Chapter Fifteen — Isla
Chapter Fifteen
Isla
I woke up, and the fear was still there, the same fear that had been running beneath everything for six years, and what was different about this particular morning was not the absence of it.
What was different was that it was no longer in charge.
I had been retreating for years. Phoenix to Las Vegas. Monroe-Vega to Monroe. One life left behind, another built carefully on top of the wreckage, and underneath both of them, the exhausting vigilance of accepting that the running is permanent.
Not because the threat was resolved—it wasn’t. Siroc White was still out there with his spectacle and his federal mechanisms. The threat was entirely real and entirely unresolved.
But I had told the truth in the library, and Alexei had said us like it was simply accurate rather than aspirational. And one night I’d learnt what it felt like to put some of the weight down.
I didn’t want to pick it back up.
While the fear was still there, something else had replaced helplessness. That something else was resolve.
And it was strong.
I got up and made coffee, standing at the window in the early morning.
I thought about Siroc White.
I’d been thinking about him, actually, since the night in the library confession. I had spent the last three weeks being the subject of assessments, plans, and strategic calculations—and I had accepted that as the necessary condition of my situation.
But I knew something Alexei’s intelligence network couldn’t tell him.
I knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end of Siroc White’s particular brand of obsession.
I had been in the warehouse. I had been in the poker room, had stood near his shoulder while he smiled at Alexei with all those gold rings catching the light.
I had seen the way he looked at the table, at the room, at me—not as people, but as components in a narrative he was telling himself about his own importance.
I had watched him lose and watched what losing did to him.
I knew Siroc White in a way that didn’t appear in any intelligence report.
That knowledge was worth something.
I was going to make it worth something.
*****
Marcus walked towards me in the main living room with a small box. I just knew it was a package. One that wasn’t from Alexei.
I brought my legs down from where they’d been tucked beneath me on the sofa.
“You have a package, ma’am,” he said, dropping the package on the table in front of me.
“Thank you.”
“It’s been checked. It’s clean,” he informed.
Then he turned around and left.
I looked back at the box. It was small and wrapped in plain brown paper.
I moved closer and opened it. Inside the brown paper was a white box, the kind that might hold jewelry. Inside the box, on a bed of white tissue, was a single poker chip.
It was heavier than I expected when I picked it up, the kind used in serious games—real weight, real construction, not the decorative tourist versions.
Engraved on one face, in the small precise font of a professional engraving service, was: A.M.
My brother.
Adrian Monroe.
I might have screamed if this same package had come to me when I was in my cozy apartment. But now it came here, in Alexei’s penthouse. The same Alexei who now knew what exactly had been chasing me for years.
I had no urge to scream.
This had been made, which meant it had been planned in advance of whatever moment required its delivery, which meant Siroc White had been holding this particular instrument for a specific occasion and had decided the occasion had arrived.
I turned it over.
The other face had a small strip of paper adhered to it; it was clearly adhesive-backed.
The clean text read:
“What happened to him can happen again.”
I stood up like someone who’s just remembered they were on a mission and walked out of the room, the chip in my hand.
Alexei was in his study.
Of course he was. The study, or library as he insists on calling it, in the morning was his thinking space, or I had begun to understand it as that.
I found him there with Dan, the two of them bent over the desk with the focus of a working session in its productive middle phase.
They both looked up when I came in, even though I neither knocked before coming in nor made a sound.
I set the chip on the desk between them.
I did not apologize for the interruption. I did not deliver any sort of what could be called a preamble. I set it down and looked at Alexei with the clarity I’d woken up with, which had been through the package and the initials and had still come out the other side still intact.
“It came with a note,” I said. “It’s a threat and a reminder simultaneously. He’s telling me that I can be lost the same way Adrian was lost.”
Dan had his phone out. “When did it arrive?”
“It was 10:40 when it got to me. Marcus cleared it before it reached the floor.” I looked at him. “Same methodology as the flowers. The engraving was definitely commissioned in advance. Whoever holds it has been waiting for a moment that justified using it.”
