Page 8

I have two days to rebuild every wall she just walked through without trying.

It won’t be enough. I already know it won’t be enough. But I’ll do it anyway, because control is the only thing I’ve ever trusted, and I’m not ready to admit that a twenty-seven-year-old woman with vanilla skin and her dead father’s secrets just made control irrelevant.

I turn off the lights in my office. Her scent lingers in the dark. I leave it there like a man leaving a loaded gun on the table, telling himself he won’t come back for it.

Chapter Four

Sophia

The apartment they give me is nicer than any place I’ve ever lived.

Twelfth floor of a building in the West Loop, all exposed brick and wide windows and hardwood floors that don’t creak. The furniture is modern and looks expensive. The bed is king-sized with sheets that feel like clouds. The kitchen has a coffee machine that looks like it takes certified training to operate.

I drop my suitcase in the bedroom and walk through every room with my hands in my pockets, not touching anything. The apartment is beautiful and it is also a cage. I can see the camera in the hallway outside my door. I can see the lock system is electronic, the kind that logs entries and exits. The windows don’t open more than four inches.

I spent the weekend finishing Dad’s apartment, donating what I couldn’t keep and packing the rest into a storage unit. I handed over his keys this morning. One more piece of his life officially gone.

I unpack. I put my father’s notebook in the nightstand drawer, underneath a Bible that someone left there like this is a hotel. I’ve decoded enough of the cipher to know the notebook contains names and dates and dollar amounts that don’t match any legitimate business. I’ll work on it at night. During the day, I’ll work for the man who put me here.

Monday morning. The office. Voronov Construction occupies the top four floors of the high-rise where I met Dominic. The finance department is on the thirty-eighth floor, a floor below his office, and it’s sleek and quiet and staffed by people who don’t make a lot of small talk. My supervisor is a woman named Patricia who has the tight smile of someone who was told to expect me and wasn’t given a choice about it. She shows me my desk, gives me login credentials, and hands me a stack of vendor contracts to review.

“Familiarize yourself with the accounts,” she says. “Mr. Voronov wants you integrated quickly.”

Something about the word integrated bothers me. Not onboarded. Not trained. Integrated. Like this company isn’t an office so much as a system, and I’ve just been inserted into it.

I sit at my desk and open the first file and within twenty minutes I know two things. First, Voronov Construction is a real company that builds real buildings. The projects are legitimate, the permits are filed, the subcontractors are licensed. This isn’t a paper operation. There’s genuine revenue.

Second, the genuine revenue is a skin stretched over a skeleton made of something else entirely.

The vendor contracts are structured in layers. A construction project in Pilsen has fourteen subcontractors, which isn’t unusual for a project that size. But three of those subcontractors share a registered agent. Two others were incorporated within a week of each other at the same address in Delaware. The payment routing runs through an intermediary LLC that exists for no purpose I can identify other than adding distance between the source of funds and their destination.

I’ve seen this architecture before. Not in person, but in case studies. In my forensic accounting elective. In the textbook chapter on layered transactions designed to obscure the origin of money.

This is a laundering operation. A sophisticated one, built by someone who understands both construction and financial regulation well enough to keep everything technically legal while making the money impossible to trace back.

I close the file and open the next one. Same patterns. Different project, same underlying structure.

I don’t react. I don’t make notes, not here, not on a company computer. I read the files like Patricia told me to and I keep my face neutral and I start building a map in my head.

Around ten, the elevator opens and a man walks onto the floor who is not Dominic but must be related.

I know before anyone tells me. The resemblance is there in the bone structure, the height, the strange effect he has on the room when he moves through it. Nobody visibly moves for him, but bodies angle away from his path before he reaches them. People make space without appearing to.

It reminds me of watching a school of fish turn all at once.

Or something less harmless.

But where Dominic is controlled, this man is barely contained. He walks like a fighter, shoulders forward, weight balanced, eyes tracking the room. He’s younger than Dominic, or he looks younger. Late twenties, maybe. Dark hair worn longer, jaw sharper, mouth set in a line that suggests smiling is something that happens to other people.

He doesn’t stop at my desk. He walks past it, heading for the corner office where Patricia sits, and he doesn’t look at me. But I feel his attention the same way you feel a change in air pressure. His gaze sweeps the floor as he moves through it, cataloging everything, and when it passes over me it lingers for a fraction of a second. Assessing.

He disappears into Patricia’s office. Through the glass I watch them talk. At one point he glances in my direction and says something that makes Patricia’s face go carefully blank. She nods. He leaves without looking at me again.

On his way to the elevator, he passes my desk again. This time he slows, just slightly, and his eyes meet mine. Up close they’re darker than Dominic’s, harder, and they communicate something his mouth doesn’t bother to say. I’m not welcome here. I’m tolerated.

“Roman Voronov,” Patricia says from behind me after he’s gone. Her voice is a shade too casual. “Dominic’s brother. He handles the operational side.”

I nod and go back to my files. But my hands are cold and my stomach is tight because I’ve been around men like that my whole life, the ones who sat in my father’s restaurant and never raised their voices and never needed to. Roman didn’t threaten me. He didn’t have to. His eyes did it for him, and what they said was: I’m watching you, and I haven’t decided yet what to do about it.