Chapter Seventeen — Isla
Chapter Seventeen
Isla
I woke up slowly like someone, nothing or no one was chasing.
There was no jolt. No immediate inventory of threat—door, window, sound.
Just a gradual surfacing, like rising through warm water, until I was lying in the grey-gold light of early morning with birdsong outside the window and the smell of pine through a gap in the casement, and I realized with quiet shock that I was not afraid.
I lay still for a moment, just to make sure.
There was nothing. No coiled muscle, no low-frequency hum of dread that had become so constant over the past weeks I’d started seeing it as the simple texture of being alive.
It was gone. I was without fear.
I turned my head. Alexei was already awake; I suspected he was always already awake, but he hadn’t moved.
He was lying on his back with one arm behind his head, watching the ceiling with his usual focused stillness.
The morning light fell across the planes of his face, the ridged architecture of his chest, and the map of old damage I’d traced with my hands last night.
And something warm moved through me slowly, like a tide coming in.
He felt me looking. His eyes dropped to mine.
“How long have you been awake?” I asked.
“A while.”
“You could have woken me.”
One corner of his mouth shifted slightly. “You were sleeping without your jaw clenched. I decided to leave it.”
I hadn’t known my jaw was clenched when I slept. But I believed him.
“Leave it to my husband to notice things like that,” I commented.
Then I realized what I just said.
Alexei’s eyes were still on mine, giving me no hiding space. He blinked slowly like he was digesting what I was sure he’d heard.
I sighed.
Well, I said that already.
I stretched, the cotton sheet cool against my legs, and listened to the birds.
“You’ve never called me that,” he uttered when I thought that chapter had been closed.
“I’m sorely aware of that, Mr. Golovin,” I answered, looking anywhere but at that ridiculously handsome face.
“Just checking, Mrs. Golovin,” he said.
“Monroe-Golovin,” I corrected quickly. Not like that did anything to the soft explosion in my chest at the sound of the name rolling off his lips.
“Same thing,” he replied, an easy smile that I wouldn’t say he was aware of crossing his lips.
We listened to the conversation of the birds, which we couldn’t parse anyway, in the absence of ours.
*****
He made coffee. I stood on the porch in a cardigan I’d found hanging by the door—one of his, oversized and smelling of cedar.
The first time I’d worn his clothing, I’d been looking through the few clothes I brought when I saw the white shirt that hung idle.
I had taken it off the hanger just to find out if his clothes smelled like cedar or if it was just his skin.
Then I ended up wearing it because the material was soft and thick, the smell of cedar on it was nice, and it was an action that came easily.
This time, however, I wore his cardigan because I liked the thought of it.
I held the mug in both hands as I watched the valley below us burn off its fog.
The world looked different in daylight. It looked larger.
The trees ran further than I’d realized, deep and dark green, the kind of density that swallowed sound.
Beyond the ridge, a thin strip of sky had gone pale orange at its lowest edge, and I watched it lighten by increments until it was simply blue.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d watched the sky.
Alexei came to stand beside me, his own mug in hand, and we didn’t speak for a long stretch. Of course, he didn’t treat silence as a problem to solve. Rather than fill it, he occupied it, like a room he was comfortable in.
“I want to walk the tree line,” I told him. “Before it gets too bright.”
He looked at me. “Why before it gets bright?”
“The light is better for… ” I stopped, realizing how it sounded. “I’ve been sketching. In my head. Ideas for events.” I shook my head slightly. “Habits.”
“Sketching ideas,” he repeated.
“It’s what I do. Did. What I,” I uttered, chuckling. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters.” He said it simply, like a fact he was reporting rather than a comfort he was offering. “Show me.”
I didn’t have my actual sketchbook, so I found a notepad in one of the kitchen drawers, the kind with the wire spiral and the faint blue lines, and I carried it with me into the woods while Alexei walked a measured ten feet to my left, doing his own silent measuring of the terrain.
The light through the pines was extraordinary. It fell in long shafts, broken by branches into something fractured and intentional, the way light inside cathedrals was fractured and intentional. I stopped walking and just stood in it for a moment.
A winter wedding.
Ceremony outdoors, right here, the altar framed by these trees.
