Chapter Ten — Alexei #2
“I went to a festival,” she said. “Three years ago, before… the business got busy enough that leaving felt impossible. I had four days and no client obligations. I walked until my feet gave up and then I sat in a restaurant until midnight eating things I couldn’t name.
” She picked up her fork. “It was the best four days I’ve had in recent memory. ”
“Where else?” I asked, and meant it not as social filler but as an actual request for information I found I wanted.
She looked at me with slight surprise, which told me the genuineness had been audible.
Then she told me about Oaxaca, where she’d planned a destination event and stayed four extra days on her own money because she wasn’t ready to leave. About a road trip through the American Southwest that she’d done alone with a bag and a playlist and no fixed itinerary.
“You moved to Las Vegas years ago. What was life like before then?”
She blinked, not saying anything at first.
“Well… it was okay. Just not enough for me.”
“Not enough in what way?” I pressed, not quite accusing but probing.
She shrugged. “Loss, family stuff, debt, you know, it became too much, so I decided to have a fresh start.”
“You lost your brother. Sorry about that.”
“You know?” she inquired, raising a brow. “Of course.”
“It’s not a secret, is it?”
“Nope.”
Then she asked, “Tell me about the last vacation you took and actually enjoyed. Or maybe a trip.”
It wasn’t a question about the operational Alexei Golovin or my empire; it was about me. And that suddenly made me feel… younger and lighter. A small smile left my lips before I reined it back in.
“Moscow,” I said. “Before we came to Las Vegas, when we were… ” I paused on the word ‘children’ because it had a weird weight that surprised me. “Young. Mikhail used to take us to the river in the summer. The Moskva. We’d go in the early morning before the city was properly awake.”
She was looking at me with the full attention I’d noticed she brought to things she was actually interested in. “That’s very specific.”
“It was specific.” I looked at the table and then decided to look back at her.
“My father was—not present, in the ways that registered at the time. Mikhail compensated.” I paused.
“He used to tell me that the river didn’t belong to anyone.
That it was the one thing in Moscow that the men with power hadn’t found a way to own yet.
” I realized that I’d never said this out loud.
“I don’t know what Mikhail knows. He was seventeen. ”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “He was trying to give you something he understood mattered.”
“Yes.”
“That’s… that’s quite a brother to have.”
“He is the reason the Golovin Bratva is what it is. Everything that functions, functions because Mikhail built a structure that could sustain weight.”
She smiled at that.
“He loves you,” she said.
“I suppose so.”
“Does he say it?”
I looked at her. “Golovin men don’t… ” I stopped because the end of that sentence was going to be ‘express things in those terms,’ and I could hear how it sounded before I finished it.
“He shows it,” I said instead. “Consistently. Over many years.” I picked up my glass. “I’ve been taught that’s sufficient.”
She laughed. It was a light, beautiful laugh that brightened her face and made her presence feel even more homely.
“You’re different here,” she said.
“You’ve said something like that before.”
“I mean different from the poker room.” She tilted her head slightly. “Different from the first days. You’re—” She seemed to locate the right word. “Less armored.”
“You’re a variable I’ve recategorized,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow.
“That’s a compliment,” I said. “In the most functional sense.”
“Functional sense,” she repeated. But the corner of her mouth was implying a smile.
We ate. The music shifted through two more tracks, and I found myself listening with more of my available attention than dinner conversation typically warranted.
She was fast. Faster than the warmth suggested, faster than the sunshine surface of her communicated to people who read sunshine as lightness. Underneath the warmth was something precise and quick that she must have learned.
I thought about the questions she’d asked during the storm—not fearful questions, strategic ones, wrapped in the vulnerability of the moment.
The evening had a warmth I was reluctant to alter. That explained why I moved our empty plates away and didn’t do anything to break the silence.
I watched the gradual softening of her posture over the course of twenty minutes, the book she’d picked up after dinner tilting by degrees, her feet tucked under her and her head finding the cushion. Then the book came to rest against her chest, and her breathing changed.
She fell asleep on the couch.
I sat across from her and just looked at her, despite having told myself not to.
She was younger this way, or rather, more purely herself, without the layers of professional competence and survival. Still, the warmth she radiated didn’t leave.
Someone was circling her. Someone patient, with resources, with the kind of determination that came from a long-held interest rather than a recent one. Someone who had found a thread in her history and was pulling it, carefully, with gloves on, from a distance they’d calculated.
They thought she was available.
They thought that because she’d been available once—had been a person with no significant structural protection—she was still available.
They were operating on outdated information.
She was Isla Monroe-Golovin. She was the woman who sat across from me at dinner tables and stood at my side in rooms full of dangerous men. She was the one who made floor managers smile, and asked me about the Moscow rivers with genuine interest.
She was mine.
Not in the language Siroc White had used—not the language of ownership, of currency, of a stake to be won, spent, and won again.
She had come to belong to me the way things belong when they’re not owned—when the belonging is mutual and chosen in the accumulation of ordinary moments rather than declared in a single transaction.
She didn’t know all that was coming. I didn’t either—not fully, not yet. There were variables I hadn’t closed and threads I hadn’t traced.
But I knew the outcome I was working toward.
And I had built my entire professional life on the foundational premise that the games I played were games I had already decided to win.
Whoever was circling her, they had made the miscalculation that defined the majority of the failures I’d watched in this world. They had assumed that the object of their interest had no one.
She had someone.
She had me.
Her husband.
I reached over and gently lifted the book from her chest. I settled the throw from the arm of the couch across her without waking her.
She didn’t stir.
Whatever was coming, it would find her covered.
And it would regret the finding.
Because Alexei Golovin does not lose what belongs to him.