30. Isla
ISLA
I woke up alone in an apartment that had never once felt too big before, and lay there a full minute just listening to how loud that kind of quiet was.
Nikolai's side of the bed was cold enough that he had been gone a while.
Not fled, not slipped out mid-sentence the way he had two nights ago. Gone with intention, the sheet pulled straight on his side like he had taken a moment before he left to make the bed look like nobody had panicked their way out of it.
I remembered why soon enough. He had come home last night and finally told me everything, sitting across from me at that same kitchen table instead of pacing a room away from it.
A warehouse. Three names, Grisha, Dima, Pasha, said out loud in his own voice for the first time since I had known him.
Six years of a silence he had been carrying alone, handed to me in pieces that cost him visibly to hand over. I had watched what it did to his face every time one of those names left his mouth, like each one weighed something he had spent six years pretending was weightless.
I had held his hand through most of it and said very little, because some stories only need a witness, not a response. That felt like the first honest thing either of us had managed all week.
He had not told me where he was going this morning. He had only kissed my forehead before I was fully awake and said something about an hour, about needing to see Basin before anything else happened today.
I reached for my phone once, thumb hovering over his name, before I made myself set it back down on the counter without calling. Checking on him every hour was exactly the kind of managing I had just decided to stop doing, even to myself.
I made coffee I did not really want and sat at the counter with both hands wrapped around the mug, waiting to feel the fear that usually showed up whenever he left without me.
It did not come. Something else showed up instead.
I was tired of it. Not tired of him, not tired of loving a man who came with warehouses and men named Basin and six years of silence attached. Tired of being the one who waited at home with a phone in her hand while everyone else in his life got to be useful.
I had spent this entire war being managed. Managed by Nikolai, who thought love meant deciding what I could handle.
Managed by my own fear, which had convinced me for weeks that staying small and staying home was the same thing as staying safe.
I set the mug down harder than I meant to.
I was done being managed by either one.
By the time I finished the coffee, I had already decided where I was going, and it was not to sit on this couch refreshing a phone that had nothing new to tell me.
I got dressed, grabbed my keys, and drove to the one place in this entire mess where I actually had standing to ask questions and expect real answers.
Detective Cruz's precinct sat six blocks from the hospital, a squat brick building I had visited twice before, both times because someone I loved was in danger.
I walked in without an appointment and asked for her by name, and something in my voice must have carried enough weight that the officer at the desk did not argue.
Cruz met me in a hallway that smelled like old coffee and found me a small conference room instead of her desk, which I understood immediately as a courtesy. Fewer eyes on whatever I had come to say.
"Isla." She studied my face the way she probably studied every witness who walked in without calling first. "You didn't come here for an update."
"I didn't."
"You came here with something to say."
"I did."
"Then say it. I've got twenty minutes before a meeting I can't move."
I sat down across from her and made myself say it plainly, the way I said everything that actually mattered. "Whatever operation you're running against Kovalenko, I need to know Nikolai is protected inside it. Exactly the same as anyone else you're planning to protect."
"Meaning Reyes."
"Meaning Reyes." I held her eyes so she would understand this was not up for negotiation. "Meaning any other officer you've got on this too, him too, equally, not as an afterthought."
"That's not really a question."
"It's not. I'm not asking your permission to care what happens to him. I'm telling you what I need to hear before I walk out of this room."
Cruz leaned back and looked at me for a long moment, something shifting behind her eyes that looked almost like respect.
"You understand what you're actually asking, right?
I don't have unlimited resources to babysit a civilian informant who technically doesn't exist on any paperwork I can show a judge. "
"He's not asking to be protected for free. He handed you a name, a location, and half a shell company's paper trail."
I did not let my voice climb, but I did not soften it either. "That has to count for something more than a shrug if this goes wrong."
"It counts, more than you probably realize." She tapped a pen against the table twice, deciding something. "The intel on that shipment likely stopped a second attempt on the ward, the kind Reyes might not have walked away from twice."
"I don't say that to every civilian who sits in this chair." She met my eyes squarely. "I'll tell you what I can, because you've earned that much by now."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet." She almost smiled at that, tired and brief. "Pretending you'll go home and wait quietly after this isn't going to work on either of us, so let's skip that part."
"It never was going to work."
"No. I don't think it ever was." Something close to a real smile crossed her face before it disappeared again.
"We move on Kovalenko within forty-eight hours. Maybe sooner, if the accelerant delivery Basin's people flagged turns into anything actionable tonight."
"Last night sounded a lot more urgent than forty-eight hours."