Alexei turned the chip in his hand. His jaw was tightly set the way it got when he was handling something significant under the controlled surface.
He set the chip down and looked at me.
“Are you alright?” he inquired.
The question was in the tone I’d learned to distinguish as his actual inquiry rather than social mechanics. I had no reason to be anything but honest.
“I’m frightened. But I’m also past the point where my being frightened is an end.” I met his gaze. “I want to be part of the response.”
Dan looked at Alexei.
Alexei looked at me.
“Isla—” he started before I cut in.
“I know Siroc White. Not from intelligence reports. Not from network mapping. I know how he thinks because I was on the inside for an extended period. That knowledge is useful. I want to make it useful.”
“You’re not… ” He stopped, and I saw him redirect the sentence from where it had been heading. “The operational risk of involving you directly—”
“Is real,” I said. “I know that. I’m not suggesting I become a field operative in whatever you’re building. I’m saying that I understand Siroc White’s psychology in a way that your network doesn’t have access to, and that understanding is directly relevant to the strategy.” I paused. “Use it.”
Dan was looking at his phone with the expression of a man focusing deliberately on something else as a way of removing himself from a conversation he’d concluded was between two other people.
Alexei looked at me for a long moment but didn’t say anything.
I pulled a chair to the desk and sat, turning to face him.
“Siroc White’s fundamental motivation is not money,” I said.
“I know the debt suggests financial motivation, but the money is incidental. What Siroc needs, what he has needed, consistently, in every move he’s made, is to be seen winning.
” I looked at the chip on the desk. “In the poker room, the night you won me, what made that catastrophic for him wasn’t the money.
It was the audience. He lost in front of witnesses.
In your space, by your rules, in a room full of people who would carry the story.
” I paused. “That’s what he can’t recover from. Not the loss. The visibility of it.”
Alexei was listening with full attention. Dan, too, maybe with a bit more surprise.
“He escalated to the federal raid because he needed to reverse the narrative—needed to be the one causing visible damage rather than the one who’d been visibly damaged.
The raid gave him the news cycles. It made him feel like the story was running in his direction again.
” I kept my gaze on Alexei’s. “But he’s still reacting.
Everything since the poker room has been a reaction to what you did.
He hasn’t been able to get back on the front foot because every move he makes, you absorb it and respond without giving him the spectacle he needs. ”
“He wants us to retaliate loudly,” Dan said, folding his arms across his chest.
“He needs you to,” I agreed, nodding. “A loud retaliation becomes the story, and then suddenly Siroc is the aggrieved party, and you’re the aggressor.
That way, the public narrative shifts. He can’t win the direct confrontation, so he’s trying to provoke the kind of response that changes the shape of the game.
” I paused. “The poker chip is designed to provoke. He’s trying to make it personal. ”
“It is personal,” Alexei said like it was the most obvious thing.
“I know. But there’s a version of personal that serves you and a version that serves him.
Siroc wants the version where you respond from fury, where the response is visible, loud, and undeniable.
He wants a Golovin who’s reacting rather than planning.
” I looked at the chip again. “What he can’t tolerate—what would be, for him, worse than any retaliatory blow—is being ignored.
Being treated as a manageable inconvenience rather than a significant threat. ”
Alexei was quiet for a moment, then he said, “The humiliation is the weapon.”
“His obsession with pride is the vulnerability,” I said.
“He’s been in this business long enough that he understands power as the capacity to make things happen.
What he doesn’t understand is the power of a person who doesn’t need to prove they can make things happen because everyone who matters already knows it.
He can’t touch your standing with the people who actually count.
But he can generate noise and create a bad news cycle.
He cannot walk into a room in this city and have the room respond to him the way it responds to you, and he knows it, and it drives every single thing he does. ”
The silence that followed, on his part, was the type that ensued when a piece of information had been received and was being integrated rather than evaluated.
On my part, however, it was the self-conscious, not-so-awkward type as I realized how I’d unconsciously complimented Alexei.
How I’d expressed how I saw him even before the marriage.