Chapter Nine — Isla
Chapter Nine
Isla
The flowers arrived on a Tuesday.
They were beautiful, white garden roses arranged in a low, expensive vase, with the kind of arrangement that took skill to make look effortless.
I stood in the lobby and looked at them for a brief moment before I asked Marcus, the day security lead with the quiet, watchful presence, who had sent them.
He didn’t know.
The card slot on the vase was empty.
Regardless of how many things I did afterward, I thought about the flowers constantly.
*****
Life as Alexei Golovin’s wife had a form I hadn’t anticipated.
I had imagined, in the hours before the wedding when I’d been running worst-case scenarios through my head, something more obviously constraining despite the terms he’s accepted.
Guards at the door. Permission required for movement.
Captivity dressed up in expensive furnishings.
I had prepared myself for that and had prepared, alongside it, my response to it—the lines I would not allow to move and the version of this arrangement that I could survive with my sense of self intact.
What I had not prepared for was the strange, disorienting experience of being treated like I belonged.
The whole staff on the penthouse floor deferred to me with respect instead of the performative style I’d expected.
I knew one explanation of it would be the fact that their fear and respect for their boss was absolute.
But I also knew that if that were the case, they would have treated me differently whenever Alexei wasn’t around. But they didn’t.
Marcus briefed me each morning on the day’s security arrangement, assuming my interest rather than showing a fake tolerance of it. Mira had transitioned from the role of caretaker to something closer to coordinator, appearing when needed and disappearing when not.
The sisters were the most surprising.
Anya appeared on Wednesday with coffee. Her energy was that of someone who has decided that a social call is happening regardless of whether it’s been scheduled.
She sat in the main living area and talked about three entirely different subjects in the span of forty minutes and asked me questions about event planning with genuine curiosity.
She told me, with complete sincerity, that Alexei had seemed “less like a closed door” in the last week, which she considered a significant improvement.
I wasn’t sure what to do with this information, so I gave her more coffee, and she seemed satisfied.
Even silence wasn’t negatively charged with her.
Sofia came the next day, which felt more like a visit with a quieter agenda, conducted over tea in the kitchen. Even though I didn’t ask, she told me about her own first months with Viktor,
“He was worse than Alexei,” she said, which was genuinely hard to imagine. “At least Alexei knows he’s controlled. Viktor thought he was being reasonable.”
I laughed at that.
“You’re settling,” she said. Not approvingly, not disapprovingly—observationally. The way someone notes the weather.
“I’m adapting,” I said.
“That’s how it starts.” She set down her cup. “For what it’s worth—he’s different. I don’t mean easier. But different.” She looked at me. “I thought you should know.”
I thought about that for a long time after she left.
*****
Evenings with Alexei had developed their own sequence.
We hadn’t slept at the same time since the wedding night. He was out at the casino until after midnight, and he spent most of the day in his office while I spent mine in the kitchen or the study. I also now had a laptop that he’d given me with no explanation other than, “It’s yours to use now.”
He’d sit. He’d work, usually—always had something, documents or a phone call or a tablet with screens I didn’t examine because his professional life was not my business unless he made it mine.
We occupied the same room with ease, like people who have run out of reasons to disturb each other and are simply, tentatively, being.
He made observations rather than conversation.
Something he’d read, something Dmitri had said that had been either useful or idiotic (the line, with Dmitri, was often unclear), once a question about event logistics that surprised me so completely I looked up from my laptop to check whether he was actually asking.
But he really was. He had a client relationship that involved an annual private dinner and wanted to know what made a venue feel intimate rather than small.
We spent forty-five minutes on that. Him asking precise questions. Me answering with unfeigned enthusiasm. By the end of it, he had what he needed, and I had, without quite planning it, talked more freely than I had about anything since I’d been abducted.
*****
The black car was there on Friday.
I noticed it from the window of the bedroom as I pulled my hair into a bun after hours of logging into my work accounts and keeping track of the next events.
It was parked on the cross street half a block from the penthouse with the type of stillness that I had learned, recently and against my will, to distinguish from ordinary parked cars.
Ordinary parked cars didn’t have someone in the driver’s seat.
Ordinary parked cars didn’t have tinted windows rated past the legal tourist-facing limit.
I clocked the make and the color. I kept my breathing even and went out of the room, opening my laptop and staring at the vendor email I was supposed to be responding to for eleven minutes without reading a word of it.
I thought about telling Alexei about it. But then, I didn’t. I did not tell him about the anonymous flowers, either.
I wasn’t sure why.
*****
The storm arrived on Saturday without much warning.
