I had told her with a closed door and seven words. With deliberate withdrawal of what she had needed. She had taken the information and made the only plan available to someonewho had been told that the instrument she had relied on was no longer hers to use.
I had been precise about the withdrawal. I had made sure she understood exactly what she had lost. I had stood in the penthouse at midnight and delivered the accounting with a level voice, and then I had touched her face—once, carefully, like a man saying goodbye to something—and then I had stepped back and removed my hands and turned away.
I had been punishing her.
I had told myself it was the line.
She had been recruited by people who had identified her grief and her anger. People who had made her an offer that looked like justice, and she had made choices inside that offer that had damaged things I valued. And I had responded by using what I knew about her against her. By offering the warmth and then withholding it at the exact moment the withholding would land hardest.
I was not better than Cruz because my instruments were more intimate.
The live feed showed the lobby. Empty at 5 am. The night shift security at his station, a man who had worked this building for three years and who believed, currently, that he was protecting the standard configuration.
He was not protecting the standard configuration. He was protecting a configuration that I had altered by telling Sofia she was outside it, and in the alteration, I had left a gap, and Cruz’s people had reached through the gap to the Monarch Club, and Sofia had gone alone because I had told her alone was what she was now.
She was in the building.
I had waited too long. I had held the line at the exact moment when holding it had pushed her further in rather than further out, when the line had functioned not as discipline but as the wall that closed the last exit.
I picked up my phone.
But I did not call her.
I set down the phone.
“Sergei,” I said.
He looked up from the technical station.
“The deadline. I need everything Cruz’s people have on their timeline for it. Who’s running the asset management on their end, what the escalation path looks like if she doesn’t comply, what contingencies they have, and what triggering those contingencies costs them.” I held his gaze. “I need it before tomorrow morning.”
He nodded. Turned back to the laptop. The machinery began.
I looked at the feed.
The lobby was still empty. The street outside was the same as it had been. Somewhere in the building above me, in the penthouse I had built and that had briefly been shared, Sofia was awake.
I was certain of this without the feed confirming it. She was awake the way she was always awake in the early hours.
I had already waited too long.
I was done waiting.
Chapter Twenty-One
Sofia
I noticed the coverage on Thursday morning.
Not Viktor’s—or not Viktor’s the way it had been before, the known surveillance of a man who had told me he was watching and had meant it as both warning and protection. This was different. It was the footprint of people who were trying not to be noticed rather than people who had decided they didn’t need to bother.
The car on the east side of the building was not the grey sedan. Different make, different plates, parked at a different angle, but the angle was wrong, being that it was chosen for sightlines rather than parking convenience. I had spent enough days being surveilled by professionals that I had developed, without intending to, a sensitivity to the difference between a parked car and a positioned car.
I noted it and kept walking.
Cruz’s people, following through on the Monarch Club’s implicit message about knowing my movements. Or Viktor’s people, reinstated after the confrontation, which would be either protection or monitoring, depending on what Viktor had decided. I did not know which. I had no way of knowing. Or maybe I didn’t want to.
I bought coffee. I walked three blocks and went back inside and sat in the penthouse that no longer felt like mine. I thought about the deadline and the plan I had been building since the Monarch Club, and the problem of executing it in a city that had eyes I couldn’t fully count.
