23. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
I stood behind Isla's chair for a long time before I said anything at all, looking at the spreadsheet glowing on her laptop screen like it might rearrange itself into something less dangerous if I stared at it long enough.
It did not, not even a little.
Three columns, three names, three sets of dates lined up in neat rows she had built herself out of nothing but memory and four years of admission records.
Marcus Webb, Priya Anand, Daniel Ruiz, names that had been nothing but case numbers to the rest of the world until she decided they deserved better than that.
Every cell was color coded, red for the fires, blue for the payouts, a small stubborn efficiency to all of it that looked exactly like her.
I had spent six years learning to read a room for threats before anyone standing in it had even finished deciding to become one. I did not need very long at all to read this particular room.
She had made herself a target twice over now, once simply by existing in my life and once by proving, cell by careful cell, that she understood exactly what Kovalenko had built and exactly how to take the whole thing apart.
I was proud of her in a way that had no clean edges to it at all, proud enough that it sat uncomfortably close to something that felt an awful lot like fury.
"You're quiet," Isla said, not turning around, still scrolling through a column of policy numbers like she had not noticed six minutes pass since I walked in.
"I am thinking."
"About the spreadsheet, or about how you feel about the spreadsheet?"
"Both."
She finally turned to look at me, arms crossed, the same look she gave a chart that did not add up the way it should have. "Say it. Whatever it is, I'd rather hear it than watch you stand there doing the math on your own face."
"I am proud of you." I meant it, and let it show, because there was no version of hiding it that would have done either of us any good. "I am also furious that being this useful to this case is the thing that keeps making you a target."
"Those two things are allowed to be true at the same time, you know."
"I am aware. It does not make either of them easier to hold."
"You don't have to hold them alone." She reached over and closed the laptop halfway, just enough to make me look at her instead of the screen.
"I did this because I wanted to. Not because you asked, not because Cruz asked. Because I was the only person in this entire city who could actually read what those charts were saying."
"I know."
"Then stop looking at me like I'm something you need to lock in a room to keep safe."
That landed closer to the truth than I wanted it to. Six years of believing that the only honest way to protect anyone was to remove them from the equation entirely, and she had just described the exact shape of that instinct back to me without my ever saying a single word of it out loud.
I had built an entire life on the theory that distance kept people alive: keep the circle small, keep the information smaller, and nobody standing outside either one could ever be used as a lever against you.
Grisha, Dima, and Pasha had trusted me with their lives inside a burning warehouse, and distance had not saved a single one of them.
Whatever I thought keeping people at arm's length was protecting, it burned down with them that night.
I was only now, sitting in this kitchen, letting myself see that clearly.
Isla had walked directly into the center of the most dangerous thing in my life and made herself more capable inside it than anyone I had ever worked with, myself included. She had done it with a legal pad and four years of memory, without a badge, without resources, without anyone asking her to.
Protecting someone by shutting them out had never once made anyone safer. I knew that better than almost anyone alive, and some old, stubborn part of me still fought the instinct every single time it mattered, whispering that the safest version of her was the one who knew nothing at all.
"I am not trying to lock you anywhere," I said finally. "I am trying to understand how to want you safe and want you exactly as capable as you actually are, at the same time, without one canceling out the other."
"You don't have to choose between those. I never asked you to."
"I know that now."
She studied me a moment longer, some of the tension leaving her shoulders, and reached for my hand across the table, lacing her fingers through mine the same unhurried way she did everything that mattered most to her.
"So what happens with the spreadsheet," she said. "Please tell me you're not about to suggest we sit on it."
"I am not."
"Good. Because I didn't spend an entire night cross-referencing burn charts so you could decide alone that it was too dangerous for anyone else to see."
"I would not do that to you."
"You almost did, about four minutes ago, with your face."
She was not wrong, and I did not insult either of us by pretending otherwise.
"I am taking it to Cruz," I said. "Today. It is the right call, and you would never forgive me if I buried it to keep you further out of this, however much a part of me still wants to."
"Thank you for not making me fight you about it."
"You would have won."
"I know." She almost smiled at that, the first real one I had seen from her since the package arrived on our counter three days ago. "But I appreciate not having to."
Cruz arrived within the hour, moving through our doorway with the same brisk, unbothered efficiency she brought to every room she had ever walked into, folder already open in her hand before she had even fully cleared the threshold.
