Coffee at a counter service place three blocks from the building, the kind of place where nobody looked at anyone. The early shift newspaper at a rack outside. A walk that was also a survey of the environment, the kind of walk I had learned to take, noting who was on the street, who repeated across a distance, whether the monitoring Cruz had demonstrated was present in physical form as well as digital.
A man in a grey jacket appeared at the corner of Flamingo when I doubled back on my route. He had been at the coffee place, in my peripheral vision, and was now on a different block in the same general direction.
I stopped at a drugstore. Bought things I needed for that evening—nothing unusual, nothing that could be read as preparation for anything specific.
The grey-jacket man was not outside when I came out. Either he had continued past, or he had been replaced. I considered both possibilities and kept walking.
By noon, I was back at the penthouse.
Viktor's study door was open.
He was not inside the study. I did not see him. The coffee pot was at its morning level, a file was closed on the desk, both things meant someone had been here and had gone.
I got dressed for the meeting.
Not seductively—I was not going to walk into whatever Cruz's representatives had arranged, looking like I was performing anything. Not submissively, either. I chose the clothes I usually chose when I needed to be taken seriously while revealing nothing about my state: well-fitted, dark, nothing that communicated either appeal or fear. The visual equivalent of the casino smile—made to an exact degree, deployed for a specific purpose, giving nothing away that wasn't intentional.
I looked at myself in the mirror once.
Then I stepped out.
*****
The Monarch Club was what it had been described as—a closed venue with its renovation signage still in the front windows, the kind of space that had learned to keep its useful interior operational while maintaining the fiction of dormancy.
The door opened onto a lounge that had the aesthetic of somewhere that had stopped trying to look legitimate some time ago.
There were two men at a corner table. I had expected more—Cruz's operation ran on hierarchy, and hierarchy usually required display. Two men suggested either that they were very confident or that the display was elsewhere.
Both, I decided, when I reached the table and sat down.
The one on the left was the type I had noticed before across the casino floor—forties, functional, expensive clothing, trained stillness that was professional rather than unusual. He introduced himself as Marco, which I did not believe was his name. The one on the right was younger and said nothing, just watched me with blatant attention.
"Sofia Golovin," the first man said. Using Viktor's name. Deliberate.
"Sofia Reyes," I corrected calmly.
He smiled with the lower portion of his face only. "Viktor's war is escalating," he said. "I'm sure you're aware. The reception was a demonstration of capacity. What comes next is a demonstration of reach." He folded his hands on the table. "We've been patient with the pace of your contributions. The patience has reached its functional limit."
"You told me to meet you," I said. "I'm here. Say what you mean."
He looked at me for a moment before speaking.
"We need Viktor's operation disrupted from the inside. Not incrementally. Substantially." He slid a folded paper across the table. I did not touch it. "Access points. Security rotation timing for the primary building. The command center's backup power configuration."
"I don't have access to his operational read," I said.
"You share his bed." The phrasing was clinical, not leering. "Access is a function of proximity."
"I am no longer—" I stopped. "The configuration has changed."
Both men looked at me.
"Viktor knows there's a leak," I said. "He doesn't know the full scope. But the access I had to his operational thinking is no longer available." I held the first man's gaze. "Which you would know if your intelligence about the penthouse was as good as you've implied."
A pause.
"Then we have a timeline problem," he said. "Because what you've described is an asset that has been identified and is therefore expiring. Expiring assets create specific risks." He looked at the younger man briefly and then back at me. "We have contingencies for expiring assets."
