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“How are you doing? Dimitri’s not here, if you’re looking for him.”

“I’m not. He told me he’s on the way.” I sat across from her casually, the way I approached every conversation; I didn’t want to look like an interrogation. “I just thought I’d see how you’re doing before he gets here and you both start disgusting me with those doting looks of yours.”

“Really?” she asked, laughing.

I shrugged.

“Well, how are you?”

“I’m good,” I answered, letting out a small chuckle.

“I was doing an information check on the staff, and your name showed up as a close acquaintance of one of them,” I said.

“Who?” she asked in a way that told me she knew who already.

“Camila Alvarez.”

Something in her face softened immediately. I could clearly see the warmth of a woman talking about a friend she genuinely liked. “Camila’s my friend, yeah. Why?”

“Curiosity.”

Val didn’t buy that for a second.

“She’s the funniest person I know. Loyal too—she sat with me for hours when I was a wreck about things with Dimitri. Never asked a single question she didn’t need to. She works harder than anyone on that floor and never complains about it. If you’re asking because you think something’s wrong with her, you’re wasting your time.”

“I told you I was just curious, Val.”

I believed every word she’d said. That was the problem. Good liars didn’t announce themselves with nervous hands and shifting eyes—they built lives clean enough that even people who loved them had nothing false to report. Val’s certainty told me nothing about whether Camila was hiding something. It only told me Camila might be good enough at hiding that even Val hadn’t noticed.

*****

I quietly put surveillance on her that week. Security tracked her shifts, her commute, the grocery store two blocks from her apartment where she bought the same brand of coffee every Tuesday, always the same register, always a five-dollar tip in the jar, even when the line ran long. Phone metadata came back unremarkable—texts with a friend, nothing routed anywhere it shouldn’t have been.

I watched the footage more than the job required. I told myself it was diligence.

On the third night, the monitor caught her crouched beside a busboy who’d dropped a full tray in the middle of the floor, glass everywhere, his face gone gray with panic. She knelt next to him and said something I couldn’t hear. By the time she stood up, he was laughing and sweeping the mess into a dustpan like it was no big deal.

Later, she spent ten full minutes at an elderly man’s slot machine, laughing at something he’d said, refilling his water without being asked, patting his shoulder before moving on to the next table.

I sat back from the screen. I didn’t have a category for that kind of warmth. Everyone in this world feigned kindness when it served them—even my own courtesy toward men I despised served the ledgers, eventually. I watched Camila do the same thing for a busboy who could do nothing for her at all and found myself replaying the footage a second time before shutting the monitor off. I sat in the dark afterward, longer than I meant to, comparing the two versions of her—the woman who lied to my face without flinching, and the one who knelt on a casino floor to comfort a stranger over a broken glass—and found no way to reconcile them.

I didn’t sleep that night, though I hadn’t really expected to.

*****

Yuri entered my office at midnight with his laptop under his arm and an expression that meant he’d found something.

“Deleted browser history,” he said, setting the laptop down and turning it toward me. “Took my guy a while to pull it back. She’s been searching this for months.”

I read down the list myself. Bratva structure. Underground fighting rings, Nevada. Missing persons, Las Vegas, unsolved. Laundering through entertainment venues. Each search was more specific than the last, each one narrowing toward the operation sitting three floors beneath where she served drinks five nights a week.

I read it twice.

Every piece I’d been holding at arm’s length clicked into place at once—the calm under my hands, the lie delivered without a single tremor, the confidence to threaten me with my own security detail. None of that belonged to an ordinary waitress with a thin bank account and a gym membership she barely used. It belonged to someone who’d spent months building exactly the life that would let her stand in my office at midnight and walk out again untouched.

Anger would have been the easy response, and some part of me reached for it out of habit before abandoning the effort. What replaced it was quieter and considerably more dangerous. It was the focus I brought to a problem worth solving properly instead of quickly.

I could have had her brought in that night. Questioned and searched. Instead, I closed the laptop and told Yuri I’d be watching. I wanted to know what she was building toward before I decided how to take it apart.