Chapter Thirteen — Isla
Chapter Thirteen
Isla
I had my way of dealing with things I couldn’t say out loud.
It was a method I’d developed since I was young, maybe younger than I should have needed to, as a child who grew up adjacent to chaos and had to develop a system for dealing with what the adults around me couldn’t or wouldn’t manage themselves.
It was quite simple: I took the issue and put it somewhere internal, somewhere with walls thick enough to contain it. Then I went about my day and returned to it when I really had to and put it back when I could. And, over time, the returns became less frequent, and the walls became load-bearing.
I had been dealing with Adrian for a long time before he died. After he died, I had dealt with the grief that came alongside guilt, relief, and love. And then I’d dealt with the debt and the changes it made me make.
But this midnight, as I continued to toss and turn in bed instead of sleeping, I understood this method of mine had reached its maximum capacity.
The note was still in the nightstand drawer.
I knew what the note meant. But I was only just getting real with myself enough to call it what it meant.
I had not been random collateral.
I’d told myself, when I paid the first installment to the account number with no name, that I was buying a clean break. That the payments would close the ledger and the ledger would stay closed.
I had been wrong.
I sat up. And that was when I felt the silence of the penthouse. It was too quiet, and that made my thoughts even louder. The space beside me was empty, and it wasn’t surprising because 1 am was still too early for Alexei to be in bed. So I got up and stepped out of the room.
As I shut the bedroom door, my mind went to the room beside his private office. The one that was his private study and strategy room, or so. I felt drawn in that direction, for a reason I couldn’t make out. I headed there.
I pushed the door open and stopped.
He was there.
Of course he was.
It was fitting. Alexei was in the middle of a room that existed for thinking, surrounded by reports that he’d arranged with geometric precision.
He looked up when I appeared, and I saw him read me completely in the way that he’d stopped concealing around me recently. He definitely saw something in my face that made him put down the document he was holding.
He didn’t speak. He waited.
While most people who waited for you to speak filled the space with a prompt, an encouraging noise, or a question, Alexei waited like he had made a deliberate choice to leave a space open and was leaving it open completely, with no edges that required you to fill it quickly or fill it in a particular direction.
It was, in its way, the most patient thing I had ever encountered. And that prompted me more than any form of pressure.
“I need to tell you something,” I said.
He nodded once.
Walking past him, I crossed the room and sat in the chair across from the desk. I folded my hands in my lap and looked at them.
“Adrian was in Siroc White’s circuit, you know that part,” I said.
“What you don’t know is that Adrian was a compulsive gambler.
He left a ton of debt…” I paused and sighed.
“To me. I always knew he had debts, I mean, he owed me a lot, too. But I never in my wildest imagination thought he owed such a large amount of money to people like Siroc White. A few days after his death, Siroc White’s people reached out to me, and that was when I knew. ”
Alexei neither spoke nor looked like he was about to. So I went on.
“I had no choice but to bear the debt since we were all each other had. I took extra jobs and shifts to start paying. And I did pay. Regularly. At first, I was sad but surprised at how much money I could really make when I put my mind to work and nothing else. But then, the calculations became real to me. I started to see how, regardless of how frequently I paid these guys, the interest was growing abnormally. Then I became overwhelmed. It became clear to me that I didn’t have a way out unless I made one for myself. ”
I looked up at him as I said, “And so I made one. I changed my name from Monroe-Vega to just Monroe, which was more common, and left. I came to Las Vegas and started my life from scratch. I saved up from working three jobs for years, then I set up my event planning company. I didn’t hear from Siroc White all those years, and I made myself believe that was done.
Until he came back again. His guys abducted me out of nowhere, and I ended up in your poker room.
You know how the rest of the story goes. ”
Alexei was still. Completely, utterly still. But I couldn’t stop there. Not when he still had more things to hear from me.
“Recently, he’s been moving again. Once he sent me flowers, I guess that was for me to know he could get to me. And then, a few days ago, after the initial check that I thought was a raid, I found a note from him under the door.”