White fabric between the trunks, no flowers. Just the light and the evergreen and the cold making breath visible.
I sketched it in fast, loose lines. Proportions, not details. The way the space was intended to be used.
When I looked up, Alexei was watching me with an expression I couldn’t entirely read — something careful and intent.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.” He looked away, back to the trees. “Keep going.”
I did. We walked the ridge path from the morning before, and I filled three pages with impressions—a dinner concept using these stone outcroppings as natural table settings, a retreat layout that used the valley’s natural sightlines, a ceremony arch built from stripped timber—that I’d never build because none of these clients existed and none of these events would happen.
But my hands needed to move and my mind needed somewhere to put itself that wasn’t contingency planning and threat assessment.
Alexei walked beside me through all of it, never commenting on the sketches, never hurrying me. Once, when I stopped to study a particular angle of light between two trees, he stopped with me and waited without any visible impatience, which was its own small miracle.
“You’re good at it,” he said finally, as we turned back toward the cottage.
“Duh, it’s my job,” I answered playfully, chuckling.
Then I sighed and said, “It was.”
He looked at me sidelong. “Was.”
“It was, more or less, a life force to me. Now, it’s something I gave up.”
“You didn’t give it up,” he said. “It was taken. Those aren’t the same thing.”
Something about the honesty of his tone caught in my throat. I swallowed it and kept walking.
*****
We ate lunch at the kitchen table and argued companionably about nothing important like we’d done several times recently. He thought the path was six kilometers, I thought it was eight, neither of us had a way to check, and neither of us particularly cared.
Somewhere in the middle of it, I thought, ‘This is what people mean when they say domestic bliss.’
The thought was so foreign and fitting at the same time that it made me laugh, briefly, at nothing.
“What?” he asked.
“I just… I never imagined this.” I gestured loosely.
“Any of this. I had a version of my life I was building before. I’d mapped it out.
I thought I’d get married eventually, but it was abstract.
The way you think about retirement—theoretically possible, probably fine, but not something you actually plan toward. ”
He set his fork down.
“And then I got married,” I said, “and it was nothing like the abstract.” I looked at him. “It’s more frightening. And more real. And I can’t decide if those two things are connected or just coincidental.”
He was quiet for a moment before he said, “I never thought I deserved it.”
“Marriage?”
“Peace.” He said the word like he was still getting used to the sound, or maybe the weight, of it.
“The kind of life that doesn’t require constant management of damage.
I understood the structure of a Bratva marriage — the function, the strategic necessity.
I’d seen other men treat it that way. And I’ve seen my brothers treat it the other way.
But I’m not Mikhail or Viktor.” There was a pause.
“I didn’t think it would become something I’d want to protect for different reasons. ”
“Different reasons,” I said carefully.
He looked at me directly. “You know what I mean, Isla.”
I did. Because I could feel it, too.
“I know,” I said.
The afternoon light began to slant.
I washed the dishes while Alexei sat at the kitchen table with a physical map he’d unfolded—paper, no satellite, the way he insisted on operating when he wanted to be unreadable—and I watched him work in the reflection of the window over the sink.
I was living a kind of life that was not what I’d planned and was also, undeniably, mine.
At the realization, I felt something settle inside me, quiet and heavy and not entirely comfortable, like a stone finding its place.
This was certainty. Not safety. Certainty.
I’d started to learn the difference.
*****
I stopped moving when I noticed the door.
I’d gone to the small room at the back of the cottage—a utility space, barely larger than a closet—to look for more firewood. The door had been latched when I’d passed it earlier; I remembered the latch, a simple iron bar, because I’d noted it.
Now it was slightly ajar.
I stood in the hallway for a moment, looking at the gap. It was about two centimeters. The wood swelling with the cold was a possible explanation. A draft from somewhere could be another. There were a dozen entirely reasonable explanations lined up neatly in my mind.
So I latched it again and kept moving.
But the feeling followed me.
It wasn’t exactly paranoia. This was something more animal than that. Something that bypassed the reasoning part of the brain entirely and went straight to the part that knew, before thought arrived, that something in the environment had shifted.
I told myself it was residual anxiety. The city was bleeding out of my nervous system slowly, presenting itself as a phantom threat.
