Chapter Ten — Alexei
Chapter Ten
Alexei
This was not unusual. I had operated on interrupted sleep cycles for most of my adult life.
It was the operational reality of running an enterprise that didn’t observe business hours and implied that full nights were a periodic luxury rather than a baseline expectation.
I had adapted to this by building systems that extracted maximum utility from the hours available and didn’t mourn the ones that weren’t.
What was unusual was the reason.
I lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling, even though something in me would rather be gazing at the sleeping form of my wife.
She had asked about threat vectors.
Not in those exact words—Isla didn’t use operational language; she used the instinctive civilian equivalents that meant the same things. But hers were the questions of someone building a picture. Not out of curiosity—out of need.
I understood that need. I had built my entire professional life on it.
What I hadn’t decided yet was why she needed it.
I could see the outline of it. I could decipher that there was something she knew that she hadn’t told me, and it was directly relevant to the threat I was trying to manage. And she was not withholding it out of carelessness.
She was protecting something.
I got up and went to my office to start working.
*****
Dan arrived with coffee he’d made himself. I knew him enough to know that meant the meeting was going to be significant enough that he’d decided not to wait for Mira or any other staff.
“Good morning, boss,” he greeted, sitting across my desk.
“Morning.”
He set his tablet between us and pulled up a display that I looked at for thirty seconds before I looked back at him.
“When did this start?” I said.
“Earliest activity we can confirm is seventy-two hours ago.” He turned the tablet slightly so the network diagram was oriented toward me. “Someone is running a retrospective search on her. They’re pulling historical data, not recent stuff. Pre-Vegas. Older records.”
“Not Siroc?”
“Not Siroc, boss. We discovered a different kind of signature. Different methodology. Siroc’s people are blunt—they make traceable calls, they use intermediaries who are identifiable because they don’t care about being identifiable.
This is careful. Someone who knows how to look without leaving a clear record of looking. ”
I looked at the network diagram again. The search pattern had a quality I recognized.
It was not a sweep but a depth excavation.
Whoever this was, they weren’t trying to locate Isla.
They already knew where she was. They were looking for something specific in her history, something they believed was there and wanted confirmed.
“Independent of White?” I asked again, probably hoping for a deviation from what I already knew.
“Almost certainly. The timing doesn’t correlate with White’s activity pattern. He’s been quiet since the casino—we think he’s building the legal case I briefed you on last week.” He gestured at the diagram. “This is a different actor.”
A different actor.
A second actor introduced the exact kind of complexity I disliked most, not because complexity was unmanageable, but because it meant the initial assessment had been incomplete. That somewhere in the information I’d assembled, there was a gap I hadn’t identified and someone else was using it.
“The Monroe file,” I said. “The gap before Phoenix.”
“My contact got back to me this morning.” Dan’s jaw moved slightly.
“There’s more there than we know. Possibly more than she’s told anyone.
” He pulled up a second display. “The name Monroe-Vega shows up in connection with a Phoenix gambling circuit that was shut down six years ago. Not as a player.”
The silence that followed was absolute.
“Could she be running something?” I asked, more to myself.
Dan looked at me steadily. “Do you believe she is, boss?”
I turned to the window.
The honest answer to that question required setting aside what I wanted the answer to be, which was a discipline I had applied without difficulty to every other assessment I’d made in twenty years. But I was finding that unexpectedly hard this morning.
I ran through the evidence. The way she moved through a room. The direction of her questions.
She wasn’t running anything.
She was afraid of something that was running, and she hadn’t told me what it was.
“No,” I said, turning back to Dan. “I want everything. Whatever the contact has, whatever the Phoenix circuit produced, whoever the active associates are. I want it before the end of the week.”
I thought about her in the hallway during the storm, back against the wall, breathing through something she initially refused to call fear even as it moved through her.
“We might need to bring in Kai and Jay. Since what we’re looking for isn’t exactly on the surface. Or, we could—”
“Call them,” I cut in.
