Chapter Twelve — Alexei
Chapter Twelve
Alexei
Dan’s call cut my sleep short.
“Boss, it’s happening.”
We knew the raid was going to follow the initial check. We had been aware days ago that Siroc was on to the legal side of our operation. Yet the news wasn’t any less weighty.
I was dressed and in the security room in four minutes.
The feeds were already live—eight screens arranged in the grid that covered the building’s primary systems, and three additional feeds Dan had pulled from the external cameras at our secondary properties.
I watched all of them in the first sixty seconds with a systematic sweep, moving left to right, top to bottom.
I spotted federal vehicles at the service entrance.
Three unmarked at the Calder Street financial offices.
Two more at the warehouse on Industrial Road that functioned as logistics for the casino supply chain and that had, on paper, no connection to any Golovin entity that an investigator should have been able to locate in less than two weeks of dedicated work.
They had located it.
Someone had helped them locate it.
“Warrants,” I said.
Dan set the copies in front of me. I read them with the attention anyone would give to the documents that were going to determine the next seventy-two hours of their operational life.
Drug trafficking. Money laundering. Illegal gambling expansion.
The specific combination was not designed to be accurate; it was designed to be functional.
The charges didn’t need to be held.
Their effectiveness was in the fact that they existed.
“It’s his shell company,” Dan said. He set a second document beside the warrants—a corporate registry printout, two layers of subsidiary deep, with a red annotation at the bottom that he’d added.
“Registered in Delaware eighteen months ago. Dormant until four weeks ago.” He tapped the annotation.
“The registered agent is a law firm that has represented White’s interests in three previous Nevada proceedings. ”
I set down the warrants.
Eighteen months ago. Siroc had incorporated the shell company eighteen months ago—before the casino confrontation, before the poker room, before Isla.
He had been building this mechanism for eighteen months, which meant this was not a response to my marriage.
At least, not to it alone. This was a structure he’d been constructing on a separate track, waiting for the right moment to activate it, and he probably had more than one direction or target.
“Get me Volkov,” I said. Our senior legal counsel—a man who billed at a rate that made CFOs wince and who was worth every dollar because he had spent thirty years ensuring that whatever he protected stayed protected.
“And Reiss.” The second name was newer, a federal attorney who specialized in the specific intersection of organized crime accusations and civil liberties that produced cases like the one we were currently inside.
“And Anya.” My youngest sister was the fresh, young lawyer who gave veterans a run for their money.
The experience she lived through, rather than getting it through interning like other lawyers did, was more than an advantage to her.
“Volkov is already in the building,” Dan said. “He was staying on-site.”
I looked at him.
“I had a sense,” Dan explained.
I moved to the next item. “The poker rings.”
“Dmitri is handling it. All operations suspended as of…” He checked his phone. “Four minutes ago. Staff dispersed through standard protocols.”
“The financial accounts.”
“Freeze order incoming on three accounts. I’ve already moved the operational liquidity to the secondary structure. Legal exposure is manageable.”
Manageable was Dan’s word for situations that were serious and contained rather than serious and escalating.
“Employees?”
“The morning staff at the Meridian are arriving at a building with federal vehicles at the service entrance. I’ve positioned Gregor at the main staff entrance to manage the messaging.
” He paused before adding, “They’re steady.
They know the difference between an operational irregularity and a structural threat. ”
I had built an operation that paid its people fairly, treated them with the specific professional respect that created loyalty rather than compliance, and had never once asked them to be present for anything that would genuinely implicate them.
They were steady because I had given them reasons to be.
“Mikhail,” I said.
“He called while you were reviewing the warrants.” Dan handed me my phone, which I’d set on the desk when I’d begun reading.
There was one missed call and a text below it that read:
‘Full authority. Do what you need to do. I’m here.’
I nodded, as if he were here to see me.
