Page 13 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
Her eyes went sharp. “I’d call it refusing to be managed.”
“There’s a distinction between refusing to be managed and walking toward the thing you claim to be afraid of.”
“I told you. I’m not afraid of you.”
“Yes.” I looked at her. “You’ve said that several times.”
“Why haven’t you?” she started, and then stopped. “You could have killed me,” she said. “That night. It would have been—” she searched for the word. “Simpler.”
“Yes.”
“So why didn’t you?”
I looked at her face. The eyeliner she had drawn on was like a preparation for battle. The lipstick she wore was like a position. The directness in her eyes that had not wavered once in our entire short and strange acquaintance, not in that corridor, not on this floor, and clearly not in this moment.
She stared at me. She had expected denial, or threat, or the smooth deflection of a man who had rehearsed his story. The honesty of my silence had disarmed her in a way. I could see that.
The moment stretched.
“Go back to work,” I said.
She went. She turned and walked away. And, this time, I watched her go with something I did not try to justify as aprofessional assessment. No one was here, after all. So I simply watched her because she was walking away and I was staying, and the distance between those two things had begun to feel, somewhere in the past week, less like a default and more like a choice I was making and would eventually need to revisit.
*****
I drove home at 3:23 am and sat in the car for a moment before going inside.
Distance was no longer a functional option. I had tried it—or tried a version of it, the version where I told myself I was conducting surveillance while committing what was plainly something other than surveillance. The version where close monitoring from a position of professional removal would be sufficient to contain the variables.
It wasn’t sufficient. She was not the kind of variable that reduced under observation. She compounded.
What needed to happen was becoming clear to me with the slow, reluctant clarity of something I had been looking away from for long enough that I had run out of directions to look. Sofia Reyes was a witness I could not eliminate, could not ignore, and could not manage from a distance, and the distance was no longer purely a tactical problem.
She needed to be closer. The risk required proximity.Irequired proximity, and I wasn’t going to give myself a headache by delving into the why.
I would need to be precise about the approach. Unsubtle moves would produce resistance, and she was not a woman who responded to force by becoming smaller. She responded to force by looking straight at the source of it and refusing to blink.Whatever I built would need to be constructed carefully—each piece reasonable, each step logical, nothing that couldn’t survive scrutiny.
The groundwork would take a few days.
I got out of the car and went inside. Lying in the dark, I thought about dark eyes and red lipstick.
I did not sleep for a long time.
Chapter Five
Sofia
I noticed the car on a Tuesday.
Dark grey sedan, American make, parked across from my building when I left for my shift at 9 pm. It was there when I came home at 3 am in the morning. Different spot—street cleaning on the east side pushed it half a block north—but the same car, same plates, same slight tint on the windows that was just dark enough to obscure the driver without being dark enough to be illegal. I noticed it the way you notice something that doesn’t belong, the way a wrong note sounds in a song you’ve heard a thousand times: not with alarm at first, but with the inevitable unease of a pattern interrupted.
I told myself it was a coincidence.
The following evening, a security guard I had never seen before was stationed at the entrance to my apartment building’s parking structure. No lanyard, no uniform—but the posture was unmistakable. He had the stillness of someone doing surveillance work and trying to look like they were doing nothing.
I walked past him without stopping and went upstairs.
On the third night, it all came together. A man at the coffee cart two blocks from the casino, present when I arrived, present when I left. I had seen him before. Not here, not in this context—it took me until I was on the bus home to place him. The east mezzanine. Golovin security. He had been rotating between floors the week before.