"Basin's people moved into position last night, watching, confirming traffic patterns, nothing that crosses into an actual raid.
" Her tone stayed even, procedural, the version of her voice built for exactly this kind of question.
"What I run needs a warrant that will hold up in court, federal partners who need their own sign-off, and enough coordination that nobody kicks in the wrong door. "
"That takes time I would rather not spend, but it is not optional."
My stomach tightened, but I kept my voice level. "What does that look like?"
"A coordinated raid, my department working alongside federal partners who've wanted Kovalenko for longer than either of us has been on this case.
" She said it flat and exact, no wasted words, probably the same tone she used to brief every room she ever walked into.
"Multiple entry points, a warrant that covers the Red Hook property and two others tied to the same shell company. "
"And Nikolai's role in it?"
"He's not law enforcement, Isla. I can't put him inside an operational plan the same way I'd place an officer." She held up a hand before I could argue.
"But I can make sure every unit involved knows exactly who he is and what he looks like. Nobody puts a bullet in a man feeding us intelligence because they mistook him for the wrong side of this."
"That's not the same as protecting him."
"It's the version of protecting him that I actually have the authority to promise you." Her voice softened, just slightly. "I'm not going to lie to you and pretend I can guarantee anything cleaner than that, not with a man like Kovalenko standing anywhere near the middle of it."
I nodded slowly, because it was more than I had walked in expecting and still less than I wanted.
"I need you to hold your people to that. All of it. Not just the parts that are easy to promise."
"I will." She said it without hesitation, and something about the flatness of it made me believe her more than a warmer answer would have.
"For what it's worth, I don't think you came here to ask me a favor. I think you came here to make sure I understood it wasn't optional."
"You're right. It wasn't."
She studied me again, longer this time, and something in her expression shifted into a question she seemed to be deciding whether she had any right to ask.
"Can I ask you something, off the record?"
"Go ahead."
"Are you sure you want to be this close to it?" She said it gently, none of the flat procedure from a minute earlier in her voice now. "You could walk away from all of this right now, and nobody in this building would think less of you for it."
"I know."
"This isn't your fight, Isla. Not the way it's his."
I thought about how to answer that honestly, because she deserved honesty and so did I.
"I've been this close to it since the night I grabbed a fire extinguisher off a hallway wall and ran toward a fire instead of away from it." I did not look away, wanting her to see I meant every word of it.
"Nobody handed me that choice. I made it myself, before I even knew half of what I know now."
"That's not really an answer to whether you're sure."
"It is, actually." I let the silence sit for a second before I kept going.
"I've never once been unsure since that night. Scared, plenty of times. Unsure, never."
I felt the truth of it settle into my chest as I said it out loud, solid in a way it had not quite been an hour ago over coffee.
"This stopped being someone else's fight the moment I decided to stay in that hallway instead of leaving it."
Cruz held my gaze a moment longer, and something in her posture eased, like she had gotten the answer she actually needed rather than the one she had asked for.
"All right." She stood, gathering the single folder she had brought in with her. "Forty-eight hours, and I'll have someone reach out the moment there's a window."
"And you'll make sure I hear it before it's on the news."
"I will. Your name's already on that list, for whatever that's worth to you right now."
She walked me to the hallway herself, which felt like its own small kindness. "Go home, Isla, not to wait, just to be somewhere safe while the rest of this moves without needing you to watch it happen."
"I can do safe. I don't think I can do quiet anymore."
"I'll take safe." A tired laugh escaped her this time, brief but real. "Quiet was probably never going to happen for you anyway."
I told her I would try, and I mostly meant it, and I walked back out into daylight that felt sharper than it had two hours earlier, like some part of me had finally stopped holding its breath.
I had not asked anyone's permission to walk into that precinct, and I had not waited for Nikolai to decide I was ready to hear the details of a raid that could get him killed.
For the first time since this entire war had walked into my life, I had made a decision on my own terms and let it stand without apologizing for it.
It felt less like courage and more like something I should have claimed for myself a long time ago.
I did not see the man half a block down adjust his collar and lower a phone back into his coat once I had passed him. I had no reason yet to notice one more stranger on a crowded street, no reason to think that leaving a police precinct in broad daylight could cost me anything at all.
Across town, in an office with the blinds drawn against an afternoon he had no interest in looking at, a photograph sat face up on a desk. Isla, leaving the precinct, timestamped an hour earlier.
The man studying it already understood something Isla would not learn until it was far too late to matter. He had already decided exactly how he intended to draw Nikolai Stepanov out into the open.
It was not going to be with Reyes.