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“Graham’s been moving aggressively in the last three weeks,” I continued. “Two independent fight operators who wouldn’t sell to him have gone quiet entirely. My sources say he’s consolidating trafficking routes that used to run through half a dozen smaller players, folding them all under his own structure while every federal eye in this city is fixed on us instead of him.”

“You think he’s using the exposé as cover,” Alexei uttered.

“I think it’s convenient timing for a man who’s spent years wanting exactly what we have,” I answered. “While we’re distracted defending our own books, Graham gets a clear runway to consolidate everything we haven’t already claimed. Two years from now, we could be looking at a rival with twice the reach he has today, built entirely off the gap our current mess handed him.”

Viktor said, “So we hit him.”

“We watch him first,” Mikhail said, cutting in before Viktor could push further. “Nikolai’s right. We can’t afford a two-front war while federal agents are already circling. We contain the exposure, we monitor Graham, and we wait for the moment that actually favors us instead of forcing one that doesn’t.”

The room settled into the kind of tense agreement that held this family together more often than any of us liked to admit, with everyone reluctantly accepting the same conclusion from a slightly different angle.

*****

I couldn’t stop thinking about her on the drive back. The fury hadn’t dulled at all since that night in her apartment, but underneath it sat something I liked considerably less—the gnawing need to understand exactly why she’d done it, why it had to be me she’d chosen to destroy from the inside, and why her betrayal still cut sharper than the financial damage it had caused.

I turned every possible motive over in my mind during the drive and found none of them satisfying enough to settle the question fully. Money didn’t explain it. A rival organization didn’t explain it either, not with the specificity of her searches.

I told myself I was going to her apartment to confront her. That was mostly true.

She didn’t answer when I knocked. I stood in the hallway for a full minute, irritation building into something colder when the silence stretched past what an ordinary absence would explain. I knocked again, harder, and then waited. When I heard nothing move on the other side of the door, a phone call got me a master key within the hour, and I let myself into her apartment, unbothered by whatever laws I was breaking to do it.

Inside, I found a life scattered across every surface—photographs pinned to a corkboard by the window, notebooks stacked with handwriting too urgent to stay inside the lines, a sweater thrown over the back of a chair like she’d meant to grab it and forgotten. Nothing here had been for anyone else’s benefit. It existed the way a person’s real life existed when they thought no one was watching it.

I didn’t search it. I’d expected to and had told myself on the drive over that I’d tear the place apart until I understood exactly what remained of whatever plan she’d constructed against me. Instead I found myself simply sitting in the dark on the edge of her couch, allowing the apartment to tell me things about her that an interrogation never had. A framed photograph on the side table caught my eye—Camila younger, laughing, an arm slung around a young man who shared her same dark eyes. I studied it for a few seconds before setting it back down exactly where I’d found it.

I sat there a long time, running through every interaction since the night she’d stood over that drawer in my office, trying to separate the anger from the want and finding the two more thoroughly tangled than I’d ever allowed anything to become in my life. I did not like how difficult the separation was proving.

Somewhere below, traffic moved in its usual restless rhythm, headlights sweeping briefly across her ceiling every few minutes before fading again into the dark. I stayed in the shadows and waited for her to come home, with no idea yet how thoroughly everything I believed about her was about to change, or how little of what I thought I understood would survive the conversation still waiting for both of us.

Chapter Thirteen

Camila

Bianca had texted to ask if I’d found the place okay, and I’d typed back a quick yes without mentioning that I was still outside, too afraid to go in.

Taking a deep breath, I eventually moved toward the door.

The bar sat three miles away from my apartment in a strip mall that had clearly given up on itself years ago, wedged between a check-cashing place with bars on the windows and a laundromat that looked permanently closed. Instead of neon, there was a flickering beer sign and a door that stuck when pushed. Inside smelled like spilled whiskey and cigarette smoke that had soaked into the walls long before smoking bans existed in the city. A television bolted high in the corner played a rerun of some fight nobody in the room seemed to be watching.

Men lined the bar in twos and threes, hunched over drinks and phones. Nobody looked up when I walked in. That should have made me feel safer, but it didn’t. I kept my bag close against my hip and my eyes forward, the way I’d learned to walk through unfamiliar rooms.

Bianca’s ex sat in the back booth exactly where she’d said he would, a heavyset man in his forties with a face that had clearly taken more hits than it gave. He was nursing a beer. He looked up with the wary air of a man who dealt in secrets for a living.

“You Bianca’s friend?”

“Camila.” I slid into the booth across from him, nodding. “Camila Alvarez.”

His whole face changed at the name. I saw recognition first, then something softer underneath it that I hadn’t expected at all.

“Alvarez,” he repeated, quietly. “I’m Ray.”

I nodded again.

“You’re Mateo’s sister?” he asked.

“He was good,” he said, before I’d even answered. “Better than good. Stubborn as hell, too. Guy wouldn’t throw a fight even when the money got stupid. Some guys, you offer them enough, they’ll take a dive in the third round, and nobody blinks. Mateo never once did that. Cost him plenty of paydays. Earned him a lot of respect in the circles that mattered.” He shook his head slightly as a small smile crossed his face, like he was remembering something. “He had this look right before a fight, like he already knew how it was going to end and just wanted everyone else to catch up.”

Hearing someone describe my brother like that, almost in the present tense, like he was still walking around somewhere, exactly as I remembered him, hit harder than I’d expected it to. I pressed my palms flat against the table and forced myself to keep breathing normally.