Chapter Fifteen — Isla #2
Dan set his phone face-down on the desk. “The summit,” he said. He was looking at Alexei, something in his expression suggesting the word had been building toward the surface for a while.
“Not yet,” Alexei said.
“What summit?” I asked.
They exchanged a look—the shorthand of two people who had been working together long enough that the look contained a conversation.
Then Alexei looked at me.
“We’ve been building a counter-operation.
A gathering. Under the pretext of a high-stakes poker summit.
The kind that draws the cross-section of players whose presence would be meaningful to Siroc,” he explained.
“It’s bait. Designed to draw him into a controlled environment on terms he doesn’t know we’ve set. ”
I looked at the chip in the middle of the desk.
“He’ll come,” I said. “If the bait is constructed correctly. Siroc can’t resist a table—it’s the same psychology.
He has to believe he can win, and he can’t stop himself from sitting down.
” I paused. “But the construction matters. It has to feel like an opportunity he’s discovered rather than one that’s been offered.
Siroc’s pride won’t let him walk into something he thinks he’s been invited to. ”
“How do you make a man believe he’s found something that’s been placed for him to find?” Dan asked no one in particular. Rhetorical, almost. A problem stated rather than a question asked.
“You make sure what he finds confirms what he already believes about himself,” I said.
“You give him information that makes him feel like his intelligence is better than yours. That he’s a step ahead.
” I paused before going on to ask, “What does Siroc White believe about himself that you could confirm for him? What story does he tell himself that you could make feel true?”
Alexei looked at me for a long moment. Something was changing in his expression; I could both see and feel it.
It was not his controlled surface; that was a constant I’d recognized as a part of the structure that made up Alexei Golovin.
This was different. Like something I’d seen briefly in the library and on the balcony, which seemed to show now with a different weight.
It looked like he was seeing something he hadn’t quite seen before, or seeing something familiar in a new light.
“He believes,” Alexei said slowly, “that I’m afraid of him. That the caution I’ve shown in my response is fear rather than strategy.”
“Yes,” I said.
“So the bait that works is one that appears to confirm his read that the Golovin response to his escalation is defensive rather than offensive. A summit positioned as a neutral gathering rather than a Golovin event. Something that looks like we’re seeking allies rather than projecting strength,” he went on.
“It tells him he’s winning,” I said. “It confirms the story. He won’t be able to stay away.”
Dan was already writing.
Alexei looked at the chip on the desk. Then at me with the expression that I was still trying to figure out.
“You’ve been thinking about this for a while,” he said.
“Since the balcony,” I said. “Since the morning after the confession. I’ve been waiting to know enough about the shape of your counter-operation before offering a framework that might be useless without the context.”
“It’s not useless.”
“No,” I agreed. “I know.”
He looked at me for another moment. Then, without looking away, he called, “Dan. Give us ten minutes.”
Dan picked up his phone, the table, and left with an efficiency that proved he had been waiting for that instruction.
The room was quiet again.
I looked at Alexei across the desk and waited.
“You should have been part of this from the beginning,” he said.
The statement was clear and concise. It wasn’t an apology; I doubted if he ever offered those. It was a statement of fact. It was a correction to a prior position.
“You were protecting me,” I said.
“I was protecting you in a way that assumed protection and operational participation were mutually exclusive,” he disclosed. “They’re not. I’ve been building a defense around a person I was treating as a civilian. You are not a civilian in any way that matters to this situation.”
I looked at the chip.
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
I looked at the poker chip. My mind went over the deliberate cruelty of what it represented—Adrian’s name used as a message to his sister, the dead repurposed as a threat against the living.
I closed my hand around it.
“Tell me the rest of the plan,” I said.
In that moment, I deciphered what I saw in Alexei’s expression. It was an acknowledgment.
He pulled the legal pad toward him and opened it to a fresh page.
“The summit is anchored to a specific pretext,” he said.
“A private poker tournament. High-stakes, invitation-only, positioned as an independent, neutral gathering. The invitations go out through channels Siroc’s intelligence has access to.
Not directly to Siroc, because a direct invitation triggers his suspicion, but visible enough in his network that he’ll hear about it within hours. ”
“And he’ll interpret hearing about it as intelligence,” I said. “As proof that his people are better than yours.”
“We didn’t have that in our perspective before, but yes.
” He wrote something on the pad. “The guest list needs to include three or four names he specifically values. People whose presence tells him the stakes are real and that the Golovin position is weaker than it appears. We give him reason to believe that key allies are attending without Golovin confirmation.”
“Giving him a room he thinks he can work.” I thought about the casino floor.
About the way he’d stood at the east bar watching us with those calculating eyes.
“He’ll want to arrive before the room is set.
He’ll want to be there when people arrive so he can position himself as already present, already central. ”
“Which tells us where he’ll be and when.”
“And what he’ll be focused on,” I added.
“Siroc at a table he thinks he’s winning is Siroc not watching the edges of the room.
He’s a man who gets tunnel vision when he’s performing.
The spectacle consumes his attention. Whatever you’re planning to do—it needs to happen when he’s at the table.
When he thinks he’s in the middle of winning. ”
Again, Alexei was watching me with full, blatant attention.
Resisting the heat his look suddenly started in me, I went on, “Siroc sees women as scenery. He talks in front of them. He explains himself to them the way people explain themselves to furniture—not for the furniture’s benefit but because it’s easier to think out loud to something that isn’t keeping score. ”
Alexei set down his pen.
“I have been trying,” he said carefully, “since the night in the library, to understand what I was doing when I kept you at the edges of this. I’ve been framing it as protection, and it is protection, in part.
But I think the more accurate explanation is that I’ve been trying to keep something I value away from whatever threatens it, which is a reasonable impulse applied incorrectly.
” He paused. “You’re not something to be kept away from the threat. ”
“No,” I said.
“You’re someone who has been dealing with the threat longer than I have.” He looked at the chip. “And whose understanding of it is more direct than mine?”
“Hm. That, I am,” I answered, unable to keep from smiling.
“Then I’ve been operating with incomplete data by choice,” he said. “Which is the kind of error I don’t make twice.”
Dan knocked twice and came back in at the signal, resuming his position at the edge of the desk with the tablet, his expression carefully neutral.
“The summit timing,” I said, turning back to Alexei. “You’ll want to control the window between when Siroc hears about it and when it occurs. Enough time for his intelligence to confirm the details, not enough time for him to build a counter-strategy.”
“Four days,” he said.
“Four days,” I agreed.
We got to work.
The legal pad filled, the tablet screen changed, and Dan made calls in the corner in a low voice. Alexei and I built the structure of something that had started to feel less like a defense and more like an ending.
At some point, Mira appeared with coffee and left without interrupting.
I asked questions and offered corrections, and they listened.
I looked at the chip in my hand.
A.M.
Adrian Monroe, who had been charming and destructive.
Who had loved me in his imperfect way and had talked to the wrong people because he trusted everyone and understood no one.
Who had died on a highway in Phoenix and left me with a debt I hadn’t incurred, a name I’d had to change, and a life I’d built from scratch because the alternative was letting what he’d done be the last word on what I was.
It wasn’t the last word.
This time, I was not afraid of what my past had done.
I was ready to fight what it made me into.