"I told you." I lean back in my chair, keeping my posture deliberately relaxed. "Everyone who works for this family gets vetted. Thoroughly."
"Vetted." She laughs, but there's no humor in it. "That's a polite word for digging through someone's personal life."
"It's not personal. It's standard procedure."
"It feels pretty damn personal from where I'm sitting." She sets the whiskey down on the coffee table. Hard. Amber liquid sloshes against the crystal. "My finances, my debt, my ex-husband—that's my business, Nico. Not yours."
She's not wrong. And I don't give a shit.
"You work in my family's home. Around my brothers, my sister, my brother's wife. You think I'm going to let someonewalk through those doors without knowing exactly who they are?"
She wants to argue. I can see the fight building behind her eyes. But she's smart enough to know she can't win this one.
"Fine." She exhales, deflating slightly. "Fine. So you know about the loan. You know Jack put it in my name because he couldn't qualify himself. He'd taken one out years ago to help his family and his credit was shot."
I process her words. Turn them over in my mind like puzzle pieces that don't quite fit.
She thinks the loan came from a bank.
Kristen Thomas is not a stupid woman. I've watched her navigate this house for days. She reads people better than most soldiers I've worked with. She sees through bullshit faster than I do sometimes.
But Jack Walker spent years apparently conditioning her to accept whatever story he fed her without looking too closely.
That's what abusers do. They don't just control your body. They control your reality.
"Lily needed the surgery," she continues, staring at a point somewhere over my shoulder. "Her heart condition—the doctors said if we waited, it could be fatal. We didn't have the money. Insurance covered some of it, but there was still this gap, and Jack said he knew someone at a bank who could push through an approval fast."
She pauses. Swallows.
"I didn't ask questions. I should have. I know I should have. But Lily was in the hospital and the doctors were talking about survival rates and I just—" Her voice cracks. "I signed whatever he put in front of me."
The rage that builds in my chest is slow. Quiet. The dangerous kind.
Jack Walker didn't just steal from his wife. He used their daughter's life as leverage. Used Kristen's terror to make her compliant. Made her sign documents while she was too scared to think straight.
I've done a lot of dark things in my life. But this? This is a special kind of evil.
"Kristen." I keep my voice level. Controlled. "The loan wasn't from a bank."
She blinks. "What?"
"The money Jack borrowed. It didn't come from any bank."
"That's—" She laughs again, but this time it sounds brittle. Nervous. "That's ridiculous. Of course it came from a bank. I saw the paperwork. There were logos and account numbers and?—"
"Paperwork can be faked."
"You're wrong." She shakes her head. "Your information is wrong. I don't know who you hired to dig through my life, but they made a mistake. It was twenty thousand dollars from First National?—"
"It was a hundred thousand dollars." The words land like bullets. "From the Bratva."
Silence.
Kristen stares at me. Her face cycles through emotions I can't name—confusion, disbelief, the first sharp edge of fear.
Then she laughs.
"The Bratva." She says the word like it's a punchline. "You mean the Russian mafia? You're telling me my ex-husband borrowed money from the Russian mob?"
