Page 6 of Obsessed Bratva's Pregnant Claim
Elena Morozova. Listed under personal contacts. Best friend.
Elena Golovina now. My new sister-in-law and the wife of the absolute ruler of the Golovin Bratva, Mikhail. My older brother.
Mikhail would not appreciate unnecessary complications. Elena was his. That made Sofia adjacent to protected, not because I answered to sentiment, but because Mikhail’s stability was part of the structure I maintained, and the structure did not benefit from fracture points. Killing Sofia would create a fracture point.
This was what I told myself.
I poured the vodka down the sink and went to get my car.
Her building was twelve minutes from the casino. I had already, without deciding to, noted the direction she had walked when she left through the east entrance at 1:43 am. The address in her file only gave me the specifics.
I parked across the street and left the engine on.
The building was ordinary. Four stories, exterior corridors, the kind of property that was kept clean enough without being maintained well enough. A city that ran on fantasy had a great deal of this just behind the neon—ordinary buildings full of ordinary people doing the unglamorous labor that made the fantasy possible. Sofia Reyes lived on the third floor, east-facing, which I knew because on the third floor, east side, a light came on at 1:49 am.
I watched the window.
She paced. I could see the shadow of it—the light changing as she moved through the room, the brief stillness, then the movement again. Back and forth. Back and forth. A person working through something too large to sit still with.
While I reminded myself that I had no reason for investment in her interior state, I didn’t look away from her window.
The pacing slowed. Then it stopped. Then, after a few minutes, the light shifted to what I recognized as the warmer quality of a bedside lamp. Then that, too, went out.
I sat in the dark for another twenty minutes.
I told myself I was ensuring she didn’t contact anyone. That this was threat management: observing the subject duringthe highest-risk window, the immediate hours when panic most often produces poor decisions and poor decisions produce exposure. This was entirely standard.
I sat in the dark outside her building for another twenty minutes.
*****
She came back to work the next day.
I had expected… well, not fragility but some kind of tiny indication of being shaken. The visible seams of a girl held together poorly. A girl who had watched a man die and carried it on her face.
Sofia Reyes came back to work with her eyeliner sharp, her lipstick red, and her chin at an angle that suggested she was daring someone to say something about it.
I watched her on the floor from the mezzanine level, where I had a sightline over the whole casino without being visible from below. This was a thing I did regularly and for legitimate professional reasons. The fact that my attention had narrowed to one person on a floor of several hundred was not something I wanted to think about.
On the second evening, she saw me.
She was crossing below the mezzanine with a loaded tray when she looked up—not accidentally, not a glance. She looked up the way people look at things they have been tracking in their peripheral vision. Directly. Deliberately.
Her eyes found mine.
She held them there for two seconds, three, long enough that it could not be mistaken for an accident. Then she looked away and kept walking, the tray level, her stride unbroken.
My hand tightened on the railing.
I had spent twenty years in rooms with men who were afraid of me. I had learned to read fear the way other people read text—automatically, without effort, the meaning arriving before the conscious mind had finished processing the signal.
She was not afraid of me.
Or she was, and she had made a decision about what she was going to do with the fear, and the decision was this: eyes up, chin level, stride unbroken. Direct eye contact in a casino where most of the staff had learned, by some form of occupational osmosis, to look slightly to the left of me when I passed.
It was the most destabilizing thing anyone had done to me in recent memory. I did not enjoy that.
She was chaos. That was the word that kept arriving. It was not a word I used for people, because people were systems and systems could be understood and managed, but chaos implied something outside the ordinary reach of management. She was loud in ways that had nothing to do with volume. She was present in a room in a way that pulled attention without appearing to want it. She argued with the cocktail waitress at the adjacent station about something involving the tip pool and won without raising her voice and smiled at a guest thirty seconds later as if she had been doing nothing else.
