Chapter Two — Alexei #2
He walked towards the table and took a seat. I watched as one of his men forced the lady to stand by the table like a prize on display.
It was clear to anyone who had eyes. Siroc was using her as collateral. Something flared in my chest. She was out of place here. She didn’t belong. And, looking at her pale skin and terrified eyes, she knew it too.
I walked toward Siroc.
“In case you didn’t get what I meant the first time. You can’t have her here. I won’t allow it.”
Siroc laughed. And then, with a taunting look, he replied, “If you want her that badly, Alexei, you can win her.”
I went quiet, and the room did the same. Dealers paused mid-shuffle. Players found reasons to look at their hands. Dan was already in my peripheral vision, positioned near the east wall.
“Explain,” I said, even though I already knew where the bastard was going.
Siroc shrugged with theatrical ease. “I thought, given your appreciation for a good game, you might prefer to win her rather than watch me collect.”
I didn’t blink.
The specifics of how she got here with him didn’t matter yet; it was information I would acquire and process later.
What mattered now was the structure of what Siroc had just done.
He had walked into my room—my territory, under my rules—and introduced human trafficking as a transaction.
He had done it in front of witnesses. He had done it with a woman whose wrists were bound and whose feet were bare.
But here was the problem with Siroc White: he was crude, but he wasn’t stupid.
He understood that if I refused the game outright, he would simply play a game with someone else and give her out as collateral.
My refusal wouldn’t save her. It would only remove her from my vicinity, which was not the same thing as protecting her.
How is protecting her my business, though?
This was why I didn’t operate on principle alone. Principle was important, but the outcome was more important. And the outcome I wanted was the woman not being in Siroc White’s possession by the end of the evening.
The mathematics were simple. Infuriating, but simple.
“What are the terms?” I asked.
I heard Dmitri, somewhere behind me, exhale.
Siroc named them—five hundred thousand dollar buy-in, seven-card stud, three rounds minimum, the woman released to the winner at the end of the final hand.
He named them with the confidence of a man who thought the proposition was generous, which told me he hadn’t fully thought through what he’d just agreed to.
He had just agreed to play poker against me. Against the Golovin poker empire heir.
In my room.
For something I had decided to win.
“Agreed,” I said.
The table we used was the center one—the largest, the most visible, the one I chose for exactly that reason.
If Siroc wanted a spectacle, I would give him the spectacle, and then I would use it.
I sat down across from him and did not look at the woman again because looking at her served no purpose and potentially served as information I didn’t want to give Siroc about what motivated my participation.
I already knew what motivated it. I didn’t need to advertise it.
The dealer began.
Reading Siroc White’s poker face was the least interesting intellectual exercise I’d performed in recent memory.
He was the kind of player who had learned to suppress the obvious tells—no knee bouncing, no finger-tapping, no obvious micro-expressions around the eyes—without understanding that suppression itself was a tell if you knew what to look for.
The quality of his stillness changed when he had something.
Not much. Not in any way a casual observer would catch.
But the absence of his usual background noise—the ring-fiddling, the slight forward lean, the way he reached for his glass—created a pattern as legible as text once you knew how to read it.
I knew how to read it within the first seven minutes.
After that, the game became a question of pacing.
You didn’t want to dismantle a man too fast. Too fast looked like luck or cheating and invited accusations I had no interest in managing.
The art was in making it feel plausible—letting him win a hand he should have lost, building his confidence by increments so that when the architecture came apart it felt, to him, like bad luck rather than systematic deconstruction.
It was, in miniature, everything I found interesting about strategy.
You didn’t beat a man. You built the conditions in which he beat himself.
I was aware of her the entire time.
That was the detail that sat poorly with me, afterward, when I examined the evening with the distance I preferred.
I was aware of her in a way that was neither useful nor welcome—a peripheral consciousness of her presence that persisted through three rounds of cards and roughly endless minutes of focused competitive attention.
I didn’t look at her. But I knew she was there, standing where Siroc’s men had positioned her near the edge of the table he formerly occupied, still barefoot on my carpet, watching the table with those calculating eyes that refused to go blank.
At one point, Dmitri positioned himself near her. Not conspicuously, just near—within a range that served no purpose other than to be within a range. I noted this and said nothing. Dmitri’s instincts were inconvenient and reliable in roughly equal measure.
The final hand was the only hand that mattered.
Siroc had three kings and thought I didn’t know it.
He’d been building toward this hand for the last forty minutes, letting his stack diminish just enough to justify the escalation when it came.
It was, by his standards, a well-constructed trap.
He watched me across the felt with the restrained pleasure of a man getting ready to collect, and I let him watch, and I laid down my cards with no particular ceremony.
Four jacks.
The silence that followed lasted about three seconds.
Then everything seemed to move at the same time.
Siroc’s face went through several private phases in rapid succession—denial, recalculation, fury—before settling into the rigid blankness of a man choosing, in public, not to show what he was feeling.
To his credit, he didn’t throw the table.
He sat with it, jaw tight, rings glinting as he pressed his knuckles to the felt.
“Clean game,” he said finally, through his teeth.
“It always is,” I said.
I didn’t stand immediately. I took a moment—deliberate, unhurried—to straighten my jacket, retrieve my cufflinks from where I’d set them on the table’s edge when I rolled my sleeves.
Then I looked at Dan, who was already moving.
“Take her upstairs. The guest suite on twelve. Have Mira bring clothing and whatever else is needed.” Then I added after a pause, “And cut the zip tie.”
Dan crossed the room without a word, and I watched him reach her—watched the small, reflexive flinch she gave before she controlled it—and I looked away before it became something I was noticing.
Siroc pushed back from the table like a man saving the rest of his controlled fury for somewhere private.
This isn’t finished.
“Most things worth doing take time,” I said pleasantly. “Drive safely.”
He left with his men.
I stood at the now-empty table for a moment longer than necessary.
Dan reappeared at my shoulder. “She’s going up.”
“Good.”
“She just argued with Vasily.”
I looked at him.
“He offered to carry her because of the floors. She declined.” Something in Dan’s expression suggested he found this either impressive or a portent of future complications. Possibly both. “She walked.”
I said nothing. I picked up my Scotch from the side table where I’d left it an hour ago and took the first sip of the evening, which had gone warm and tasted like the aftertaste of a decision I hadn’t finished making yet.