The room smelled like rust and rain.
Marco noticed that before anything else — before the light, before the pain, before the two men standing at the edges of the room like shadows that had learned to breathe. The cloth came off his face without warning, yanked hard enough to take skin with it, and the single bulb above him hit his eyes like a slap.
He was in a basement. Somewhere deep, somewhere no one would hear anything that happened here.
His wrists were zip-tied behind the chair so tight his hands had gone numb an hour ago. His left cheekbone was swollen shut from when they'd grabbed him outside his office — he'd fought back, which had been the worst decision of his twenty-three years on this earth, and the evidence of that decision was currently making it difficult to breathe through his nose.
The man sitting across from him had been waiting. Patiently. The way a man waits when he has nowhere else to be and nothing left to prove to anyone.
He was somewhere in his forties. Compact, quiet, with the eyes of someone who had watched a lot of people make mistakes and had never once been surprised by any of them. He wore no jewelry, no watch, nothing that would identify him. His hands were folded in his lap.
"Marco Reyes," he said.
Not a question. Never a question with men like this.
"I want to make a call," Marco said. His voice came out wrecked.
"No."
"You can't just—"
"We can." The man tilted his head, almost gently. "You're not under arrest, Marco. This isn't the police. There are no rights here. No calls, no lawyers, no one coming." He let that settle. "Just you and a number. Three crore, forty-eight lakhs. Transferred from Raza Empire Holdings — your employer — to a private shell account registered in Cyprus, seven months ago. Three separate authorization layers. All cleared under your employee ID. Your workstation. Your fingerprints on the keyboard." He paused. "Would you like to tell me it was a mistake?"
Marco said nothing.
"Smart," the man said. "Last person who told me it was a mistake is currently at the bottom of the Bosphorus." He said it the way someone mentions the weather. Factual. Unbothered. "So. The account. Who gave you the number?"
Marco's jaw tightened.
The man on his left didn't wait for a signal. He simply hit Marco — open palm, side of the head, the kind of hit that was designed not to break anything but to rearrange the entire world for about four seconds. Marco's vision went white. When it came back, his ear was screaming and he could taste copper at the back of his throat.
"Who gave you the number," the seated man said again. Same tone. Same patience.
"It was already in the system—" Marco started.
Another hit. Same side. Harder.
The room tilted. Marco breathed through it — in, out, focus, don't give them anything — but his hands were shaking behind the chair and he couldn't stop that part.
Sofia's face came to him. Not as a comfort. As an accusation. The face she made when she was trying not to look worried — the slight tightness around her eyes, the way she'd hold a pen she wasn't writing with just to have something in her hand. She'd been making that face for him since they were children. Every time he jumped without looking. Every single time.
You have a good heart, his mother had said. But someday your good heart is going to write a check your good sense can't cash.
He'd cashed it. He'd cashed it in full.
"The account number," Marco said quietly, "was given to me by someone at the company. Someone I trusted. I thought it was an internal transfer — a discretionary fund, off-books, I was told it was normal—"
"A name."
Marco looked at the man across from him.
"If I give you a name," he said carefully, "what happens to me?"
The man looked at him for a long moment. Something in his expression shifted — not kindness, exactly, but the closest thing to it that existed in a room like this.
"That," he said, "depends entirely on your sister."
Istanbul. 11:43 PM.
The city outside the window was all lights and distance — minarets and bridges and the dark shimmer of the Bosphorus cutting the skyline in half. Sofia had lived here for six years and she still couldn't sleep with the curtains open. Too much world. Too much happening out there while you were trying to be still.
She'd called Marco four times.
Voicemail. Every one.
She told herself it was nothing. Marco was twenty-three and catastrophically bad at responding to calls even when everything was fine. She told herself he'd gone out with colleagues, lost track of time, let his phone die in a bar somewhere while he laughed too loudly at someone else's joke.
She paced the kitchen anyway.
His dinner sat on the stove getting cold — she'd made it at seven because he'd texted at five saying late night, don't wait up, and she'd made it anyway because that was what she did, what she'd always done, the quiet machinery of looking after someone who didn't know he needed looking after.
She called his friend Emre. Emre hadn't seen him.
She called his colleague Dina. Dina said he'd left the office at normal time.
She was standing in the middle of the kitchen deciding whether she was overreacting when her phone rang.
Unknown number.
She answered before the second ring. "Hello."
"Sofia Reyes." Male voice. Flat and deliberate, the kind of flat that costs effort to maintain.
"Yes."
"Your brother is with us." No softening. No preamble. "He's alive. He hasn't been seriously harmed. Whether that remains true is a question you're going to answer in the next twelve hours."