"You said you had something for me." She dropped into the chair across from Isla without waiting for an invitation, the particular manner of a woman who considered chairs a formality rather than a courtesy. "Show me."
Isla turned the laptop toward her and walked her through it the same careful way she had walked me through it that morning, patient and precise, translating every column into plain language a detective without a nursing degree could actually use.
Cruz did not interrupt once. She leaned in closer with every new name, every date, tracking the pattern the way I imagined she tracked crime scenes, cataloguing without letting anything on her face give away what she was actually thinking until she had seen the whole shape of it.
"Three separate fires," she said finally, sitting back. "Three survivors, all at your hospital, all under Kovalenko-linked policies you traced yourself, going back four years."
"Correct."
"Marcus Webb, the shoulder burns. Priya Anand, the rental unit." Cruz read the names off the top page like she was already memorizing them for a warrant application.
"Daniel Ruiz, the townhouse."
"Any of them still local? Anyone I could actually put in front of a judge if this gets that far?"
"Ruiz still comes in for follow-up appointments every few months. The other two moved away, but their discharge paperwork should still have forwarding information on file."
"That's useful. Genuinely useful." She underlined something on the page hard enough that I heard the pen catch against the paper.
"You did this from a legal pad? At three in the morning?"
"I couldn't sleep."
Cruz laughed, short and genuine, an actual sound instead of the clipped professional courtesy I had heard from her in every previous conversation. "I've got detectives on my own floor who couldn't put this together with a warrant, a subpoena, and six weeks to work with."
"I've spent three years reading burn charts. It's a very specific skill."
"It's an extremely useful one. The city could use a lot more people who actually have it."
Cruz looked at her then the way she looked at evidence that mattered, no trace left of the polite skepticism she had walked in with. "Would you be willing to walk my team through your methodology, formally, so we can replicate it across every hospital in the city instead of just yours?"
"I would." Isla did not hesitate, and something in her voice had shifted, steadier and more certain than I had heard it in days.
"I'd want it done right. Proper chain of custody, nothing that gets thrown out on a technicality because someone cut a corner I could have told them not to cut."
"That's exactly the kind of thing I need someone in the room to say." Cruz made a note, actually wrote it down, treating the words like they belonged in an official file instead of a courtesy conversation with a civilian who happened to be dating one of her sources.
"You'd be an asset to this investigation. I don't say that to many people."
I watched something ease in Isla's shoulders that had been sitting there since the moment Cruz first walked through the door, some old fear that competence without a badge would always be treated as decoration instead of evidence.
Cruz had just handed her the opposite of that, and it visibly mattered more to both of them than either one said out loud.
"What happens now?" I asked, because someone needed to steer this back toward the reason Cruz had come.
Cruz gathered the three printouts Isla had made and squared their edges against the table, tapping them once, twice, into a neat, deliberate stack, the practiced motion of a woman closing one chapter of a file so she could open the next.
"Now I take this to a judge," she said. "Three confirmed fires, three confirmed survivors, a documented pattern of fraudulent claims routed through shell companies tied directly to Kovalenko Restoration and Claims."
"That's not circumstantial anymore. That's a paper trail with a name at the end of it."
"How fast can you actually move on this?"
"Fast enough that it'll matter. Not fast enough that I'd tell you an exact number and risk being wrong in front of you." She stood, gathering the folder and the stack of Isla's printouts together, tucking them all under one arm with the same brisk finality she had used walking in.
"I want protection on both of you doubled the moment I file this," she added, looking at me directly now. "Whatever Basin already has posted isn't going to be enough once Kovalenko realizes what we're sitting on."
"I have already made that call."
"Good. Then we're thinking the same way, for once."
I felt the shift in the room before she ever reached the door, the particular weight of a decision that could no longer be undone once it had actually been made.
Somewhere between a legal pad and this apartment, Isla had turned four years of quiet, careful memory into something Kovalenko would soon have no choice but to answer for, and there was no version of the next few days that did not begin with him finding that out.
I reached for her hand, because some things were easier to hold onto than to say out loud, and she let me take it without a word, both of us aware that whatever came next would arrive faster now that it had already started moving.
Cruz paused at the door, folder tucked against her side, and looked back at the two of us for a moment longer than the moment strictly required, something almost like respect crossing her face before she let it go.
"This is enough to move on him," she said. "Which means he's about to know we're moving."