Chapter Twelve — Alexei #2
“I want a different approach. Stop looking for what’s there.
Start mapping what should be there and isn’t.
If you know the shape of a normal life in that period—employment records, lease agreements, utility accounts, tax filings—and some of them are missing, the missing ones tell you what someone decided to remove. ”
Dan looked at me again for a moment before saying, “That’ll take time.”
“Take the time.”
He nodded and moved away.
I looked at the screen again.
The absence of her trail felt increasingly like a specific rather than a general absence.
*****
She tried to act normal when I came to our floor much later that evening. And it infuriated me in a way I couldn’t fully describe. Not because I doubted her loyalty, but because I thought she was carrying a burden alone and I didn’t even know what it was.
“How are you doing? How was your day?”
“Good,” she replied, turning to face me from the window by the bed. “I heard the raid wasn’t that bad. That’s good, right?”
I knew the difference by now. Her genuine responses were warmer and less composed than what she was giving me.
“Dinner?” she said. “Mira left something in the kitchen.”
“Sit down,” I said.
She looked at me, confusion clear on her face. Then she sat.
I sat beside her at the edge of the bed.
“Siroc’s next move will be more direct than this morning.
The raid was designed for public impact—it’s already in three news cycles, the narrative is running exactly as he intended.
” I watched her face as I spoke. “When it resolves cleanly, and it will, he’ll have another mechanism ready.
He’s been building this systematically. The warrants were one layer. There will be more layers.”
She nodded, following and clearly processing.
“The financial pressure will escalate. He’ll try to use the news coverage to create withdrawal among our legitimate business partners—anyone whose board has a risk threshold will be receiving calls from people Siroc has primed to make them.
” I paused. “We’re managing it. I want you to know what’s happening so that if you encounter anything—anyone approaching you in a professional context, any communication that feels adjacent to this—you bring it to me immediately. ”
“I understand,” she said.
“Isla.”
She looked at me. “What? I heard you, boss,” she joked, chuckling.
“I’m your husband,” I corrected, my voice coming out lower than I’d intended.
She sighed, her eyes moving to the floor before they flicked back to my face. I could tell my words didn’t have a heated effect on only me.
“When I say Siroc’s name…” I watched carefully. “Your expression changes. I know it’s not fear. Something else.”
It was not a question.
“I know who he is, of course,” she said carefully.
“I know that.” I held her gaze. “That’s not what I asked.”
The silence between us stretched while we communicated without words.
She looked at me with the expression of someone standing at the edge of something they’ve decided they’re not ready to step off yet.
I let her make the choice, not because I didn’t want the information or I had decided the incomplete picture was acceptable, but because I had learned something about Isla Monroe-Golovin in the past three weeks that was relevant to the question of how to get what I needed from her.
She could not be controlled or even urged into honesty. She could only arrive at it herself, on her own timeline, in her own terms.
I was running low on patience, but I was not yet out.
“You’re protected,” I said. I heard my own voice shift in a way I couldn’t prevent and was done trying to. “Whatever is coming, whoever is involved, wherever this connects to what happened before you came here. You are protected. That doesn’t change.”
She nodded, the sincere look of acceptance in her expression like she was saying, ‘I needed to hear that.’
“You don’t have to carry things alone. That’s not how this works. Not anymore.”
Something broke in her expression for a moment. Her eyes went bright with something that wasn’t quite tears and then weren’t bright anymore in three seconds.
“I know,” she said, her voice almost quiet.
Then I stood and, because I couldn’t stop myself, I bent to kiss her forehead. I moved my hand to cup the side of her face and felt the warmth of her hand as it held my wrist, holding my hand to her face.
The room was suddenly hotter.
So I bent and kissed her lips. Once. And then again. Then she kissed me back, her lips lingering on mine but not quite going further. Then she moved back, and I stood straight.
My eyes searched hers. I understood even better in that moment how deep our intimacy was even when we weren’t technically doing anything.
She’s beginning to trust me.
And, fuck, she was doing something to me.
She looked away, and I said, “Eat with me.”
“Okay,” she said, a smile appearing on her face as she stood.
She’s beautiful.
I just couldn’t wait until she shared her worries with me.
*****
The police lights were gone later in the night.
I stood at the window and looked at the street below where federal vehicles had been parked for the better part of the day.
The street was its ordinary self. From a distance, you’d never know what went down.
That was the point of what Siroc had done today.
He didn’t want destruction; he was too aware that a destroyed Golovin empire was worth nothing to him and that it was an unachievable task for him.
What he wanted was a Golovin empire that was smaller, less confident, less able to absorb pressure.
An operation that had spent its resources and goodwill defending against fabricated charges rather than expanding into the territory he wanted.
He had made a precise move.
My response would be more precise.
The shell company, the federal channels he’d compromised, the legal infrastructure he’d constructed over eighteen months—all of it visible now, traceable, the kind of evidence that could be turned with sufficient care and legal resources into something that moved in the opposite direction and with considerably more consequence.
Siroc White had humiliated my arm of the Golovin empire.
I did not forgive humiliation.
My thoughts went back to Isla.
She knew something.
She was going to tell me. Not because I was going to pressure her into it—I had tried pressure, and she was categorically immune to it, which was both a professional observation and something I found, privately and against my better operational judgment, admirable.
She was going to tell me because she processed things on her own and arrived at a conclusion herself.
I would need to ensure she arrived before whatever she was carrying became load-bearing in a way neither of us could manage after the fact.
Siroc White had made his move.
He had aimed it at what he believed was the structure most likely to destabilize. He had miscalculated.
Not because the move was unsuccessful—it had achieved its intended public effect, and the story was already written. He had miscalculated because his model of what I was protecting was incomplete.
He thought I was protecting an empire.
But I was protecting a person.
Those required different responses. The empire response was legal, financial, and about reputation—containment, counter-filing, the exposure of the mechanism he’d built.
The person's response was different.
The person's response was what I had decided, standing at the window of the room I now shared with my wife.
No one was going to reach her.
Siroc White wouldn’t go scot-free.