Chapter Six — Alexei
Chapter Six
Alexei
The file on Isla Monroe was over fifteen pages long and told me almost nothing new or useful.
I’d read it twice early this morning. First, in the broad scan I used for initial pattern recognition.
Then, line by line, with the attention I used for information that was either very important or very wrong.
The second read confirmed what the first had suggested: the file was clean in the intentional way that things are clean when someone has worked to make them that way.
Not empty. Clean. Employment records, lease agreements, business registration, tax filings, social media presence curated to the level of professional necessity and no further.
A life assembled like that of someone who understood that visibility was a liability.
She’d done it well. Better than most people manage without professional assistance.
The problem was before. Everything before her relocation to Phoenix.
A lease in a name that no longer existed.
Employment records from an event planning firm that had since closed.
A college transcript. A brother, deceased, whose own file was considerably thicker and considerably uglier.
Before that, almost nothing. A childhood that existed in bureaucratic records and nowhere else.
Someone had been thorough.
I set the file down and looked out the window at the city.
The cleanliness of her record could mean one of three things: she’d scrubbed it herself, which required either resources or expertise she didn’t obviously have; someone had helped her, which introduced a party I hadn’t yet identified; or the original was simply sparse, which was possible but felt, given everything, optimistic.
In my world, optimism was a hypothesis you tested before accepting.
Dan arrived five minutes after 7 am.
He came with another folder—thicker than mine, which was either good news or bad news depending on what it contained.
“Good morning, boss,” he greeted.
“Morning.”
He sat across my desk and set the folder between us without opening it.
“The Monroe file,” he said.
“I’ve read mine.”
“I’d be worried if you hadn’t, boss,” he mentioned, chuckling without any sign of humor in his expression.
“Then you know.” He opened his version anyway, turning it so I could see the summary sheet on top.
“No active syndicates. No current debts in any network we can access. No ongoing surveillance from any organization other than White’s, which we already knew. ”
I looked at the summary sheet. “The gaps before Phoenix.”
“I have a contact working on it. Could be another forty-eight hours.” He closed the folder. “It may not matter.”
“Everything matters.”
“What I mean is that the gaps in her record don’t change the threat assessment. White wants her to be visible. He wants her to be accessible. Whether her history before Phoenix is clean or complicated doesn’t alter what needs to happen.”
What needs to happen.
Dan was not a man who editorialized. He offered unsolicited opinions with the reluctance of someone who understood that the job description didn’t include opinions and was making an exception because the stakes warranted it.
I looked at him.
“According to Mira’s report,” he said, his tone factual. “She ate breakfast. She asked questions. She didn’t attempt to leave.” A pause that carried weight without words ensued for three seconds. “People who intend to refuse stop asking logistics questions. You taught me that, boss.”
I stood and moved to the window.
And then, a thought that shouldn’t be in my mind became the foremost.
The kiss.
I had been trying not to think about it with considerable effort since it had happened, which was itself a form of thinking about it that I found professionally irritating.
The discipline required to not think about something was applied discipline, which meant the subject was present in the structure of my attention even when I wasn’t examining it directly.
Her hands in my jacket had been tight.
That was the detail my mind seemed to hold on to the most. That involuntary clutch of someone whose body had decided something before their mind had authorized the decision.
She’d held on. Not for balance, not by the time the grip had registered in my awareness—she’d been stable, she’d found the floor, and she’d held on anyway for a half-second.
“Call Dmitri,” I said. “I’ll call Mikhail and Viktor. We meet in two hours. At the Golovin estate.”
“Done, boss.”
“Call my sisters, too. If they’re available.”
“Okay, boss.”
*****
The Golovin estate sat thirty minutes from the Strip in a neighborhood that communicated wealth through restraint rather than spectacle—no gates with gold crests, no fountains, no architecture that announced itself.
Just space, quiet, and the kind of security that didn’t need to be visible to be absolute.
It was somewhere that was, by the logic of our world, home.
My three brothers were already in the meeting room, which told me that my calls had communicated something of the gravity of the occasion without spelling it out.
Mikhail sat in the chair that was always his—at the head of the rectangular dark wood table.
Even if he weren’t the Pakhan, the absolute ruler of the Golovin Bratva, Mikhail’s place was nowhere else around the table.
