“Strategy,” Alexei said. “Not romance. The distinction matters for the documentation, but practically, Cruz’s people stop looking. She stops being a variable. She becomes—” he appeared to consider— “a constant. With all the protection that implies.”
I said nothing.
“It would need to be real,” Mikhail said, facing me. “Registered. Public enough to matter, quiet enough not to invite the wrong kind of question.”
“It would need to be soon,” Alexei said. “Given the timeline.”
“She won’t agree,” I said.
“No,” Alexei agreed coolly. “She likely won’t.” He looked at me with those pale, analytical eyes. “Which is why it’s your problem rather than mine.”
*****
They left forty minutes later. I stayed.
The monitors ran. I turned the VIP feed back on, but the floor was in its post-close mode—staff clearing, lighting shifting, the casino returning to its skeleton state. Sofia was gone. Clocked out, per the system.
I thought about what Alexei had offered.
The logic was sound. Not that I would have expected otherwise from Alexei, whose logic was always sound, who had identified the cleanest solution with ease. In Bratva law, a wife was protected. A wife was an extension, affiliation, and declaration. Sofia Reyes, as a free civilian, was a problem that compounded daily. Sofia Reyes as Viktor Golovin’s wife was a problem that resolved—for Cruz, for the rival faction, for the operational exposure she represented.
The cage would also be a shelter.
I mulled over that for a long time. The cage and the shelter were the same structure, entered from different sides. Ihad spent days telling myself that what I was building around her was an operational necessity. That the surveillance and the perimeter and the careful, comprehensive architecture of her protection was a strategy. It was the management of a variable that couldn’t be eliminated by other means.
I was finished telling myself that.
She challenged me. Not because she was naïve—Sofia Reyes was not naïve, she had the specific, undeceived knowledge of someone who had learned exactly what the world was and chosen to continue anyway. She challenged me because she looked at me with those dark eyes and refused to shrink when most people would have, refused to step back when the obvious wisdom was to step back, pushed her palm against my chest in a dim corridor, and looked at me afterward with an expression that was furious and anything but afraid.
I wanted her close.
That was the truth, assembled from its parts and stated plainly. I wanted her where I could see her, not because she was a variable, not because Cruz was looking for her, not because Mikhail had given me latitude that was running out. I wanted her close because the alternative was her being elsewhere.
Alexei had said it, but it was a conclusion I would have arrived at if I were being honest.
The decision had been building since the corridor. Since the footage. Since those words on a piece of paper told me the timeline had collapsed and the margin for deliberation was gone.
Cruz is asking about the dark-haired waitress. Golovin floor staff.
She would hate it. She would look at me with that fury she wore like a second uniform and tell me she had never belonged to anyone and never would.
It would also mean that Cruz’s people could not touch her. That the rival faction’s interest in the dark-haired waitress from the Golovin floor would become a declaration of war if acted upon. That Sofia Reyes would be, by every structural measure that mattered in the world we moved through, safe.
Safe, furious, and close enough that I would stop waking at 5 am with the particular restlessness of a man who cannot account for where all his attention has gone.
Sofia Reyes was going to receive an offer she would hate with everything she had. She was going to look at me with those dark eyes and tell me exactly what she thought of me and the offer.
And she was going to accept.
I prepared for that conversation with the same attention I gave to everything that mattered. Which told me, if nothing else had, everything I needed to know about how much this did.
Chapter Seven
Sofia
The summons came through Marco, which was clearly deliberate.
A note, handwritten, was delivered to me between tables. It read:
