Chapter Twenty-One — Isla
Chapter Twenty-One
Isla
I knew the time because I’d been watching the clock almost lazily when Marcus brought it. I’d been sitting at the kitchen island with cold coffee and the remains of a breakfast I hadn’t really eaten.
Security had already cleared it.
I asked him to set it on the counter. As he left, I looked at it for a moment before I touched it.
It was just brown paper, tied with plain string. My name was in the center, handwritten in a script so neat it looked almost printed.
I untied the string.
Inside the paper was a single photograph. Old enough that the colors had softened and the contrast flattened. I picked it up.
My brother.
He was sitting at a poker table. I could see the green felt, low lighting, the amber warmth of a casino interior that I recognized from a hundred nights I’d spent in rooms like that.
He was smiling at someone off-frame, that particular smile he had when he thought he was the smartest person in the room. When he believed, absolutely, that what he was doing was going to work out.
He’d always believed that. Right up until it didn’t.
I turned the photograph over.
You were always part of the game.
The handwriting was the same neat, unhurried one.
My hands were trembling. I noted this as mere information, not as a verdict. My hands were trembling because my nervous system was responding to a stimulus. That was all it was. That was all I was going to let it be.
My brother.
I loved him. I had also spent years quietly drowning in the wake of his choices, bailing water out of the boat he kept puncturing, and I had never once let myself say that out loud because the dead were supposed to be mourned without the thought of what they’d cost you while they were alive.
I let myself say it now, just inside my own head, in the quiet of the kitchen.
He made terrible choices. He dragged me into them without asking. And I loved him anyway, and his death had broken something in me that had never entirely healed. And Siroc White had looked at that fracture and decided to press on it with both thumbs.
That was what the photograph was. Not a threat. Not a warning in the traditional sense. It was a scalpel, applied to the exact place most likely to make me flinch.
You were always part of the game.
Meaning: you didn’t stumble into this world. You were already in it.
Meaning: the marriage, the Bratva, the danger—none of it was an accident that happened to you. You were a piece on a board you didn’t know you were sitting on.
Meaning: your grief is a weapon, and I’ve just picked it up.
I picked up the photograph and stood.
*****
Alexei was in the study.
He looked up when I came in, seeing my face before he registered the photograph, which told me my face showed something I thought it wasn’t showing.
I put the photograph on the desk between us.
He looked at it and picked it up. Then he wordlessly turned it over and read the back.
His jaw tightened, but his eyes stayed steady. He set the photograph down with the same care he’d picked it up with, and when he looked at me, his expression was totally unreadable.
“It’s your brother in the picture,” he remarked, already knowing he was right.
I nodded quickly, pursing my lips.
“When did this arrive?”
“About twenty minutes ago. Security cleared it.” I sat down across from him.
“He wants me to spiral,” I said, my voice gaining more momentum with every word.
“That’s what this is. He wants me to sit alone in a room and ask myself how much of my life was real and how much of it was someone else’s game, and he wants that question to be loud enough that I become useless to you.
” I looked at the photograph. “He wants to make me doubt myself. Make me small. Make me a liability.”
Alexei was watching me with focused stillness.
“It’s a good strategy,” I said. “If I were him, I’d probably use it too.”
“You’re spiraling.”
“No. I’m angry.” I looked up, meeting his eyes. “There’s a difference.”
“He wants to destabilize you. That’s why he has the picture. It’s why he’s using it as a weapon now.”
“I know.”
He tilted his head to the side for a second before stretching his arms toward me. “Come here,” he urged.
I rose before my body asked for my permission, and he pulled me into him, his strong arms around me. I sighed, melting into his embrace.
“He’s already lost,” he said.
Of course, he has.
*****
I thought about Adrian for a long time after I left the study.
Not in the way Siroc intended, not as a wound reopened.
I thought about him honestly, the way I’d started to do in the kitchen.
My brother had been reckless and charismatic and genuinely funny in the way that people who don’t take anything seriously often are, and he’d borrowed money from people he shouldn’t have and gambled it in rooms he had no business being in.
What I hadn’t known, what the photograph and its neat handwriting confirmed, was that the line he’d crossed had placed me on a board I hadn’t consented to occupying.
That my connection to him had been noted and held in reserve by someone patient enough to wait for the moment when it would be most useful.
The marriage to Alexei had made me useful in a specific way. I was the emotional variable. The soft target inside the fortress. And Siroc had photographs going back years, which meant he’d been watching the board long before either of us had moved on it.
You were always part of the game.
I stood at the window of the sitting room, looking at the city below.
I was not a woman who’d been maneuvered.
I was a woman who’d made imperfect, sometimes uninformed, occasionally the wrong decisions—and had arrived somewhere real because of them. My marriage was real. My husband was real. The life I was building in the wreckage of the one I’d planned was genuinely, specifically mine.
Siroc could not take that by mailing me a photograph.
What he’d done instead—what I suspected he had not intended—was remind me exactly how far I’d come.
*****
“I want to be involved,” I told Alexei from the doorway of his study.
There was a pause before he said, “Involved.”
“In whatever you’re doing to move against Siroc. Not as bait, not as a symbol, not as something you’re protecting. As a participant.” I came fully into the room.
Alexei leaned back in his chair and looked at me with an expression that was neither dismissal nor immediate agreement.
“Isla,” he started. “You were part of the former plan because, really, you know how Siroc thinks. But that was when the danger was pretty much contained.”
“I spotted the camera. I told you about the door. I drove the car when you needed me to. I’m not scared of any danger from him.”
He was quiet.
“Siroc wants me isolated,” I continued. “He wants me afraid and sidelined so that I become a liability instead of an asset. That’s the whole point of the photograph.
If I disappear into this house and let you manage everything while I try not to fall apart, he wins that piece of it without firing a shot.
” I put my hands flat on the desk. “So I need to do the opposite.”
The silence stretched. Somewhere in the house, a door opened and closed, and the security feed on the monitor to Alexei’s left cycled through its rotation.
“There are lines,” he said finally. “Boundaries.”
“Draw them. I’ll respect them,” I answered, shrugging.
“You don’t go anywhere without close protection. You don’t communicate externally without it being vetted. Any intelligence you develop, any observation you make, comes to me before it goes anywhere else.” He paused. “These are not negotiable.”
“Agreed.”
A look of recognition was evident in his expression.
“All right,” he said.
“Don’t look so pleased about it,” I drawled jokingly, going over to his chair as he shook his head like the resigned parent of an over-energetic child.
I moved his hand from the table and settled into his lap. He brought his other hand around my waist.
“I know you’re thrilled to be working with me,” I whispered.
His chest vibrated with a short laugh. Then he sighed again, pulling me tighter into him.
*****
We stood on the balcony later, after the briefings were done.
If I were in the game, I would be in it. Not as a piece to be moved. Not as leverage to be applied. As a player. With information, instinct, and months of hard-won understanding of how this world worked and what it asked of the people who survived inside it.
I was in it as a partner.
Siroc had sent that photograph to remind me of who I’d been. The woman in the background of her brother’s story, perpetually cleaning up the wreckage, perpetually one step behind someone else’s disaster.
He’d miscalculated.
Because looking out at the city now, I didn’t see that woman anywhere.
I only saw the woman I’d become.
Alexei’s hand found mine on the railing.
We stood there, and the city blazed, and I was done being afraid of any of it.