Sofia sat down. She picked up the pen on the kitchen table — old reflex, something her mother had taught her when she was nine years old and their father had left and the world had required someone to stay calm. Write when you're scared. It keeps your hands honest.
She didn't write anything. She just held it.
"What do you want," she said. Flat. Like his.
"Tomorrow morning. Eight o'clock. The Karaköy offices of Zain Malik." A pause. "You know the name."
Everyone in Istanbul knew the name.
"I know it," Sofia said.
"Come alone. Don't contact the police — we'll know if you do, and the conversation you'd have with them would be the last useful thing you ever did for your brother." Another pause. "Are we clear?"
"I want to speak to him."
A shuffle. Then Marco's voice, rough and slightly broken at the edges in a way that meant he was trying very hard to hold it together. "Sofia."
"Are you hurt?"
"I'm — it's fine. Just come, please. Just—" His voice fractured on the last word, and she heard him pull it back, and she knew — with the specific clarity of someone who had been reading this person her entire life — that it was bad. That it was very bad.
"I'll be there," she said.
She held the phone after the line went dead and looked at the dark window and the lights beyond it and thought: Zain Malik.
The name sat in her chest like swallowed glass.
She pressed her palms flat on the table. Feel the ground.
She wasn't going to sleep. She made her peace with it, filled the kettle, and started going through everything she knew — which wasn't enough, and never would be, but it was what she had.
The building had no name on it.
That was the first thing Sofia noticed when the car dropped her at the address — a narrow street in Karaköy, between a spice merchant and a building whose windows had been dark for years. No signage. No lobby visible from outside. Just a heavy door, matte black, and a man beside it who looked at her the way security looks at things they're expecting but not welcoming.
He knew her name without asking. He took her phone. He led her inside.
No corporate lobby. No marble and chrome. Instead — a corridor that opened into a space that felt deliberately, carefully neutral. Like a room that had been designed to tell you nothing about the person who used it. Dark wood. A single window looking out over the water. Maps on the wall that she clocked immediately as shipping routes — Bosphorus, Black Sea, Mediterranean — with markers that weren't decorative.
The man behind the desk was not what she'd expected.
She'd built a picture in her head the night before. Older. Heavier. The kind of man who'd grown into his power over decades of careful violence. She'd prepared herself for that man.
Zain Malik was thirty-one. Maybe thirty-two.
He was standing when she entered — not as a courtesy, she realized immediately, but because he didn't like having his back to a door. He had the posture of someone who had learned, a long time ago, to always know where the exits were. Dark suit, no tie, the top button open in a way that wasn't casual — it was just one fewer thing to adjust if the situation required moving quickly.
His eyes moved to her the second she crossed the threshold.
Dark. Still. The kind of eyes that didn't assess — they recorded. Every detail, filed, permanently.
He didn't offer his hand. Didn't offer a seat.
He simply looked at her for three full seconds — long enough to be deliberate, short enough to be controlled — and said:
"You came alone."
"You told me to."
"Most people would have brought someone anyway." Something moved in his expression. Not approval. Something more neutral than that, but adjacent to it. "Sit down."
"Where is my brother?"
"Alive. Uninjured, beyond what was necessary to make him cooperative." He said it without apology, which she found — strangely — more trustworthy than if he'd softened it. "He stays that way as long as this conversation goes the way it should. Sit down, Ms. Reyes."
She sat.
She held his gaze and gave him nothing.
He opened a folder and turned it to face her. Transaction records — she recognized the format from six years of client finance work. Her eyes moved across the columns with the speed of someone who'd read hundreds of these.
Three crore, forty-eight lakhs. Marco's credentials on every authorization line. Three separate clearance levels, all manual, all confirmed.
She looked up.
"Your brother stole from me," Zain said. "Whether he knew the full scope of what he was doing — I'm still deciding. But the result is the same." He pulled the folder back. "The account the money went to belongs to a man named Reza Kaya."
The name changed the air in the room.
Sofia had heard it once — in a conversation she'd been on the edge of at a work function, two men speaking quietly who didn't know she was close enough to listen. One of them had gone pale at the mention of it. The other had changed the subject immediately.
"You know it," Zain said, reading her.
"I've heard it," she said carefully.
"Then you understand that recovering money from Reza Kaya is not a legal matter. It's not a civil matter. It's not any kind of matter that ends well for the person who tries." His voice was even. But underneath the evenness — she heard it. Not fear. Something colder than fear. Something personal. "He has been operating in this city for fourteen years. He moves money through forty shell companies across six countries. He has judges, he has officials, he has people inside every institution that should theoretically stop him." A pause. "No one gets close to him. He doesn't trust men who approach him with money or power — he assumes they want something, because they always do. He doesn't sit across tables from enemies."
