Chapter Sixteen —Alexei
Chapter Sixteen
Alexei
The decision didn’t cost me sleep. That was the thing about me and clarity.
I’d been watching the patterns shift for three days: a contact who went quiet, a channel that suddenly ran dry, a car I’d seen parked on Fremont that I recognized from a face I’d buried two years ago.
Individually, they were nothing. Together, they were a map.
Siroc wasn’t trying to hit us. Not yet. He was tightening the radius, slow and methodical, the way you’d boil something alive — enough patience that the thing in the water never realized it was dying until the surface started to bubble.
He was feeding on information, building a picture, waiting until he had enough to make one clean, precise strike.
And Isla was the point he’d aim for. I knew it the way I knew my own heartbeat.
I told Mikhail first. He didn’t argue, only asked where, and when I gave him the location, he was quiet for a moment — long enough that I understood what the silence meant.
You’ve never taken anyone there.
“Keep it clean on your end, brother,” I said instead of answering him. “Rotate the vehicles. Don’t reach out unless something breaks open.”
“And if something breaks open?”
“I’ll handle it from there.”
I ended the call before he could say anything else.
Isla was standing at the window of our bedroom when I came back in, looking through the glass as if what she saw was a painting she hadn’t decided whether she liked.
“Hey,” she uttered, turning around. “You’re never here around this time. Is everything okay?”
“All is fine. We’re going somewhere. Pack light. We leave in forty minutes.”
“How long?” she asked, raising a brow but still not giving any form of the expressive reaction I was expecting.
“I don’t know yet.”
She nodded and moved toward the closet.
I watched her go. Something about the absence of complaint settled something in my chest and disturbed it in equal measure.
*****
We were on the road in the next forty minutes. I took the back route out, the one that looped through the industrial corridor before threading north, watching my mirrors with focused patience from over twenty years of moving through hostile terrain. Nothing followed us.
Isla sat beside me wordlessly, looking out the window.
The city faded out gradually behind the glass—signs dissolving into highway lamps, then into the muted wash of distant neighborhoods, then into trees and nothing at all.
Isla shifted, making my eyes dart towards her almost subconsciously.
She now sat with her knees angled toward me, and her hands folded in her lap, watching the road ahead.
I could feel her awareness of me without looking directly at her, just the way one feels heat from something one is not touching.
“You knew this was coming,” she said eventually.
“I had indicators.”
“And you waited.”
“I was confirming them.” I glanced at her briefly. “I don’t move on instinct. I move on certainty.”
She was quiet again. Then she asked, “Siroc?”
“Yes.”
She seemed to absorb that. The trees had started, dark shapes crowding the road on either side, and I watched her relax in increments —
After several minutes, the changes in her- so subtle I’d have missed them if I hadn’t been mindful of her since the moment I’d decided she mattered- became evident to me.
The tightness around her eyes eased. Her hands loosened in her lap.
Each mile between us and the city seemed to return something to her, some version of herself the city had been slowly eroding.
“You’re breathing differently,” I told her.
She looked at me. “Am I?”
“Slower. Easier.” I kept my eyes on the road. “The city was suffocating you.”
She didn’t deny it. “I didn’t realize how much until just now.”
I understood that. There were things you only recognized once you’d put distance between yourself and them — damage worked that way, and pressure worked that way, and so did want.
You didn’t always know how badly you needed something until you could finally feel its absence.
And that single thought made me wonder how long it had been since that night on our balcony.
It had only been a few days in the actual sense. But it felt like a month ago.
*****
The cottage sat at the end of a private access road that wasn’t on any map I hadn’t personally had altered.
It was set back into the tree line. It featured a stone foundation, timber frame, and a wide porch that looked out over a shallow valley that caught fog in the mornings.
I’d bought it eight years ago under a name I’d since retired, paid cash through two intermediaries, and told no one but Mikhail it existed.
There was no staff. No standing security detail.
No satellite uplink, no cameras beyond what I’d installed myself on the perimeter.