Viktor’s chair, which was to the left of Mikhail’s, was angled slightly toward the door, positioned for full sightlines to both exits.
Dmitric, my only younger brother and the self-nominated rascal of the family, took the seat next to the vacant one on Mikhail’s right.
His chair was pulled back, and he had his ankle over his knee, wearing the looseness of a man who was genuinely delighted by whatever he suspected was coming.
“Don’t tell me this is a wrong poker client situation, Lex. I could kill you,” Viktor implored as I approached the table.
Dmitri chuckled.
“I should be on my way home this minute,” Viktor explained, giving Dmitri a ‘what’s funny’ look.
“Of course, he knows better than to call on us for such,” Mikail remarked.
“Ugh,” Dmitri practically groaned. “What’s with you married folks and rushing home?”
“You expect an answer to that question?” Viktor inquired, before directing his gaze towards me again.
“Thanks for being here, brothers,” I uttered as I sat down in the vacant chair on Mikhail’s right.
Mikhail nodded once. Viktor blinked.
The door opened again, and my two sisters breezed in.
“Sorry for being late. Anya delayed me,” Katerina rushed, going straight to the seat opposite Mikhail’s, the tail of her pale yellow dress flowing behind her.
“You’re here now,” Mikhail uttered.
“Thanks for throwing me under the boss,” Anya replied, settling into the seat beside Viktor.
“Of course, it’s always the junior lawyers,” Dmitri uttered, shrugging.
“Say whatever you want,” Anya, our youngest sister and Dmitri’s banter partner, answered.
She bumped her upper arm against Viktor’s. “I’ve not seen you in weeks.”
“You know where to find me, Anya,” he answered.
“Dmitri said you’re entwined with an American woman,” Katerina said, looking from Mikhail to me.
“There’s a situation,” I said.
“We know about the woman,” Mikhail said. Not unkindly, direct but never cutting, the kind of precision that came from a man who had learned the difference between efficient and cold— and had chosen efficient. “Dan briefed us.”
“Proof that Viktor is also capable of wasting your time. I’m not the only one. Talk about quizzing you about why we’re here when he already knows,” Dmitri said.
“Shut up,” Viktor answered, his tone light.
“Uh, we missed the memo,” Anya revealed.
“This asshole brings this lady as collateral to the poker room. Restrained and all. Lex opposes. Plays against the guy and wins the girl,” Dmitri explains.
“And that could set off a chain of events from this guy’s end,” Katerina concluded. “The lady has become a visible weakness. A liability. Unprotected.”
Katerina’s elegance and PR position at the Golovin casino made people surprised at how sharp her brain was. But it was no shock to any of us in the meeting room.
Mikhail nodded in the affirmative.
“Then I’ll skip the background.” I looked around the room—at Viktor’s crossed arms, at Dmitri’s poorly suppressed enjoyment, at Anya leaning forward. “I intend to marry her.”
Viktor uncrossed his arms. “Alexei, are you joking?” he scoffed.
“The threat assessment supports it. She’s been made visible in networks that don’t—”
“I understand the threat assessment.” Viktor’s voice was measured, which meant he was being careful.
Viktor was not, constitutionally, a careful man.
The care was a deliberate overlay, something his marriage to Sofia had refined in him.
“What I’m questioning is the execution. Marrying a civilian woman to protect her from a problem we created by winning her at a card table is—”
“It’s the correct move,” Mikhail cut in.
Viktor looked at Mikhail.
“Siroc White brought her into our room,” Mikhail continued. “That’s a line he crossed on our territory. What happens to her now is a reflection of our organization, regardless of whether we act or don’t. If we act and it’s marriage—” A small pause. “That’s a statement.”
“It’s a very large statement,” Viktor said.
“Siroc made a large move.” Mikhail looked at me.
“What do we know about her?” Katerina asked, a hint of a smile on her face.
I had prepared for this question. I had prepared a concise summary of relevant information—background, threat nexus, professional profile, assessed temperament under stress.
I had intended to deliver it the way I delivered operational briefings: factually, in the most efficient configuration of data.
“She’s stubborn,” I said.
Dmitri made a sound.
I looked at him.
“Nothing,” he said, apparently exercising restraint.