Then, a woman’s voice, deliberate. Sharp. Russian.
“Hello, Isabella. I am Irina Mikhailova.”
My body goes cold.
The table. The café. Elena. All of it falls away in an instant.
The name clicks. First like a knock. Then like a bomb.
Irina.
My brain takes a second to catch up. Because I’ve heard it before—whispered, referenced, avoided like a curse word no one wants to say out loud.
Konstantin’s wife.
Correction—I’m Konstantin’s wife.
She’s the ex. The ghost. The one who vanished.
The one no one talks about.
Until now.
I hold my breath,
“I want to meet,” she says. “But you must not tell Konstantin. If you do…”
A pause.
A beat of static.
Then—
“Your siblings. Julian. Lila. I know where they are.”
The words hit like a bullet to the chest.
“Understand,devushka? You say one word to him… and you won’t have a family left to protect.”
The line goes dead.
And I sit there, frozen, the phone still in my hand, the world still pretending everything’s normal—lattes foaming, forks scraping plates, someone laughing too loud two tables over—
While my entire body screams.
38
Konstantin
The private lounge is thick with cigar smoke and quiet tension. Manhattan glints through floor-to-ceiling windows behind me, its skyline cold and jagged in the evening dark, like a city built from scalpels. We’re thirty-five floors up at The Apex, a place where men like Richard Alcott pretend they still matter.
He signs. Tries not to look shaken. Fails.
“Just like that? One-point-three billion?” Marcus Whitley’s voice carries the affected casualness of old money. He taps his Mont Blanc pen against the contract’s final page while his eyes scan the zeroes.
“Just like that,” I confirm, my tone flat.
Whitley is fifty-something, spray-tanned to the color of weak coffee, with a hairline that’s been surgically dragged back into position. The desperation in his eyes costs nothing—it’s the free gift that comes with making bad decisions.
