Page 48 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

I was not the woman from the warehouse anymore.

I am Isla Monroe-Golovin, and I have survived things that should have broken me.

If it, whatever it was, was coming for me, it would find me ready.

I took the note out of my pocket. I read it once more, slowly, with the full attention it didn’t deserve. Then I folded it, precisely, along its original crease, and I put it away.

Not forever. But not tonight.

Tonight there was dinner.

Then I could think about Siroc White and what he was up to later.

About how he wasn’t just attacking the Golovins but was testing me.

Chapter Twelve

Alexei

Dan’s call cut my sleep short.

“Boss, it’s happening.”

We knew the raid was going to follow the initial check. We had been aware days ago that Siroc was on to the legal side of our operation. Yet the news wasn’t any less weighty.

I was dressed and in the security room in four minutes.

The feeds were already live—eight screens arranged in the grid that covered the building’s primary systems, and three additional feeds Dan had pulled from the external cameras at our secondary properties. I watched all of them in the first sixty seconds with a systematic sweep, moving left to right, top to bottom.

I spotted federal vehicles at the service entrance. Three unmarked at the Calder Street financial offices. Two more at the warehouse on Industrial Road that functioned as logistics for the casino supply chain and that had, on paper, no connection to any Golovin entity that an investigator should have been able to locate in less than two weeks of dedicated work.

They had located it.

Someone had helped them locate it.

“Warrants,” I said.

Dan set the copies in front of me. I read them with the attention anyone would give to the documents that were going to determine the next seventy-two hours of their operational life. Drug trafficking. Money laundering. Illegal gambling expansion. The specific combination was not designed to be accurate; it was designed to be functional.

The charges didn’t need to be held.

Their effectiveness was in the fact that they existed.

“It’s his shell company,” Dan said. He set a second document beside the warrants—a corporate registry printout, two layers of subsidiary deep, with a red annotation at the bottom that he’d added. “Registered in Delaware eighteen months ago. Dormant until four weeks ago.” He tapped the annotation. “The registered agent is a law firm that has represented White’s interests in three previous Nevada proceedings.”

I set down the warrants.

Eighteen months ago. Siroc had incorporated the shell company eighteen months ago—before the casino confrontation, before the poker room, before Isla. He had been building this mechanism for eighteen months, which meant this was not a response to my marriage. At least, not to it alone. This was a structure he’d been constructing on a separate track, waiting for the right moment to activate it, and he probably had more than one direction or target.

“Get me Volkov,” I said. Our senior legal counsel—a man who billed at a rate that made CFOs wince and who was worth every dollar because he had spent thirty years ensuring that whatever he protected stayed protected. “And Reiss.” The second name was newer, a federal attorney who specialized in the specific intersection of organized crime accusations and civil liberties that produced cases like the one we were currently inside. “And Anya.” My youngest sister was the fresh, young lawyer who gave veterans a run for their money. The experience she lived through, rather than getting it through interning like other lawyers did, was more than an advantage to her.

“Volkov is already in the building,” Dan said. “He was staying on-site.”

I looked at him.

“I had a sense,” Dan explained.

I moved to the next item. “The poker rings.”