Chapter Five — Isla
Chapter Five
Isla
I didn’t sleep. I simply couldn’t.
I tried. I lay on the bed that wasn’t mine in the room that wasn’t mine and stared at a ceiling that probably cost more per square foot than my monthly rent, and I tried to make my body relax. But my body resisted, anyway.
Marriage.
The word kept arriving. It would simply appear between one thought and the next, dropping into the silence.
I pressed my palms flat against the mattress and looked at the ceiling, running the logic again, which was a mistake I kept making.
The logic was the problem. If the logic were obviously flawed, I could dismiss it cleanly.
But the logic wasn’t obviously flawed. The logic was annoyingly coherent. It made sense, technically.
Someone had been watching me hand out programs at galas, watching me argue with florists, watching me become the person I’d fought to become—and I hadn’t known. I’d been living in a snow globe. Thinking the glass meant safety.
It hadn’t.
Which meant that whatever I’d been doing wasn’t working.
Which meant that my instinct—leave, run, rebuild, repeat—had a structural flaw that another round of leaving and running wasn’t going to fix.
Which meant that the infuriating, cold-blooded, impossibly arrogant man who had won me had a point.
And that was the part that scared me even more than Siroc White.
I hated that.
“You can hate every part of it,” he’d said. “That changes nothing about the conclusion.”
I hated that part of me understood his logic.
I punched the pillow. It didn’t help.
Around 3 am I gave up on the bed entirely and moved to the window. Las Vegas, even this early in the morning, is not a city at rest. I’d always found something honest about that. The Strip didn’t pretend. It was exactly what it was, and you went in knowing, which meant the losses were yours.
I thought about Adrian again.
I thought about the charm that could fill a room, that had filled every room he’d ever walked into for as long as I could remember, that had made him the person everyone wanted at their table.
The way he’d borrowed money with such genuine conviction that he’d pay it back that you believed him even when the evidence was stacking against the thesis.
And now I was standing barefoot at a window twelve floors above the city where I’d rebuilt myself, and a man I’d met hours ago had told me he intended to marry me for my own protection, and the worst part—the very worst, most unacceptable part—was that Adrian would have thought this was extremely funny.
He would have laughed until he cried. He would have said something like, “Only you, Isla, only you could accidentally stumble into the one criminal in Las Vegas who has a code of ethics.”
I pressed my forehead against the glass.
Jokes on who exactly, Adrian?
Me or you?
I stayed at the window until the sky started to change.
Mira arrived at 7:25 am with breakfast for two.
Two place settings, two coffee cups, the signs of an occasion that expects company.
I looked at the tray and then at Mira. She returned my gaze with the composed neutrality that I was beginning to understand was simply her signature expression, her permanent professional frequency, not a specific response to me.
“He’s coming down,” I remarked.
“Mr. Golovin will join you at 7:30.” She set the tray on the dining table—a table I hadn’t used yet, larger than necessary for one person, which now made sense as a design choice. “There’s fresh orange juice. The eggs are a different preparation today—he requested something lighter.”
“He requested.” I heard myself say before I chuckled lightly. “He requested a specific egg preparation.”
“Scrambled with herbs. He thought you might prefer it.”
I sat down at the table and looked at the eggs, feeling the exhaustion of a sleepless night wash over me.
“Mira.”
“Yes?”
“Do you—” I stopped. What was I going to ask her?
Do you think this is insane?
Do you think he’s a monster?
Do you think I should run?
None of those were questions she could answer, or would.
“Never mind. Thank you,” I eventually said with a small smile.
She nodded and said, “You don’t have to wait for him.”
“I’m sure he said that, too,” I muttered.
She smiled and then turned around to leave.
I drank my coffee, and exactly five minutes later, the door opened, and he walked in looking like a man who was headed to a board meeting.
He sat down across from me. Poured his own coffee. Cut a piece of fruit with the economical precision of someone for whom breakfast was a task to be completed efficiently rather than a meal to be experienced.
He looked up and found me staring.
“You didn’t sleep,” he said.
“Observant,” I dropped.
“It wasn’t an observation. You have circles under your eyes that weren’t there yesterday.”
“I was being kidnapped yesterday. My skincare routine was interrupted.”
The corner of his mouth moved. It was so small I might have invented it. “Eat,” he said.
