Page 20

Camila

Working with Nikolai instead of against him felt like learning to walk on a floor that kept tilting slightly beneath my feet. He’d send over files through an encrypted channel his own security team had built specifically for this, and I’d spend hours poring through them at my kitchen table. Sometimes he sent a message alongside the files—a name to prioritize or a date that mattered more than the others—and I found myself reading those short lines more carefully than I probably needed to.

The scale of what Graham had built made my stomach turn every time I opened a new folder. Trafficking routes running through three states. Missing fighter records that stretched back nearly a decade, names attached to men who’d simply stopped existing on paper the moment they crossed the wrong buyer. Bribed officials at every level I could think to check—city permits, casino licensing boards, even a judge whose name made me sit back for a full minute before I could make myself keep reading. Underground arenas hidden inside legitimate entertainment venues, disguised as private events for men who paid enough to never ask questions about what happened to the losers.

I’d spent years building a case against Nikolai that had turned out to be, in the grand scheme of what actually existed beneath this city, almost a footnote. Graham’s operation dwarfed anything I’d imagined when I started this, and more than once I found myself sitting back from my screen just to breathe through the scale of it before I could keep working.

I noticed the security before Nikolai ever mentioned it. A car that sat outside my building at odd hours, parked just close enough to see my door without blocking the street. A man who walked the same stretch of sidewalk twice a day, always at slightly different times, never quite looking at my window but always somehow positioned to see it. I never said anything about it. Some part of me understood it wasn’t meant to be acknowledged, that pointing it out would embarrass us both into pretending it wasn’t happening, and some other part of me, the part I trusted less, simply liked knowing he cared enough to bother.

The late nights blurred together after a while, evidence spread across my table, coffee going cold between us while we worked through another shell company or another name the man I now knew as Yuri had pulled from somewhere I didn’t ask too many questions about. Nikolai looked different in those hours than he did anywhere else I’d seen him—jacket gone, sleeves rolled up, wearing the exhaustion of a man who rarely let himself be tired when he thought I wasn’t paying attention. Once I caught him rubbing at his temple between two documents. It was a small, human gesture I couldn’t imagine him allowing anywhere near the casino floor.

I caught myself watching him more than the files on some nights. I noticed how his jaw tightened when a lead went nowhere and the unexpected patience he showed walking me through financial structures I didn’t fully understand, never once making me feel stupid for asking. Once, he reached across the table to point at a figure I’d misread, and his hand brushed mine for half a second longer than the correction required. Neither of us mentioned it afterward, even though both of us felt it.

The guilt between us hadn’t disappeared—I doubted it ever fully would—but it had started shifting into something quieter. Like two people who’d hurt each other badly enough to finally understand exactly what the other one was capable of surviving.

I finished the article at 3:00 am on a Thursday, hands steady this time, none of the sick uncertainty that had haunted me the night I’d sent the previous one. This exposé named Graham directly. Trafficking compounds disguised as private venues. A dozen missing fighters whose families had been told nothing for years. Corruption running through city offices that should have protected people and hadn’t. I read it through twice, checked every figure Nikolai’s team had helped me verify, and sent it before I could second-guess a single word.

This time when the upload bar disappeared, I felt only relief. No dread waiting underneath it. No cold certainty that I’d just detonated something I couldn’t control. I felt nothing but the satisfaction of finally aiming at the right target.

The article detonated within hours of being published. By morning, federal raids had already begun hitting three separate locations simultaneously, coordinated in a way that told me exactly how much of Nikolai’s intelligence had quietly fed into the operation without ever appearing in a single federal report.

Nikolai arrived at my apartment that night with an expression I couldn’t fully read. He hadn’t bothered with his usual composure at the door, coming straight in the moment I opened it, phone still in his hand like he’d been fielding calls the entire drive over.

“Four locations raided,” he said, before I’d even closed the door behind him. “Eleven fighters recovered alive. Graham’s lost two entire facilities and a considerable amount of money he can’t easily replace.”

Relief flooded through me first, sharp and immediate. Eleven men who’d walked out of something horrifying because of an article I’d written, because of a partnership neither of us could have predicted a month ago. I pressed a hand to my mouth, momentarily overwhelmed by the sheer scale of what that meant for eleven families somewhere in this city right now, getting a phone call they’d stopped hoping for, eleven mothers or sisters or wives hearing the words alive and safe after years of silence.

Then I understood what he wasn’t saying yet.

“Mateo wasn’t there.”

“No.”

I sat down hard on the edge of my couch, the relief curdling instantly into something messier, hope and grief tangled together so completely I couldn’t separate one feeling from the other anymore. Part of me wanted to believe this meant he was somewhere else in the network, still alive, still findable—that eleven other men had walked free tonight meant the possibility wasn’t insane, that Graham did keep some fighters alive rather than disposing of every one who crossed him. Another part of me, the part that had spent four years learning exactly how these stories usually ended, understood that every new lead that didn’t produce him only meant another location, another possibility, another chance for the answer to be the one I’d been dreading since the day he disappeared.

“We’ll keep looking,” Nikolai said, sitting down beside me, his voice steadier than I felt, his hand finding mine on the couch cushion between us without either of us commenting on it. “This isn’t over.”

I opened my mouth to answer him. My phone rang before I could.

The screen showed a blocked number. My whole body went cold looking at it, some instinct warning me before I’d even answered that this wasn’t a wrong number or a telemarketer calling at an hour like this.

“Put it on speaker,” Nikolai told me. I did.

Then I spoke. “Hello?”

The voice on the other end was smooth in a way that made my skin crawl.

“Camila Alvarez. I’ve been hoping to speak to you.”

I didn’t need him to say his name. I already knew exactly who was calling. The look on Nikolai’s face told me he knew, too.

“You’ve caused me a significant amount of trouble,” he said, as calm as a man discussing weather. “Four locations, eleven fighters, more federal attention than I’ve had to manage in years. I want you to understand something clearly, because I don’t intend to repeat myself. You made a mistake exposing me publicly. A very serious one.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” I said, though my voice shook enough to undercut the words the moment they left my mouth.

“You will be.” He said it without any rise in tone at all, which somehow made it worse. “No one is going to protect you from what comes next. Not your federal friends. Not the Golovins, whatever arrangement you’ve apparently made with them. You’ll learn exactly how far my reach extends, Camila, and I promise you’ll wish you’d chosen a different target.”

The line went dead before I could answer, the dial tone somehow louder in the silence than his voice had been a moment earlier.