I almost convinced myself.
It was during our afternoon walk, which was shorter than the morning’s, just around the eastern edge of the cottage grounds, that I got the confirmation I’d been silently hoping against.
That was when I saw it.
We were following the low fence that marked the property boundary, the tree line twenty feet to our left, and I was watching the light when I noticed that something caught the light wrong.
It was a glint. Metal or glass. Tucked against a tree trunk, partially obscured by the lower branches, angled in a way that was too deliberate for it to be anything I’d dropped and forgotten.
I kept walking. I didn’t stop, didn’t point, didn’t give it anything visible.
But it sat in my chest for the rest of the walk like a swallowed stone.
*****
Alexei built the fire higher again that evening. I sat on the floor in front of it, my knees drawn up. I tried to be present in the warmth of the room, the comfortable silence, and the glass of wine he’d put in my hand. I lasted approximately forty minutes before I set the glass down.
“I need to tell you something.”
He looked up from the map he’d been studying.
“Earlier, this morning, I found the door open. The same door I was pretty sure I’d latched. But I know it could have been something about the wood or any other cause. Maybe I really didn’t latch the door like I thought I did.”
He kept looking, like he knew I was not done.
“But for most of the afternoon, I’ve had this strange sensation. Like we’re being watched. Like, you know, something is coming that we’ve not seen yet.”
I expected him to tell me I was imagining it, that it was just my stressed mind playing tricks on me. But he didn’t.
I swallowed before telling him, “Then, on our walk, I spotted a glint of some… I don’t know if it’s glass or metal. It didn’t look random.”
“Where exactly near the fence?”
“Northeast edge. Maybe ten, twelve feet into the tree line. There was a double trunk, two pines grown close enough to look like one from this distance.”
He was already moving, pulling his jacket from the hook by the door, handing me mine.
“We go together,” he said.
I nodded, knowing I would have protested if he’d planned to leave me inside.
The cold outside was sharp, and the sky above the pines was now a deep ink blue. Alexei carried a flashlight but didn’t switch it on. We moved by the ambient light of a three-quarter moon, which was more than enough to find the fence line and follow it.
I found the double trunk first. My own landmarks, my own memory.
Alexei moved past me without a word and crouched at the base of the nearest tree, brushing aside a low branch with his forearm. The beam of his flashlight came on briefly, angled low and narrow.
I heard him exhale.
He stepped back, and I came forward, and I looked at what he’d found.
It was a camera housing. It was old enough that moss had begun to grow at its base, but the mounting bracket was new, with the metal bright and not corroded where the old housing connected to it.
Someone had replaced a component. Recently.
“It’s not transmitting,” Alexei said. He was studying it like someone reading a language they knew fluently. “The lens housing is cracked. But the bracket—” He stopped.
The sentence didn’t need finishing.
Someone had been here. Someone had installed surveillance on this property at some point, and someone had come back to service it. And the crack in the housing meant a gap in the footage, but it didn’t mean the gap was current.
It didn’t mean they hadn’t already seen everything they needed to see.
I became aware of the cold in a way I hadn’t been a moment before. It moved through my jacket and settled against my skin. I stood in the dark at the edge of this property that was supposed to be unknown to everyone, and I felt the peace of the past two days contract sharply, like a fist closing.
This wasn’t a retreat.
A clean location. A place Alexei had chosen because no one knew it existed. A camera that told someone otherwise.
We had been watched. Possibly tracked. And whatever we’d given these days—the conversations, the openness, the slow and careful lowering of every guard I’d spent months constructing—had been visible to someone.
I looked at Alexei. In the moonlight, his face had gone to stone, his expression darkening even more than it did when I told him about what I’d noticed.
“Alexei,” I called.
He turned to look at me.
“How bad is this?”
There was a long pause before he answered.
“Bad enough,” he said.
It was the most honest answer he could have given me, and I both hated and loved him for it in the same breath.
The valley below the cottage was quiet. The trees were quiet. The moon moved behind a cloud, and the dark came down. Somewhere in the same darkness, someone was already deciding what to do with what they knew.
The weight of it hit me like a door swung open into my chest.
We had not escaped anything.
This was a test.
And someone passed.