15. Sofia
SOFIA
Two days since that hallway outside the back room, and I still hadn't found a way to stop picturing something worse than Kowalski's face every time I closed my eyes, the exact kind of controlled quiet that scared me more than shouting ever could have.
I told myself the distance was caution. Somewhere underneath that excuse, I knew it was closer to fear, or something too near fear to feel comfortable naming out loud.
Maxim found me near the office door that afternoon, arms crossed, watching me with the quiet attention of a man tallying every small thing that had changed about a person he thought he already understood.
"You've been quiet," he said, not quite a question.
"Long week." The lie came easier than it should have, given how little practice I'd actually needed for it lately.
"You've said that before." He studied me a moment longer, something careful behind his eyes that I didn't have the energy to examine too closely. "If something's wrong, I want to know."
"Nothing's wrong, Maxim." I said it too fast, the same mistake Kowalski had made in that room two days earlier, and I hated myself a little for noticing the parallel. "I'm just tired."
He let it go without pushing further, though I could feel him deciding not to, and sent me off with a look I couldn't fully read and a promise to call if I needed anything, one we both understood I had no intention of keeping.
I'd kept the visits short since then, kept my answers shorter, and I was halfway down the compound hallway toward the door when my phone rang with a number I'd memorized well enough to recognize from the first two digits alone.
"You've gone quiet on me," Callahan said, no hello, the same way he always started.
"I've been busy."
"You've been quiet for two days, Reyes. That's not busy. That's something else." There was a pause, the kind he used when he wanted the silence to do the work for him. "What happened?"
"Nothing happened."
"Reyes."
"I'm handling it." The words came out sharper than I meant them to, frustration finally finding somewhere to go. "I don't need you cataloging my mood from a desk two miles away."
"I'll catalog whatever keeps you alive out there. That's the job." His voice sharpened, the patience running thin underneath it. "Sixty-five days left on this thing, and you sound like a woman looking over her own shoulder. Talk to me."
I stopped walking, pressing my back against the hallway wall where nobody would see my face if it slipped.
"I watched him do something," I said, choosing the words carefully, giving him just enough to be true without giving him the whole shape of it. "Nothing violent. That's what scared me. How controlled it was."
Callahan went quiet for a long moment, and when he spoke again, something in his voice had shifted into the tone he used when he thought he'd won an argument he hadn't actually been having.
"See? Exactly what we said he was. Finish it."
"That's not what I said, Frank."
"You didn't have to say it. You've been saying it with two days of one word answers and a voice that sounds like it's been sanded down to nothing." He exhaled, sharp. "Get me something I can use before this drags out any longer than it needs to. I mean it, Reyes."
He hung up before I could answer that, which had become his signature move lately, an exit that left me standing in an empty hallway with a dead line and no good way to argue with a man who wasn't there to hear it.
I made it to my car before the second call came, an unfamiliar number, no name attached, and something in my chest went cold before I'd even answered it.
"Sofia Reyes." It was a man's voice, calm, almost warm, the kind of warmth that made my skin crawl worse than a threat would have. "You got my card."
I didn't answer right away, my hand tightening on the wheel.
"Who is this?"
"You already know. I think you've known since the parking lot." A small, pleased sound came through the line, like he was enjoying himself. "Liam Doyle. I imagine Maxim's mentioned my name once or twice by now."
"How did you get this number?"
"I make it my business to know things, Miss Reyes.
That's rather the point of this call." Nothing was rushed in his tone, nothing that suggested I'd rattled him in the slightest. "Consider it a small demonstration of what I'm capable of, and imagine what I could do with cooperation instead of caution. "
My pulse climbed, steady and fast, the old training clicking into place underneath the fear.
"I don't know what you think I can do for you."
"I think you can do plenty. I think a woman running logistics for Kuznetsov sees every manifest before it clears that dock, every schedule, every route.
" His voice stayed easy, reasonable, like he was offering me a business deal instead of a betrayal.
"I'm offering real money for information that costs you nothing but a phone call.
Shipment schedules. Nothing more than that.
I'll even throw in protection, since a woman in your position could probably use some. "
"I'm not interested."
"You haven't heard the number yet."
"I don't need to hear it." My voice came out steadier than I felt, four years of training holding the line my actual nerves couldn't have held alone. "Whatever you think I am, you're wrong. Don't call this number again."
"That's a shame." There was no anger in it, which somehow unsettled me more than anger would have. "People change their minds, Miss Reyes. I can be patient."
I hung up on him mid-sentence, my hand shaking hard enough that I dropped the phone into my lap instead of the cupholder, and sat there in the driver's seat a long moment, breathing through a fear that didn't have anywhere obvious to go.
