“Stop there,” I warned, voice dropping to a dangerous register.
Brock’s proximity punched through my conditioning. I should have pulled the trigger. I needed to pull the trigger. My finger began the squeeze, but my hand trembled—not with fear, but with something worse. Hesitation.
“Tell me,” I demanded, forcing the words past my clenched jaw. “Tell me why.”
He didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he circled around me, a predator assessing its prey. I pivoted to track him, gun still raised, but it felt heavier with each passing second. Clouds passed outside, casting alternating patterns of shadow and light across his face. The office seemed to shrink with each step he took.
“Do you know what it was like living in your shadow, Graves?” Brock’s voice shifted, the civil facade cracking into something raw and ugly. The question hit me physically—like a battering ram against my temples.
I flinched, memories fragmenting behind my eyes. Three men were dead on a warehouse floor. Brock watched from the doorway, expression unreadable. Then, later, he accepted praise from a man in an expensive suit while I stood silent, blood still fresh under my fingernails. My grip on the gun tightened until my knuckles turned white.
“I never asked for...”
“You never had to ask,” Brock cut me off, gesturing wildly with his drink. Amber liquid sloshed dangerously close to the rim. “I built everything. I found the clients, I planned the operations, I created the network.” His voice rose with each declaration, long-suppressed rage bubbling to the surface. “But who did they want? Who did they praise? Who did they fear? Graves. Always fucking Graves.”
Through his growing rage, for a split second, I saw him as he once was—younger, sharper, watching me from across a room filled with expensive suits and criminal enterprises. The naked envy in his eyes.
Real. That memory was real.
I squeezed the trigger halfway. “You were my partner.”
“Partner?” Brock spat the word, advancing until the barrel of my gun pressed against his chest. “Do you know how it felt to be treated like your secretary? Your handler? When I was the one whomadeyou?”
His face contorted with ugly satisfaction, pupils dilated with emotion. I stepped back, maintaining distance, but the room suddenly felt airless, as if his hatred had consumed all the oxygen. My lungs strained with each breath.
“The Director offered exactly what I needed—compensation, recognition, and the satisfaction of watching you become someone else’s weapon. Mine!”
An expensive clock ticked steadily on the wall, measuring out the years of his accumulated resentment. Each second pounded in my skull like a hammer against an anvil.
“Everything was yours.” Brock snarled, mask slipping completely as years of suppressed rage poured out. “Every contact, every accolade, every goddamn thing.”
Suddenly, Brock’s rage seemed to exhaust itself. His shoulders dropped slightly, his expression shifting from raw hatred to something more calculated, more insidious.
“Your wife, though,” Brock said, voice suddenly silky with malice, “she was a particular disappointment.”
The temperature in the room plummeted.Sofia. The name punched through my defenses, dragging fragments of memory behind it. My jaw clenched so tight I felt my teeth might crack. Memories about her were still missing, but I’d be damned if I let him speak about her like that. She was dead. Because of me.
“Speaking of disappointments,” Brock continued, circling back toward his desk, “Sofia was quite an investment of mine. Your wife—on paper, at least.”
The gun felt suddenly heavier in my hand. A flash broke through—Sofia’s face, beautiful and distant, a practiced smile that never reached her eyes. The fear lurking beneath. The way she tensed when my hand touched her shoulder.
“What are you talking about?” My voice sounded hollow, unfamiliar even to my own ears.
Brock’s lips curled into something between a smile and a snarl. He had me right where he wanted me, and he knew it. He knew I had questions I needed answers to, and I didn’t doubt that he’d give them to me… just to break me a little more.
Brock reached slowly into his desk drawer. I should have stopped him, but the movement seemed distant, disconnected from the name still echoing in my head. Sofia. Sofia. Sofia.
“I orchestrated the entire arrangement,” he said, withdrawing a silver-framed photograph. “Her father had businesses perfect for laundering. When he refused directpartnerships, I decided a more personal approach was needed.”
The office walls seemed to close in. My chest constricted as if concrete hardened around my ribs. Brock turned the photograph toward me—Sofia in a white dress, my younger self beside her at our wedding. Her eyes were hollow. My arm was possessive around her waist.
“I handpicked her for you,” Brock continued, voice taking on a possessive quality. He ran a finger down the glass over Sofia’s face. “I created the perfect trophy wife for the perfect weapon.”
More fragments tore through the walls in my mind. Sofia standing beside me at galas, her hand cool in mine. Her empty expressions as we greeted politicians, crime bosses and traffickers. She didn’t want to be there, and I knew it. Then there were the bruises on her wrists that I noticed but never questioned. The way she flinched at my touch.
“She wasn’t.” I couldn’t finish the thought. What was she to me? A stranger I married. A pawn I used.
“You didn’t even appreciate what I gave you,” Brock said, disgust sharpening his words.