It was the only place in the world I went when I needed to think without the weight of the Golovin poker empire pressing against my skull.
Isla stepped out of the car and stood still for a moment, looking up at the structure.
The porch light I’d triggered remotely cast a warm glow over the timber fascia, and something about the scene—this woman, this place, the two of them meeting for the first time—made me pause with my hand on the car door longer than necessary.
Inside, she moved carefully, taking the space in. The wood floors, stone fireplace, and heavy furniture that had been chosen for durability rather than display. There were no gleaming surfaces, no curated art, no evidence of wealth.
“It’s not what I expected,” she said.
“What did you expect?”
She ran her fingers along the back of the leather couch, a slow drag that she didn’t seem entirely conscious of but which did something to the hairs on my skin. “Something colder. More… controlled.”
“It is controlled,” I said. “Control doesn’t always look like marble.”
She looked at me with something that wasn’t quite amusement and wasn’t quite challenge, and a third thing I’d never found the right word for, that existed specifically in the space between us.
Then she moved toward the fireplace, and I went to start it since it was night already and the air was remarkably chilly.
I slept badly that first night, which was expected. New environments required a recalibration period—even environments I’d chosen myself. And, from the way she tossed and turned beside me on the large bed, Isla didn’t have a smooth night, either.
I lay in the dark and ran the threat model again, the way I always did when a situation changed shape, accounting for variables and discarding probabilities below the threshold of concern.
By 4 am, with my arm around Isla, I’d done it three times and arrived at the same conclusion each time: we were clean. No tail. No digital trail. No one who mattered knew this place existed.
I got up anyway and walked the perimeter.
It was a habit as much as a need. I watched the tree line, the access road, the shallow southern slope where someone approaching from the valley would lose cover.
Everything was still. Wind moved through the pines in long, slow exhales.
An owl called once from somewhere above me and then went silent.
I stood at the edge of the porch for a long time after, just watching the dark.
*****
Isla found the kitchen before I did, later in the morning.
I came downstairs to the sound of something hitting a pan and the smell of coffee already brewed.
I stopped in the doorway of the kitchen and watched her work without announcing myself.
She was in one of my shirts—it hit her at mid-thigh, sleeves pushed to the elbows—and she moved with the kind of unselfconscious ease she only showed when she thought she was unobserved.
My mind wouldn’t let go of the fact that she had packed. I had carried her duffel bag along with mine from the car. She had clothes she could wear—her bag couldn’t be full of underwear only. But she was wearing my shirt. She chose to wear it.
I let my thoughts and stolen view of her run for a moment longer than I should have.
Then I said, “The eggs are in the lower drawer.”
She startled just slightly, recovered, and didn’t give me the satisfaction of pretending she hadn’t. “I know. I already found them.” She nodded toward the coffee. “Sit down.”
I sat down.
We cooked together in a way I hadn’t anticipated. It was a choreography that required neither negotiation nor explanation. She seasoned. I sliced. She told me the heat was too high, and I turned it down without arguing because she was right.
It was so ordinary that it felt nearly transgressive.
We ate on the porch in the cold morning air, the valley below us still wearing its fog. Isla wrapped both hands around her mug and watched the mist move, and I watched her, and for a long stretch of time, neither of us spoke.
“Tell me something about before,” she said. “Before all of this.”
“Before the Bratva?”
“Yeah.”
I considered what to give her and what to keep. I’d never had someone ask me in a way that made me want to answer honestly. Most people who asked about my past were either looking for leverage or were feigning interest they didn’t actually feel. Isla was doing neither.
“Cold winters,” I said finally. “My mother used to run water into a pan and set it on the radiator overnight so there’d be something warm in the morning. The building we lived in… the heat was unreliable. You learned not to count on it.”
She was watching me with the stillness she embodied when she was genuinely listening.
“My father was gone more than he was present. That was the Bratva before I understood the word for it. Just his absence. A chair at the table that was never used.” I set my mug down. “He came back when I was twelve and tried to teach me to shoot. I already knew how. Someone else had taught me.”
“Mikhail.”