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He straightened his jacket slowly, the same way he must have done a thousand times before walking out of rooms he no longer had any use for. Then he looked at me one final time with an expression I’d never seen from him before and hoped never to see again, and left.

There was no slammed door, no raised voice, nothing dramatic enough to give me anything to push back against. It was just the quiet click of my apartment door closing behind him—the same sound I remembered from his office the night this had all started, except this time it felt like the end of something instead of the beginning.

I stood frozen in the middle of the room long after his footsteps had faded down the hall, my laptop still glowing on the counter, the exposé already halfway to my editor’s desk and completely beyond recall.

He didn’t look at me with suspicion or curiosity but with something far colder. He looked at me like he was deciding exactly what to do about a betrayal he now understood. A betrayal that felt like I did it to him personally.

I stood there long enough that my legs finally gave out and I sank onto the edge of the couch, my hands pressed flat against my knees to keep them from shaking, staring at the door he’d walked through like it might somehow reopen and give me a chance to say something different.

It didn’t. The hallway outside stayed silent. My apartment felt smaller than it had an hour ago, every sound from the street below suddenly loud enough to make me flinch.

All this time I’d told myself I understood exactly how dangerous Nikolai Golovin was. Standing alone in my apartment with his silence still echoing louder than any shout could have, I finally understood that I hadn’t understood anything at all.

Chapter Ten

Nikolai

By 7 am, three network affiliates had already run segments on the story, each one more breathless than the last. My phone hadn’t stopped ringing since then. My lawyers called first, then two business partners who’d invested heavily enough in the fight circuit to feel the ground shifting under them personally, then a state senator’s office demanding to know exactly how much his aide’s name had been connected to any of it. Somewhere in the middle of it, one of my club’s smaller rivals called, ostensibly to offer condolences on the difficult week, though I recognized the sound of a vulture circling closer than he’d dared come in years.

I answered every call the same way—flat, controlled, giving nothing away that could be repeated back to a reporter or a grand jury. Inside, something considerably less controlled had been building since the moment I’d seen my own accounts laid out on Camila’s kitchen counter.

The morning activities passed with brutal efficiency. Lawyers dispatched to three separate jurisdictions before the sun had risen. Paper trails I’d built over years unwound just as carefully as I’d assembled them, routed through channels that would take federal auditors months to trace even with a warrant. Yuri moved through the casino like a man defusing something live, pulling records, silencing whichever employees had talked to reporters even peripherally, making sure nothing else leaked while the first wound was still bleeding. A few hours later, three of the exposed shell accounts had already been closed and their remaining balances scattered across accounts that had never been connected to Nevada soil.

Every decision I made that morning was sharp and precise, with the discipline that had kept me ahead of every threat for decades. Underneath it, something else ran hot—a fury I hadn’t let surface since I was young enough not to know better.

She had been in my home. She had slept in my bed and memorized my account structures. And I had spent the following days chasing her attention across the casino floor like a man half my age.

I replayed every interaction on a loop I couldn’t stop. Her lie delivered without a tremor that first night in my office. The surveillance that had turned up nothing because she’d built her cover too well for even careful men to crack. The ease with which she’d agreed to come home with me, like the decision cost her nothing. Even back in the hallway, the way she’d grabbed my jacket like an impulse rather than a calculation—I’d read that moment as genuine. I still wasn’t certain it hadn’t been.

I had built a career on reading people faster and more accurately than anyone else in this business. Men twice my age with decades more experience had underestimated me and paid for it. I did not miss things. I did not let instinct override the skill of knowing exactly what a person wanted from me before they knew it themselves.

Camila Alvarez had walked past every safeguard I possessed.

The humiliation of that sat under the anger, quieter but even more corrosive. I’d built my entire reputation on exactly the kind of perception she’d exploited, and now every man in this building who read a newspaper this morning would eventually wonder how anyone had managed what federal investigators hadn’t in years.

*****

Special Agent Ethan Hayes arrived just past noon, with his FBI badge out as he crossed the lobby. He requested a few minutes of my time with the fake politeness federal agents use when they wanted something to appear voluntary. I received him in my office because refusing was a weakness.

He sat across from my desk before I asked him to, glancing around and smiling like he already knew more than he did. He looked younger than I’d expected for a man with his reputation and had the kind of confidence that came from winning often enough to stop worrying about the times he didn’t.

“Quite a morning for you,” he commented, sitting back.

“Quite a morning for several people, from what I understand.” I kept my voice even, in the tone I used with regulators who wanted to feel important before they eventually went home empty-handed.

“You’ve seen the coverage.”

“I’ve seen a great deal of speculation dressed up as journalism, Agent Hayes.” I folded my hands on the desk, meeting his eyes without blinking. “If you have something specific to ask me, I’m happy to answer it. Otherwise, I have a business to run.”

He studied me for a moment before saying, “The articles are compelling. Detailed. More detailed than anything a reporter can get without a direct source inside the operation.” He let that sit. “The problem is, compelling isn’t the same as prosecutable. No cooperating witness. No direct financial link we can put in front of a judge. Just numbers and allegations that’ll take my office the better part of a year to verify, assuming they hold up at all.”

“Then I imagine you’ll be verifying for quite some time.”

“You’re very confident for a man whose name just got attached to federal wire fraud in three different newspapers.”

“I’m confident because I’ve spent years making sure confidence is warranted.” I let the silence sit exactly as long as it needed to. “You won’t find what you’re looking for, Agent Hayes. You’ll never get close enough to prove it in a way that survives appeal.”

He nodded slowly, clearly unbothered by the answer. He’d heard the same line from smarter men who’d all eventually lost. “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe someone finally hands us what we’ve been missing all these years. It happens more than you’d think. People close to men like you get tired eventually.”