I turned back to the screens. The federal agents were moving with efficiency, like people executing a prepared operation. They were not creative, not responsive, and definitely not procedural. They knew exactly where to go and what to look for because they had been told.
Siroc White had handed federal agents a warrant and a map.
But the map was to a house that didn’t contain what he’d told them it contained.
When they realized that—and they would realize it, within hours, when the initial sweep produced documentation rather than contraband and the forensic accountants began working through books that had been maintained with precision—the raid would become a review, which would become an embarrassment.
And the embarrassment would belong to the filing party rather than the target.
But the photographs were already taken. The vehicles were already on the street.
The story was already assembling itself in frequencies that were considerably harder to retract than vehicles.
I understood that. I had spent a career understanding how narratives functioned as weapons. The difference was that I used that understanding to protect rather than to destroy, and the distinction mattered to me in ways that were both principled and practical.
Siroc White had just declared a form of war I was entirely prepared to fight.
*****
I moved through the building ten minutes before 6 am.
I didn’t go through the security room route; I went through the visible route. I passed the main corridor. And I walked slowly enough to be seen and just quickly enough to communicate purpose.
I stopped at the front security desk where Gregor was managing the lobby.
“How’s the morning going, Gregor?”
“Smoothly, Mr. Golovin,” he said, his voice steady. “We’ve redirected several deliveries to the alternate entrance. No interruption at all.”
“Good.”
I looked at the lobby. There were two federal agents visible near the service corridor, conducting their sweep like people following a list. They looked up when I appeared.
I acknowledged them with a minimal nod that was appropriate for acknowledging officials performing a function in your building.
They returned with their work, and I moved on.
In the corridor outside the kitchen, I found the sous chef looking at his phone. The thought that what he was reading might be the latest news about me crossed my mind.
He looked up when he heard me, and I stopped.
“Sir,” he practically exclaimed. “Good morning, sir.”
“Good morning. If Chef Laurent needs anything today, have him call Dan directly. I want the kitchen operating normally.”
“Yes, Mr. Golovin,” he answered, nodding to emphasize his agreement.
By the time I returned to the security room, the atmosphere of the whole casino had changed tangibly.
Not in any way that the federal agents moving through the service corridors would have been able to take credit for.
It was simply the effect of small decisions by a hundred people who had concluded that the person responsible was handling what was going on and that their job was, therefore, to do their own jobs.
This was what I had built, not just the legal structures and financial protocols.
Isla appeared on the security feed, shifting my thoughts so quickly I couldn’t fight it—if I wanted to fight it.
I saw her on screen eleven. She was stepping out of our bedroom in a simple silk off-the-shoulder silk dress that stopped right on her knees, her hair falling to her shoulders on both sides.
But the sight of her beauty didn’t make me miss how she turned sharply, as if she suddenly suspected someone was behind her.
In isolation, it might have been nothing.
But, several hours later, I watched her flinch two different times. Once, when Mira rejoined her in the same kitchen. The second time, she apparently heard a sound that startled her as she walked along the hallway.
Then I pulled up the additional security coverage Dan had assigned to her without explanation three days ago—four cameras covering the spaces she regularly occupied, two additional guards whose rotation included our floor—and I reviewed the log.
Nothing anomalous. No communications I could access without methods I wasn’t prepared to use against her. Nothing I could point to.
Except for her face, on screen, which showed some type of apprehension, like she was aware of being observed.
“Dan.”
He was across the room, on a call I’d indicated he should take. He looked up. I waited for the call to finish. “The pre-Phoenix records.”
“Still processing, boss.” He crossed to the desk. “My contact says there’s a gap that doesn’t look accidental. Eighteen months, approximately, where Isla Monroe-Vega appears in no records we can find despite documented continuous employment by two different Phoenix firms.”
“That’s not a gap,” I said. “That’s a redaction.”
Dan looked at me.
“Someone removed those records,” I said. I looked at the screen where she was now in the general sitting room, alone, looking at her laptop screen like she was trying hard to focus on something.