I didn't tell Callahan about that call. I didn't tell Maxim either, not that night, not with my hands still unsteady enough to give the whole thing away the second I opened my mouth.
My phone buzzed twenty minutes later, Nina, checking in with her usual bluntness.
"You alive over there?"
"Barely surviving on caffeine and bad decisions." I typed the lie without much thought, grateful for once that texting hid a shaking hand better than a phone call would have.
"Drinks this week?"
"Ask me later. Rough day." I didn't have it in me to promise anything further out than that.
By the time my shift ended that evening, I'd almost talked myself into believing the day was over, that Doyle's voice would stay confined to a phone line and nothing more.
I'd shaken my detail somewhere around the second block without fully deciding to, an old instinct from four years of training that still worked whether or not I meant to use it that night.
I took the long way after that, three extra blocks I didn't examine too closely, the kind of route a person takes when she wants time alone with her own head instead of company she hadn't earned yet.
The garage sat half empty at that hour, fluorescent lights buzzing in a way that made everything look slightly wrong, my footsteps echoing louder than they should have across two empty levels before I reached my car.
I had my keys out, one hand already on the door, when I heard the second set of footsteps, unhurried, deliberately loud enough that I understood I was meant to hear them coming.
Two men stepped out from between a pillar and a parked van, close enough that running wasn't going to be an option I actually had.
"Evening, Reyes." The taller one smiled, easy and wrong, the kind of smile that never once touched his eyes. "We heard you might want to make some real money."
"I already told your boss I'm not interested."
"You said that to the boss too. He mentioned you might need convincing.
" The second man moved to my left, cutting off the angle toward the stairwell, casual about it in a way that told me he'd done this before.
"It's a good offer. Better than good, considering what you'd be walking away with otherwise. "
My back hit the cold metal of my car door, training screaming at me to assess exits, count distances, find the version of this that ended with me walking away instead of the version that didn't.
"You're making a mistake." I kept my voice level, refusing to let it shake even as my pulse hammered loud enough to drown out my own thoughts. "I don't work for you, and I'm not going to."
"Everybody works for somebody, sweetheart." The taller one stepped closer, close enough that I could smell cigarettes and something sharper underneath it. "Question is whether you get paid for it or just get hurt for it."
"Touch me and every camera in this garage becomes a problem for whoever sent you." I nodded toward the ceiling without looking away from him, betting everything on a bluff about cameras I hadn't actually confirmed were working. "Doyle strikes me as a man who prefers his problems quiet."
The second man's eyes flicked upward despite himself, just for a second, and something in his confidence wavered enough for me to notice it.
"She's got a mouth on her."
"I've heard that a lot lately."
I didn't see where the third set of headlights came from, only the sudden white wash of them sweeping across the concrete, tires screaming loud enough to bounce off every wall in that garage.
Then Maxim was there, moving faster than I had ever seen a person move, faster than I'd known a body that size could move at all.
He hit the taller man before either of them registered he'd crossed the distance between the car and the pillar. After that I stopped being able to track the shape of what was happening, only the sound of it, brutal and fast and over almost before it had properly started.
The second man ran. He didn't get far.
I don't remember deciding to close my eyes. I remember opening them again to Maxim's hand on my arm, steady despite everything I had just watched him do, pulling me toward his car without a single word.
He checked me over before he checked anything else, hands quick and clinical along my arms and shoulders, tilting my chin up into what little light the garage offered like he needed to confirm with his own eyes that nothing on me was broken.
Whatever he found, or didn't find, seemed to be the only thing that mattered to him in that moment, more than the men on the ground behind us, more than anything else in that entire garage.
I didn't ask how he'd known where to find me. I would spend weeks turning that question over without ever landing on an answer that satisfied me, some part of me suspecting I didn't actually want to know how deep his reach into my life had already gone.
He didn't ask why Doyle's men had wanted me specifically, out of every worker on that dock, out of every name that could have ended up on whatever list had put my face in front of two strangers in a parking garage.
I didn't offer him an answer, and the not asking felt heavier than any question could have.
The drive back passed in complete silence, streetlights washing over his jaw in slow pulses, his knuckles pale and split against the wheel, my own hands shaking in my lap no matter how hard I pressed them flat.
Neither of us said a single word the whole way home.
I had spent four years believing I understood risk, the theoretical kind that lived in case files and cold statistics, the kind that never quite touched skin.
Sitting there with my hands shaking in my lap and his knuckles split against the wheel, I understood for the first time that the danger in this job had stopped being a number on a page. It had a face now, two of them, and it knew exactly where to find me.