He looked at her directly.
"But he responds to women differently. He's not reckless about it — he's never reckless. But he lets his guard down, slightly, in ways he doesn't with anyone else. He takes meetings he otherwise wouldn't take. He talks." A beat. "He talks to the right woman."
Sofia was very still.
"Your brother owes me three crore forty-eight lakhs," Zain said. "He cannot pay that back in his lifetime. Not honestly." He leaned forward, slightly — the first time he'd moved toward her rather than simply observing. "But you can pay it back differently. Six months. As my fiancée — publicly, convincingly. I need someone who can move through certain rooms with me. High-society events, business gatherings, one particular gala in three months where Reza Kaya will be present. You'll be introduced. You build rapport — not much, just enough. I handle everything that comes after." He held her gaze. "Six months. After that, your brother is free, the case against him disappears permanently, and you go back to your life."
The silence in the room was very complete.
Sofia looked at him.
She thought about Marco's voice on the phone — that fracture on the last word, the pulling-together after. She thought about the fact that she'd made his dinner and it was still sitting cold on the stove.
She thought about her mother's hands — thin at the end, but still holding hers — and the thing she'd said the last time she'd been coherent: He has a good heart, Sofia. He just doesn't look before he jumps. If I'm ever gone — you're the one who looks. You always have been. Don't stop.
She hadn't stopped. She wasn't going to stop now.
"And if I say no?" she said.
Something in Zain's expression settled — not crueler, but more final. Like a door closing.
"The case goes to court. I have a judge who owes me considerably more than a verdict." He said it without pleasure, which made it worse. "Your brother goes to prison. And Reza Kaya — when he realizes his money trail leads back to a twenty-three-year-old data analyst instead of being quietly absorbed into my accounts — will want to collect personally." A pause. "I cannot protect your brother from that if I'm not involved. And I have no reason to be involved if you walk out of here."
Sofia pressed her palms flat against her thighs.
"I want a document," she said. "Written terms. Everything — what I'm required to do, what I'm not, exit conditions, Marco's release guaranteed in writing." She held his gaze without blinking. "And I want to see my brother. Tonight. Before I sign anything."
Zain Malik looked at her.
It lasted just slightly longer than necessary — that look. Like he was recalibrating something.
"You're not going to argue," he said. Not a question.
"Would it change anything?"
"No."
"Then I'm not going to waste either of our time." She kept her voice level. "Document. My brother. Tonight. Those are my terms for sitting at this table."
The corner of his mouth moved — just barely. Not a smile. Something smaller and more controlled than that. Something that looked like the beginning of a thought he hadn't finished yet.
He reached for his phone.
"Get legal on the line," he said to whoever answered. "Full terms draft. Tonight." He set the phone down and looked back at her.
"There's one more thing," he said. "About Reza Kaya."
Something in his tone changed — not much, but enough. The professional flatness was still there. But underneath it, for just a moment, she heard something else. Something older and colder and entirely personal.
"He isn't just someone who took my money," Zain said. He looked at the window — the shipping routes on the wall, the dark water beyond the glass. "He took something else. Four years ago." A pause that he filled with nothing. "I've been building toward this for four years. Your brother's mistake — stupid, reckless, completely accidental — gave me the opening I've been waiting for." He looked back at her. "I don't need your sympathy. I don't want it. But you should know that when I say I intend to finish this — I intend to finish this. And anyone standing close to me when it happens needs to understand what they're standing close to."
Sofia held his gaze.
"What did he take?" she asked.
Zain looked at her for a long moment.
"My brother," he said. And looked away.
The room was very quiet.
Sofia turned that over — the weight of it, the shape of it, the way it reframed everything she thought she understood about what was happening in this room. Two people, one on each side of a desk, each of them here because of a brother. Each of them holding something they couldn't put down.
She looked at the shipping routes on the wall. Istanbul to Cyprus. Cyprus to somewhere else.
Reza Kaya. Who had taken money and a life and fourteen years of this city and apparently still wasn't done.
She thought about the next six months. About the rooms she'd have to walk into. About standing next to this man — this very specific, very dangerous, very controlled man — and making the world believe she'd chosen him.
She thought about the fact that she was going to say yes.
She already knew she was going to say yes.
She pressed her palms flat on the table one last time.
Feel the ground. Make the decision. Don't run from it.
"Have your lawyers make it airtight," she said. "I'll read every word."
Zain looked at her — and this time, the look was different. Not the recording-everything assessment from before. Something more direct than that. Something that didn't have a clean name yet.
"I wouldn't expect anything less," he said quietly.
Outside, the Bosphorus moved in the dark, indifferent and ancient, carrying whatever the city put into it without asking what any of it cost.
— ✦ —