Chapter Four — Alexei #2
She stood the entire time with her arms crossed and her expression doing things she probably wasn’t aware of—moving through disbelief, recognition, grief that surfaced briefly when I mentioned the surveillance timeline and then was pressed down hard and covered with anger, which I suspected was how she handled most things that hurt her.
When I finished, the room was quiet for a moment.
“So.” Her voice was flat. “I can’t go back.”
“Not safely.”
“And you’ve decided to… what? Keep me here indefinitely?”
“No.” I held her gaze. “I’ve decided to marry you.”
The silence lasted precisely two seconds.
Then she laughed.
It was a genuine and clearly involuntary laugh. She pressed her fingers to her mouth, and then the laugh was over and something considerably colder replaced it.
“You’re out of your mind,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“You—” She unfolded her arms and spread her hands and looked at me like I’d just said the most absurd thing she'd ever heard.
“You have known me for how many hours? You have not asked me a single question about my life. You have held me here against my will, and now you are standing in your very expensive room telling me you intend to marry me, as though that sentence makes any sense whatsoever coming out of a human mouth—”
“It makes strategic sense.”
“Strategic.” She repeated like it was an apparently stupid explanation. “Do you hear yourself?”
“My wife cannot be bet, traded, or targeted without triggering consequences that no one in Siroc’s position would be willing to absorb.” I kept my voice level. “It closes every operational door he has. Permanently. Cleanly. There is no other protection that achieves the same result.”
“There is the police—”
“Doesn’t bring a solution. I told you this already.”
“There is me leaving Las Vegas—.”
“He tracked you across a state line and a name change. Distance is not a barrier.”
“There is—” She stopped, then looked at me. “You want to own me,” she accused, her voice almost quiet now. “That’s what this is. You’re dressing it up in strategy and protection and… and necessity, but what you want is ownership. Control. Something you won at a card table and now you want to—”
“Stop.” I stood.
She didn’t stop. “You enjoy this. The fear. The power. You sit there with that face that doesn’t move, and you explain things to me like I’m a situation you’re managing. And you think that because you have reasons it makes what you’re doing acceptable—”
“I don’t enjoy your fear.” The words came out with more edge than I’d intended, and I didn’t apologize for it. “I find it inconvenient. There is a difference.”
“Oh, inconvenient. I’m so sorry my terror is inconvenient for your—”
“Isla.”
“—your perfectly organized criminal enterprise—”
“Isla.”
The use of her name stopped her. I hadn’t used it before.
It landed differently than I’d intended—not as a command but as something more direct than that, something that cut through the argument and addressed her specifically, and the silence that followed it was different from the previous silences.
“How the fuck do you know my name?” she asked, more like grumbled. “Why am I even asking? It’s clearly part of the information you gathered.”
“I believe you know mine, too.”
Her eyes moved quickly between my face and the ceiling. She said nothing.
“This is not desire. I am not proposing marriage because I want you. I am proposing it because it is the only available structure that keeps you alive in the long term, and I have decided that your being alive in the long term is a priority,” I explained, my voice lower.
“You can argue about the premise. But you should understand that the conclusion holds regardless.”
She looked at me for a long moment. “You decided,” she said. “Without asking me.”
“I’m asking you now.”
“You’re not asking. You’re informing.” She stepped toward me—that same pattern from earlier, the movement without premeditation, closing distance because the anger needed proximity.
I could hear the low sounds of my internal alarm.
“You are standing there telling me this is happening and calling it a question, and it is… it is the most arrogant, controlling, cold-blooded… ”
“Cold-blooded would be leaving you to manage this alone.” My voice came out sharp again.
“Cold-blooded would be the outcome Siroc had arranged for you before I intervened. What I am offering you might be unpleasant and unconventional, but it is non-negotiable and also, by any measurable standard, the better option.”
“Non-negotiable.”
I wasn’t surprised that it was the word she capitalized on.
“Yes.”
“I will never be your wife.” She stepped closer, her chest rising and falling with the speed of the argument, eyes blazing. “I don’t care what logic you’ve assembled. I don’t care what Siroc White does or doesn’t plan. I would rather—”
“Take your chances on the street.” I met her eyes. “Yes. You’ve said.”
The words stopped her.
We were standing very close. Again. I was beginning to understand that this was a pattern she fell into when she was too angry to monitor her own proximity.
That the argument brought her forward by increments until the distance had collapsed without either of us explicitly closing it.
I was also beginning to understand that I was not taking the available step backward.
“You said this isn’t desire,” she said. Her voice had dropped to something quieter than the argument, and her eyes moved across my face with the sharp focus of someone reading text they need to understand precisely. “You said that very clearly.”
“I did.”
“Would you touch me?” It wasn’t inflected as a question. “If I agreed. If I—if this happened. Would you actually—”
“Yes.”
The word came out unambiguously, because I had been raised in a world where the only thing more dangerous than an honest answer was a dishonest one. And she seemed like someone who knew the difference between the two.
The silence that followed my admission was not hostile. Not exactly.
Her eyes didn’t leave mine.
I stepped back, internally fighting the pull that opposed my movement.
“There is no other option,” I said. My voice had returned to its normal tone, and I was grateful for that, at least. “I am not asking for enthusiasm. I’m not asking for trust, or warmth, or anything that isn’t legal cooperation.
” I picked up my jacket from the back of the chair.
“But this is happening, Isla. You can hate every part of it. You can hate me. That changes nothing about the conclusion.”
I moved toward the door.
“The answer will still be no,” she said behind me, her voice quiet but resolved.
I stepped out of the room and shut the door behind me.
The corridor was quiet and cool. In a way, it was exactly what I needed—regulated, predictable, free of honey-blonde women who shoved me and then asked questions that required honest answers. As I walked on, my pulse was not at its resting rate.
This woman had now disrupted my resting pulse twice in a twenty-four-hour window.
That was twice more than anyone had managed in the preceding three years.
The word yes had left my mouth without a single moment of deliberation in a situation where every other word I’d spoken had been carefully assembled before delivery.
She was going to agree. Not tonight—tonight the answer would be no, exactly as she’d said. But she was also not a woman who let pride override survival indefinitely. She was organized. Practical. Her mind worked in outcomes even when her heart was working in fury.
She would see it.
And in the meantime, I had a Siroc White problem to begin dismantling.