The forecast had said a chance of rain, which in Las Vegas usually meant a twenty-minute pretense of precipitation followed by the sky returning to its default indifferent blue.
This was different. I heard it before I felt it—a change in the pressure of the air against the windows and a distant rumble that sounded more serious than normal.
By 8 pm, the sky outside the floor-to-ceiling glass had turned grey, which meant the weather had decided to be thorough.
I closed my laptop and moved away from the windows.
That was the first concession. I told myself it was practical—working near the windows in lightning wasn’t sensible regardless of anxiety—and sat at the kitchen counter instead, trying to read since Mira had gone home.
The first crack of thunder hit twenty minutes later.
I was completely fine. I set down my book and put both hands flat on the counter. I looked at the kitchen wall and breathed the way I breathed when events were going catastrophically sideways, and panic was the least useful available response.
But I couldn’t block out the chaotic noises from becoming real in my head.
The sound of the door when they’d pulled me out of the second vehicle had been a crack of heavy metal on concrete that had reached into my chest the same way the thunder just had.
The darkness of the hood had been absolute in a way that made the storm-dimmed apartment feel, despite the lights, like it had narrowed around me.
I was being irrational. I knew I was being irrational. Knowing didn’t help.
The power flickered.
And then there was one second of darkness—not even a full second, a half-second; lights, screens, and the hum of the building’s electronics cut out and then returned.
It was the kind of flicker that ordinarily happened in storms. I was off the kitchen stool before the lights came back on and in Alexei’s short hallway before I’d made a conscious decision to be there.
I stood with my back against the wall that had no windows and my hands at my sides, and I breathed.
In.
Out.
Another crack of thunder followed, this one rolling. I hugged myself tight as the windows at the end of the hall lit briefly white, and I closed my eyes.
That was when I heard those footsteps that were both dominating and almost silent.
Alexei.
It was too early for him to be here, and he was still in his work clothes with his jacket over his arm and his sleeves rolled. He looked at me like he was looking for something.
He didn’t ask if I was alright.
He stepped closer, set his jacket over the nearest chair in the living room, and held out his hand.
I looked at it.
“Come on,” he said, giving me a steady look that didn’t give space for a no, despite not being commanding.
I put my hand in his.
He led me through the hall to the bedroom. He sat on the edge of the bed and waited, looking at me.
I sat down beside him.
The thunder moved through again, muffled now by walls and distance, and I registered it and did not move, which felt like progress. Alexei sat with complete stillness that seemed like being present and not being controlled.
“I’m not usually like this,” I said.
“I know.”
“I just… storms are… I’m scared of storms. But I’m usually good at taking care of the fear. But tonight… things that happened recently…”
“Siroc’s people abducting you.”
I nodded.
“The sounds in the warehouse.” I looked at my hands. “And the car. The door when they—it’s a stupid association. My brain knows it’s a stupid association.”
“Your brain is running a pattern match,” he said. “It’s not stupid. It’s what brains do with threat data. It just becomes inconvenient when the threat is past, and the pattern keeps running.”
I looked at him. “Does that happen to you?”
There was a pause. The kind that meant the answer existed, and he was deciding whether to give it.
“Not with sounds,” he said. “With disorder. With situations I can’t arrange into a logical sequence.
” Another pause. “With the feeling of not knowing where a threat is coming from. Knowing it’s there and not being able to locate it. ”
“Chaos,” I said.
“Chaos,” he confirmed. “It’s not comfortable.”
He didn’t dress it up—didn’t frame it as a historical anecdote or a professional observation. He just said it.
We were silent as the rain moved against the windows. The storm had settled into its sustained phase—no longer violent, just present, the sky making good on the threat it had opened with and doing it thoroughly.
I sat beside Alexei Golovin on the edge of our bed with the sound of rain filling the spaces between words. I thought about how scary and weirdly romantic it was that he’d come to become someone I could hold on to in such a short period of time.
I leaned in, letting the slight distance between us close, my shoulder against his arm. When he didn’t shift away, I leaned further until my head was against his chest and I could feel the steadiness of him. His arm came around me like the movement had always been the plan.
The thunder came once more, distant now, like an afterthought. I simply breathed against Alexei’s chest and let the sound move through me without taking hold. I felt his heartbeat under my cheek, steady and present.
Outside, the rain ran down the glass in long clean rivulets, and the storm that had seemed enormous twenty minutes ago was already moving past, leaving the air cleaner than before.
Inside, something was growing in the space I’d been keeping carefully empty. An intimacy I hadn’t planned for and could no longer honestly pretend wasn’t there.
It was fragile.
But it also was something that felt, tentatively and terrifyingly, like it might also be strong. And dangerous.