“You said that yesterday.”
“You ate then, too.” He picked up his fork. “So the instruction appears to be effective.”
I ate the eggs. They were good—lighter than yesterday, exactly as described, which was somehow the most irritating thing he’d done yet.
I ate them while I assembled the questions I’d been organizing for hours, arranging them in the order that moved from least to most dangerous, the way I arranged an event timeline: logistics first, the things that required concrete answers, and the charged things saved for when the groundwork was laid.
“What’s your name?”
“I thought we already established that we knew each other’s names,” he answered coolly.
“Yeah, I know you’re Mr. Golovin. Mira has mentioned that a trillion times,” I pointed out, half rolling my eyes. “I meant your first name. Do your family members and friends call you Mr. Golovin?”
“Alexei,” he declared, his eyes on mine. “Alexei Golovin.”
“Hm,” I muttered, nodding and pretending I wasn’t sorely tempted to hear how smooth it’d sound from my lips.
We ate in silence for another few seconds before I spoke again.
“If I agreed,” I started.
He looked up. Nothing changed in his expression, but I had the sense of something sharpening.
“If,” I said again, firmly. “Hypothetically. What would that actually look like?”
He set down his fork. “Specify.”
“What kind of—” I pressed my fingers against my coffee cup. “What kind of husband would you be? Practically speaking. Would I be allowed to work? To leave the building? To have—” I cast around for the word that wasn’t life because life felt too large. “—autonomy. Any version of it.”
“Yes.” No hesitation. “Your work continues. Your business continues. You would have security—you would not have a visible leash. The goal is that you appear to be my wife. Not my prisoner.”
“There’s a difference?”
“In outcome, yes. Significantly.” He looked at me steadily. “You would have access to your phone, your contacts, your professional obligations. Events, clients, whatever your calendar holds. You would move through the world as Isla Golovin—”
“I’m not sure I’d want to change my name.”
The pause this time was shorter. “Isla Monroe-Golovin.”
I absorbed that. The hyphenation felt like a small victory, which probably said something depressing about how quickly my frame of reference had shifted.
“Would I live here, with you?”
“Naturally, yes.”
I looked at him across the breakfast table. Morning light came through the windows and did something to the planes of his face that the amber poker room lighting hadn’t—made him look slightly less constructed.
“What about—” I started, then stopped myself.
“Say it,” he prompted.
“Would you expect—” I kept my eyes on my coffee cup. “Physically. Would you—”
“No.” The answer was quick and calm. “I told you. I won’t force you.”
“But.” I looked up because I needed to see his face when he said the next part, needed to read whatever was actually there. “Yesterday. You said yes.”
He held my gaze. “I said yes.”
“So you… you want to.” The word felt strange in my mouth, applied to him, in this context. “And you’d just… what? Not act on it? Indefinitely?”
“I’ve exercised considerable restraint in considerably higher-stakes situations. It’s not a guarantee I’m making about forever. It’s a guarantee I’m making about coercion. They’re different.”
“That is an extremely fine line.”
“Most important lines are,” he answered. “I’m not going to force you. Ever. But I won’t pretend desire doesn’t exist between us, either.”
I pushed back from the table slightly and stood because sitting felt like a posture I couldn’t sustain. I needed to move, needed the physical expression of what was building in my chest, which was part rage and part something else that I refused to name before I had better information.
“You are manipulating me,” I said. Not loudly. “Right now. You know that. You’re sitting there being reasonable, and answering questions without flinching, and you’re doing it deliberately because you understand that I respond to logic and you’re using that—”
“I’m answering your questions honestly.” His voice was even. “If that constitutes manipulation, I’d be curious what you’d prefer instead.”
“I’d prefer—” I gestured, wide and frustrated, stepping toward him. “I’d prefer to not be in a position where I’m sitting across a breakfast table with the man who won me in a card game trying to work out whether his offer of marriage is actually better than the alternatives—”
“It is better. You’ve already concluded that. That’s why you’re asking logistics questions instead of simply refusing.”
I stopped moving.
He was right. I’d been asking logistics questions.
I’d been building a picture of what agreeing looked like, mapping the terrain of it, questioning the possible shape of a life I’d said I would never choose.
And he’d seen that. He’d sat there with his scrambled eggs and his controlled face, and he’d seen it clearly, and now he was—