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He opened the folder and slid a printed page across the table—an IP address, a timestamp, a submission log that matched dates I remembered too clearly to pretend otherwise.

I didn’t touch them. I didn’t need to read them twice to know exactly what they proved.

“Your information triggered three separate federal investigations,” he said. “That’s real. That matters. But anonymous submissions don’t take down an organization like the Golovins’. We need a witness. Someone willing to stand in a courtroom and put a name to what they saw.”

“I’m not that person.”

“Not yet.” He said it without any pressure behind it, like a man planting a seed he had all the time in the world to watch grow. He let the silence sit a moment before he said the name that changed everything.

“Mateo Alvarez.”

My whole body went still.

“We reviewed his disappearance years ago,” Hayes said, his voice losing its casual tone as he watched me carefully. “There wasn’t enough at the time to connect it to organized trafficking under the casinos. Not enough evidence, not enough cooperation from anyone close to the case.”

“The Golovins took him,” I said. “That’s not a theory. That’s what happened.”

“Is it?” He didn’t confirm it. He didn’t deny it either, which was somehow worse. “There were other networks running fighters through this city around that time. Groups that operated outside the Bratva structure entirely, using the same underground circuits for cover. The picture might be more complicated than the one you built years ago.”

I felt the floor tilt slightly under a version of certainty I’d spent years standing on. My hands found the edge of the coffee table, gripping until my knuckles went pale.

“If you cooperate,” he said, quiet now, “I can get you real answers. Not theories. Not the story you’ve told yourself to survive. Actual information about what happened to your brother.”

I recognized exactly what he was doing. Bait wrapped in sympathy, the oldest interrogation tactic in existence. He was dangling the one thing guaranteed to break through every wall I’d built. Knowing that didn’t make it land any softer.

A small, terrified voice in the back of my mind asked the question I’d refused to let myself ask in years: What if I’d spent this entire time aiming at the wrong man?

What if every ounce of hatred I’d poured into destroying Nikolai Golovin belonged somewhere else entirely, and I’d never once bothered to check?

“Get out,” I said.

“Camila—”

“I said get out.”

He stood and left a card on the table beside the folder he didn’t bother taking with him. “When you’re ready to talk,” he said, and let himself out, closing the door behind him.

The apartment felt unbearably quiet after the door closed. I sat on the floor with my back against the couch, the same spot I’d sat in two nights ago while finishing the exposé, and let his words run through me.

Other networks. Outside the Bratva structure. The picture might be more complicated than the one you built.

Years of certainty cracked down the middle in the space of one conversation. If someone else had taken Mateo—if I’d spent years hating a man who hadn’t actually done the one thing I’d focused my entire life around avenging—then what exactly had I done to Nikolai? What exactly had I done to myself?

I needed someone who wouldn’t manipulate me the way Hayes just had. I picked up my phone and called Bianca before I could talk myself out of it.

“Hey, you okay?” she answered on the second ring, sensing something in my silence before I said a word.

“I need a favor. A weird one.” I pressed my palm flat against my eyes. “That guy you dated a few months back—the one who worked the betting side of things, knew people connected to the fight circuits. Do you still have his number?”

A pause stretched out on her end, long enough that I could hear the hesitation in it. “Camila, what is this about?”

“I can’t explain it right now. I just need to talk to him.”

She was quiet again before speaking.

“You’ve never asked me for anything like this before,” she pointed out. “Not once, in three years. What happened, Cami?”

“I know. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important, and I promise I’ll explain everything when I can.”