Page 40 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

I could see the outline of it. I could decipher that there was something she knew that she hadn’t told me, and it was directly relevant to the threat I was trying to manage. And she was not withholding it out of carelessness.

She was protecting something.

I got up and went to my office to start working.

*****

Dan arrived with coffee he’d made himself. I knew him enough to know that meant the meeting was going to be significant enough that he’d decided not to wait for Mira or any other staff.

“Good morning, boss,” he greeted, sitting across my desk.

“Morning.”

He set his tablet between us and pulled up a display that I looked at for thirty seconds before I looked back at him.

“When did this start?” I said.

“Earliest activity we can confirm is seventy-two hours ago.” He turned the tablet slightly so the network diagram was oriented toward me. “Someone is running a retrospective search on her. They’re pulling historical data, not recent stuff. Pre-Vegas. Older records.”

“Not Siroc?”

“Not Siroc, boss. We discovered a different kind of signature. Different methodology. Siroc’s people are blunt—they make traceable calls, they use intermediaries who are identifiable because they don’t care about being identifiable. This is careful. Someone who knows how to look without leaving a clear record of looking.”

I looked at the network diagram again. The search pattern had a quality I recognized. It was not a sweep but a depth excavation. Whoever this was, they weren’t trying to locate Isla. They already knew where she was. They were looking for something specific in her history, something they believed was there and wanted confirmed.

“Independent of White?” I asked again, probably hoping for a deviation from what I already knew.

“Almost certainly. The timing doesn’t correlate with White’s activity pattern. He’s been quiet since the casino—we think he’s building the legal case I briefed you on last week.” He gestured at the diagram. “This is a different actor.”

A different actor.

A second actor introduced the exact kind of complexity I disliked most, not because complexity was unmanageable, but because it meant the initial assessment had been incomplete. That somewhere in the information I’d assembled, there was a gap I hadn’t identified and someone else was using it.

“The Monroe file,” I said. “The gap before Phoenix.”

“My contact got back to me this morning.” Dan’s jaw moved slightly. “There’s more there than we know. Possibly more than she’s told anyone.” He pulled up a second display. “The name Monroe-Vega shows up in connection with a Phoenix gambling circuit that was shut down six years ago. Not as a player.”

The silence that followed was absolute.

“Could she be running something?” I asked, more to myself.

Dan looked at me steadily. “Do you believe she is, boss?”

I turned to the window.

The honest answer to that question required setting aside what I wanted the answer to be, which was a discipline I had applied without difficulty to every other assessment I’d made in twenty years. But I was finding that unexpectedly hard this morning.

I ran through the evidence. The way she moved through a room. The direction of her questions.

She wasn’t running anything.

She was afraid of something that was running, and she hadn’t told me what it was.

“No,” I said, turning back to Dan. “I want everything. Whatever the contact has, whatever the Phoenix circuit produced, whoever the active associates are. I want it before the end of the week.”

I thought about her in the hallway during the storm, back against the wall, breathing through something she initially refused to call fear even as it moved through her.

“We might need to bring in Kai and Jay. Since what we’re looking for isn’t exactly on the surface. Or, we could—”