I sighed again before speaking.
“Now I see that some debts don’t die with the debtor.”
I waited for his anger. His accusations. His walking away or thunderous yelling.
But I was not prepared for how much I dreaded it.
I wasn’t prepared for how stripped bare I felt in that moment of waiting for him to speak or at least react. I felt more exposed than I’d ever been since the warehouse as I watched him process all I’d just revealed.
“I’m… I’m sorry,” I expressed. “Not for surviving. I’m sorry for bringing danger into your life.”
Then he turned to face me completely, and the calm his face radiated terrified me.
“This changes everything,” he said. “Siroc did not just humiliate me; he totally planned this. He banked on using your history as leverage.”
If I was guilty before, I was bathed in guilt now.
I stood abruptly, walking towards him.
“I could leave,” I rushed, my voice sounding frantic even to my own ears. “I could disappear again. I can’t keep being your weakness. Believe me, I never meant to trap you. I could just—”
“Stop.”
I stopped.
“The fault structure of this situation,” he said carefully, “is not something I’m assigning tonight.”
“Alexei—”
“You brought danger into my life.” He held my gaze. “I brought danger into yours. It is not one-directional.”
“What I’m doing with this information is figuring out the shape of what we’re actually dealing with. Not assigning fault.” He looked at me with the directness that had stopped being something I flinched from. “There’s a distinction.”
“I know,” I said. “But if I had told you sooner—”
“Yes,” he cut in, his tone not softening. “You should have. That cost us time I can’t recover.”
Us.
Not me.
Not the business.
“What would I have to do,” he started, “to make you understand that you are not a variable I’m calculating the removal of?”
The question did not sound rhetorical; it was actual. He sounded like someone who understood that something he’d communicated had not been received and was asking what delivery would actually work.
“You only care now because your empire is threatened,” I spat, my voice low.
“Don’t give me that. You never trusted me enough to tell me the truth,” he snapped.
His voice was so sharp it made me think of a whip.
I did trust him.
Still, he was right.
Did that make me agree with him? Absolutely not.
“I didn’t know full disclosure was part of what I signed, Mr. Golovin,” I retorted, sarcasm clear in my tone.
“Stop being childish. That’s not what this is about,” he chastised, his voice carrying the coldness his expression didn’t.
“Oh, I’m a fucking kid. I’m a babbling—”
Then thunder cracked. And my words died on my tongue.
It was the type of thundering that registers in the chest cavity before the ears catch up.
I was standing in front of the desk before I could remember moving. My hands were flat on the desk, and I was standing with my back to the window, trying to get myself to breathe normally.
Alexei moved, not all the way toward me, but he came close enough that I could see the slight softening in his posture.
“You’re not expendable,” he said, almost quietly. “Not now. Not ever. I need you to hear that without filtering it through what you’re afraid I mean.”
“I’m… I’m trying,” I answered.
“Whatever Siroc thinks he’s playing at, you’re no longer alone.”
I sighed, unable to think of words that wouldn’t betray what his reaction was doing to my heart.
I looked at him in the dim light of the library with thunder moving away outside and the reports still spread across his desk.
And I understood, with clarity, that telling the truth hadn’t freed me.
It hadn’t released anything. The debt was still real. The threat was still real. The note was still on the nightstand, and the flowers had been in a vase in this penthouse.
None of that was resolved.
What had changed was that I was no longer carrying it alone.
The truth had bound me.
To him.
Now it was us, not me.
The thunder moved further away.
Alexei was still standing close, still not touching, still present in the way that was becoming the most reliable fact in my current geography.
“What happens now?” I asked, and my voice was steady this time.
“Now,” he said, “we know what we’re dealing with.”
I nodded.
“There’s work to do,” he added. “And you know things I need.”
And the fact that he was no longer in the dark was everything.
I was now bound even tighter to Alexei Golovin.
And I wasn’t complaining; no part of me was.