Kai and Jay were on the list of our extreme human resources. We didn’t bring them in because their practices were often too ‘final.’ These guys didn’t give a hoot about watching one’s back or being careful.
“Boss, I just mentioned them as a possibility for later. You rarely call—”
“I’m asking you to call them in now,” I insisted.
He nodded twice. “Okay, boss.”
I was irritated, alright. But that was not all. What I really felt, which I’d rather not admit to anyone, was fear. I hated that there was an open window that I didn’t totally know about. I hated that harm could be closer to her than I’d been envisaging.
Isla was hiding something, and it might be dangerous. Something I had to find out about before it detonated in my empire. And my empire wasn’t even my biggest concern.
*****
In the flat light of midday, the poker room always felt different. The same room that seemed to pulsate with desperate energy at night was filled with people who appeared to just be enjoying themselves during the day. Either way, it was more of a pretense.
But Isla moved through it like she’d been doing it for years.
I watched her and noted the way she oriented herself.
Not to the tables or the sight lines I would have prioritized, but to the people.
She read the emotional weather of every cluster she passed before she reached them, and she adjusted accordingly in a subtle way that went beyond her words or expression.
I watched and noticed the warmth she brought to a handshake versus a simple acknowledgment of someone’s presence.
This was not a skill she’d developed for this world. This was the skill she’d been using for years to manage rooms full of powerful people with competing agendas. She’d simply transferred it.
“She’s good,” Dmitri said from beside me.
He’d been standing there for at least a minute, but I had chosen to ignore him.
“She’s professional.”
“She’s more than professional.” He tilted his head, watching her navigate a conversation with two of our floor managers.
Within ninety seconds, she had one of them smiling and the other leaning slightly forward, both of them having concluded somewhere in their unconscious processing that she was someone worth listening to.
“She’s…” He seemed to be searching for the word. “Camouflage.”
I looked at him.
“Not in a deceptive way,” he clarified.
Of course, I know.
I said nothing.
“It’s not a weakness,” Dmitri added. “It’s the kind of asset that can’t be manufactured. People either have it, or they perform it, and everyone can tell the difference.” He looked at me. “She’s not performing.”
“I know,” I said.
“Does she know you’re watching her like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like you want to eat her up,” he answered, chuckling.
“Dmitri.”
“I’m asking because she will notice if she hasn’t. She notices everything.” He picked up the drink from the passing tray. “It’s okay. She’s your wife.”
And then he strolled away, leaving me with a hunger for her that seemed to have increased at the thought of the word ‘wife.’
*****
She was in the sitting room when I came down that evening, which was not unusual.
What was unusual was what she was doing, which was standing in front of the small sound system she’d apparently connected to her laptop at some point, engaged in a debate with it about the volume level—pressing up, listening, pressing down, and listening again with focused dissatisfaction.
She needs a phone.
She looked up when I ventured further into the room.
“Your acoustics are wrong,” she said. “The speaker placement for a room of this shape needs to account for the ceiling height. The bass is getting lost.”
I looked at the speaker. “I’ll have it corrected.”
“I can tell you what to change. I’ve had this argument with audio technicians at six different venues.
” She pressed the button once more, apparently settled on a compromise, and the room filled with something I didn’t recognize.
The sound was low, melodic, piano-led, with a voice underneath it that made it feel like it had the music people chose for private evenings.
I set down my jacket and sat.
Mira had left dinner on the counter, covered and warm. I noted, not for the first time, that the people in proximity to Isla had a tendency to adapt to her preferences without making anything of it.
“Have you been to Portugal?” she asked, sitting across from me with an ease I couldn’t brush off.
I looked up from the food I’d been uncovering. “Once. Lisbon. Twelve years ago.”
“For work.”
“Everything at that point was for work.”
She pulled her own plate toward her. “Did you see anything while you were there, or was it entirely transactional?”
I considered the question with the honesty she’d established was the minimum standard of our conversations. “I saw the city from a car. I was there for seventy-two hours.”
The look she gave me told me how inadequate she found that experience.