Page 85 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

The idea for the leak came from an unlikely direction.

Mikhail had been reviewing the incident reports from the cottage ambush—specifically the spacing error I'd identified in the shooter placement, the absent fourth man on the right flank—and he'd said, almost offhandedly, that the mistake read like an execution problem rather than a planning problem.

“Whoever had designed the ambush had known what they were doing; the failure had happened somewhere between the blueprint and the men on the ground,” he’d explained.

"You’re right, sir. He's compartmentalizing too tightly,” Dan had agreed. "His planners don't trust his operators with the full picture."

I'd put my coffee down.

If Siroc's people were executing with incomplete information—if they were being given enough to act but not enough to adapt—then a controlled leak wasn't just viable. It was almost too easy. We didn't need to fool Siroc. We only needed to fool the layer below him, the people receiving filtered intelligence and acting on it without the context to recognize the filter.

I spent two days designing the leak carefully. The cover was a high-stakes underground poker summit—a genuine recurring event in the Vegas ecosystem, well-documented enough in certain circles to be credible, visible enough to be tempting, exclusive enough that Siroc's people would understand the symbolism of disrupting it. This was more than an upgrade from the canceled plan.

It would be a room full of elite players and obscene money. The kind of event whose violation would generate a public, humiliating damage to Golovin credibility that a cornered man would find irresistible.

The false information moved through a channel I'd identified as compromised three weeks ago—a low-level logistics coordinator who'd been quietly feeding information to Siroc's network without sufficient awareness that I knew he was doing it. I'd kept him in place specifically for this purpose. A double channel, allowed to function until the moment I needed it to carry something specific.

He carried it.

The machinery was in place. The bait was taken. The only remaining variable was the timing of Siroc's move, which I estimated at 48 to 72 hours from the moment the false information reached his planning layer.

I was, in the most precise sense, ready.

I did not tell Isla all of it.

It was a decision I made deliberately, with full awareness of what it cost, which was different from the decisions I'd made earlier in our marriage when I'd withheld information from her by reflex.

This was different. I knew what I was doing, and I knew why.

She'd asked to be a partner. I'd agreed, and I'd meant it. She knew Siroc was cornered. She knew something was coming.

What she didn't know was the specific timeline or the specific bait because she'd carried enough anticipation. She'd earned the right not to carry this particular weight for the hours before I intended to end it.

I told myself this, and I believed it. Still, it sat uneasily in my chest because she'd know I was withholding something and that would create a distance I'd have to account for.

It was a price I'd decided to pay.

She would find the distance anyway.

She always did.

*****

We were at dinner, which had become a deliberate ritual of mine, one of the ways I'd structured normalcy into the operational tempo of the past weeks. She looked at me with searching eyes.

"You're somewhere else tonight."

"I'm here."

"Your body is here." She picked up her wine. "Where are you actually?"

I looked at her.

"Thinking through a problem," I said.

"The problem we've been working on."

"Yes."