, Sofia. I'm not saying that as your partner. I'm saying it as the person who has to explain to your mother if this goes sideways."
"Nothing's going sideways."
"Everything you've said in the last five minutes says sideways." She let go of my hand, softer now. "Just watch yourself. You're allowed to like someone. You're not allowed to forget who signs your paycheck while you're doing it."
"I know the difference."
"I hope you do." She stole a fry off my plate, back to herself as fast as she'd left. "Now tell me if he's actually as hot as the file photo makes him look, because that picture did not do the man justice if half of what I'm reading off your face is accurate."
I didn't answer that one directly, and she let me get away with it, more kindness than the moment probably earned.
"For what it's worth," she said, quieter now, pushing the last fry toward my side of the plate like a peace offering, "I've seen you talk about this job since the day you got it.
I've never once seen you look like this talking about a target.
That's not me warning you. That's just me telling you what I'm seeing. "
"What are you seeing?"
"Someone who forgot to be scared of something she's supposed to be scared of." She shrugged, like she hadn't just landed something that sat in my chest for the rest of the afternoon. "Eat your fries before I take them back."
Night came slow after that, the apartment quieter than it had any right to be for a place with this many boxes still in it.
I made tea I didn't drink, read three pages of a file I already had memorized, and ended up standing in the kitchen again, staring at the one drawer that opened without a fight.
The wire sat under the takeout menus exactly where I'd left it, patient in the way only inanimate objects could afford to be. I could open the drawer, snap the case onto my phone, and have it inside Maxim's office within a day if I wanted to.
I didn't want to. That was the part I couldn't make sense of, standing there at midnight arguing with a piece of furniture like it might have an opinion worth hearing.
I had spent four years on the job, and I had never once hesitated on a wire. Wires were just tools, no different from a badge or a gun, pieces of equipment that did a job I'd agreed to do the day I signed up.
This one felt different, like a decision I hadn't finished making, sitting in a drawer, waiting for me to be braver or more foolish, and I genuinely couldn't tell which one would win.
I thought about the version of tonight where I did my job the way I always had, no hesitation, no second look at the drawer, the case snapped onto my phone before I'd even taken my coat off.
That version of me would have been inside Maxim's office within a day, wire planted, case closed months ahead of schedule, Callahan calling me his best read on a room and meaning it.
That version of me hadn't met him yet, not really. She'd read a file and studied a photograph and decided a man could be reduced to both of those things.
Standing there in a kitchen that still smelled like paint, I almost envied her. I wished I still believed the job was that simple.
I closed the drawer again and went to bed without answering the question, which was, I suspected, an answer all on its own.
Two brisk knocks woke me sometime near dawn, quick and gone before I'd even made it off the couch where I'd fallen asleep instead of the bed I never used.
I opened the door to an empty hallway, nobody in either direction, no footsteps retreating on the stairs, no sound of anyone at all.
On the mat sat a single cup of black coffee, no sugar, no cream, exactly the way I'd been drinking it since I was old enough to need it, no note tucked under the lid, no name scrawled anywhere that would have needed one.
I picked it up and stood there in the doorway a long moment, coffee warm enough that it hadn't been sitting long, warm enough that whoever left it had been standing exactly where I was standing only minutes before.
Nobody outside Callahan and Nina knew this address. I hadn't told Maxim where I lived, not the real answer and not the cover one, and yet here it was anyway, proof that a man who ran an entire terminal without raising his voice had found a much smaller thing worth the effort of finding quietly.
It should have terrified me. A target learning your address without being told was the kind of detail that belonged in a report, flagged, escalated, treated like the warning it almost certainly was.
Instead I stood there in bare feet on a cold floor, holding a coffee I hadn't asked for, feeling something dangerously close to flattered.
My professional resolve, the version of me that knew better, that had a wire locked in a kitchen drawer and eighty-three days on a clock and a partner who'd told her to be careful, did not survive the smell of it.
I drank it anyway.