Page 52 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
He understood what that meant. That I was giving her the conversation before I gave the information to Mikhail, which was not operationally correct and was the choice I was making anyway, and he was acknowledging that choice without requiring me to explain it.
“Understood,” he said.
He left.
I sat in the office for a long time after he was gone.
I had told myself, when I had decided to keep Sofia close, that the decision was a strategy. That proximity was control, and control was protection. That the whole architecture of it was operational. I had told myself this with decreasing conviction over the weeks that had followed, through the corridors and the confrontations and the ceremony and the desert, until I had arrived at a point where I was not telling myself anything at all except that she was mine and I wanted her to be.
The facts remained true now.
That was exactly what was scraping at my chest—not rage, not the cold operational fury of a man whose perimeter has been breached. Something that required the breach to have mattered to hurt the way it hurt.
I had been real with her.
Whatever Sofia was hiding, whatever she had been doing, whatever the arrangement was between her and Cruz’s people and the footage and the reception and all of it—I was going to hear it from her.
Not from a folder. Not from signal traces and metadata, and the probability assessments of analysts who were very good at their jobs and had never stood under desert stars with the person they were analyzing. From her voice, her face, the dark eyes that did not look away from difficult things when she had decided to be honest.
Ifthere was really something to find out.
I needed to know if she had ever decided to be honest with me.
The casino hummed around me as it always hummed.
I’ll hear it from her.
Chapter Seventeen
Sofia
The messages had changed in tone.
That was the first thing I noticed. The early communications from Cruz’s network had been professional in an almost courteous way: requests framed as requests, information characterized as necessary rather than compulsory, the language of a transaction between parties with mutual interest. The language had assumed I was a willing participant who might occasionally require persuasion. It had treated me like a collaborator.
The message I read on Wednesday at 6:47 am, standing in the penthouse bathroom with the shower running to cover the light from the secondary phone’s screen, did not treat me like a collaborator.
“You have provided nothing actionable in six days. Full cooperation by Friday or we make the choice for you.”
I read it repeatedly, then I put the phone in the cabinet behind the spare towels and stood in the bathroom with the shower running.
Friday. Two days.
The threat was not violence. It was more precise than violence—violence could be survived, could be documented, could be brought to whoever you brought violence to when it happened. This was a designed threat.
I turned the shower off and went to get dressed.
The penthouse in the morning had a feel I had not adjusted to in two weeks of living in it. The quiet of it—not the uneasy quiet of a space where something was wrong, but the specific stillness of a place that had been designed to contain rather than display, where every surface was clear, and every item earned its space. Viktor’s version of order. I had thought, when I first saw it, that it looked like him. I thought that every morning now, which was itself a kind of adjustment, the accumulation of mornings in a space until it stopped being someone else’s space and started being yours.
Viktor had been up for an hour when I came out. I could tell by the coffee—fresh, the pot at the halfway point, one cup already used, rinsed, and turned upside down on the drying rack. He was at his desk in the study with the door partially open, which was how he worked when he was in the penthouse—present but contained, the open door a concession to shared space rather than an invitation.
“Coffee,” he said, without looking up.
“I know where it is.”
I poured a cup and stood at the kitchen window. I had worked enough night shifts to know this hour from the inside. I knew which food carts were open and how long the all-night pharmacies took to restock and what the air smelled like on the sidewalk at 7 am.
I knew the real version.
