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She stepped inside already mid-motion, exhausted in a way that went beyond physical tiredness. Her hair had come loose from whatever she’d pinned it back with that morning. Her hands were shaking even before she’d realized I was there.

She dropped her bag by the door, reached for the light switch, and froze the instant the room lit up and she saw me sitting on her couch.

I expected fear or lies or denial.

Instead, her face crumpled entirely, and she started to cry. Her whole body shook with it, one hand pressed hard over her mouth like she was trying to physically hold the sound in, and the rawness of it hit me somewhere I hadn’t anticipated.

“Nikolai—” Her voice broke completely on my name.

Every instinct told me to stay exactly where I was, to let her fall apart without moving an inch toward her, to use the moment to extract whatever truth she’d clearly been keeping from me. But I crossed the room and pulled her against my chest, and she came apart entirely the second my arms closed around her.

She apologized into my shirt in half-formed sentences that barely held together. The exposés. The lies. The night in my office, the night in my penthouse, every deliberate move she’d made to get close enough to destroy me. I stood there holding her through all of it, my jaw tight, my body still fighting the anger even while my hands refused to let go of her.

“I need to explain it all to you. Please, let me, Nikolai,” she pleaded, once her breathing had steadied enough to manage words, my hand still resting at the small of her back. “All of it. From the beginning.”

I led her to the couch, and she sat. I sank down beside her.

“My brother, his name was Mateo. He was a fighter. He… he was talented. Four years ago, he just…” She paused, her lips quivering before she sniffled and then went on. “He disappeared. Without explanation, without a body, without anything but silence from a police department that stopped returning my calls within the first six months. I’ve spent every year since convinced your family had taken him, that you had specifically made him disappear in your fight club. I built my entire adult life around proving it. Every article I’d released with the research I did undercover at your casino was part of a revenge plot. I… I didn’t know, until tonight, that I…” Her chest heaved, and I knew she was trying hard to keep her tears at bay. “I didn’t know I had it all wrong. I just learned that Sylvester Graham might be the real culprit. Earlier today, when an FBI agent came here, dangling Mateo’s file like bait… that was when I began to see my theory might not be watertight. I was wrong. So wrong.”

By the time she finished, the anger hadn’t disappeared. It had simply stopped being the only thing I felt.

“Graham,” I said, once she’d gone quiet, “has spent the better part of a decade building exactly the kind of operation your source described. Kidnapped fighters. Forced matches. A trafficking pipeline hidden behind casino fronts and celebrity money that makes his operation look legitimate from every angle to regulators. I’ve spent nearly as long trying to dismantle it. Quietly. Because Graham’s chaos threatens my business as much as it threatens the men he takes.”

“You didn’t kill Mateo.”

“No,” I said it plainly. “I’ve never run trafficking. I’ve spent considerable resources trying to stop the man who does.”

She was quiet for a long moment, processing years of certainty collapsing in real time, her hands twisting together in her lap. “Could… could he still be alive?”

I didn’t answer immediately, because I refused to give her false comfort. “I don’t know. I won’t promise you something I can’t guarantee.” I held her gaze. “But I’ll find out. I have resources no FBI agent has access to, and I intend to use every one of them.”

The promise immediately felt and sounded like something more personal than I’d intended it to be. Watching her carry years of misdirected grief, watching the guilt of tonight compound on top of it until she looked like she might genuinely break apart under the weight of both, I found the need to protect her outweighing every ounce of anger I’d been nursing since I’d seen her laptop.

“Your investigative work,” I started, “the exposés you built against me. That skill doesn’t have to stay pointed in the wrong direction.”

She looked up, some of the exhaustion clearing from her face as she followed where I was heading.

“Graham hides behind entertainment fronts and celebrity influence the FBI has never managed to penetrate,” I continued. “You have the instincts to build a public case piece by piece, the way you built one against me. I have the intelligence network, the names, and the financial trails federal agents have spent years failing to access.” I paused for two seconds before I went on. “Together, we can take him apart. Publicly. Legally, on your end. Quietly, on mine.”

“You’d trust me with that? I mean… after everything?”

“Not entirely. Not yet,” I answered honestly. I watched something flicker across her face. “But I trust the reason behind what you did more than I trust most people’s motives in this city, and that’s a considerably higher bar than you’d think. Grief, I understand. I’d have handled greed or sheer ambition very differently.”

She studied me with a fragile look that felt like hope. That, I liked better at least.

“Okay,” she said finally. “Tell me where to start.” Her voice was steadier, the tremor from earlier mostly gone, replaced by something that sounded almost like the woman I’d found in my office that night.

I stayed the rest of that night working through the task at hand with her, mapping which threads to pull first, which fronts to investigate publicly and which required the kind of quiet pressure only I could apply. She took notes in a notebook she’d pulled from a drawer. She stopped long enough to make coffee for both of us, setting a mug down in front of me without asking if I wanted one, with the same easy certainty she’d shown when agreeing to come home with me the first night, except this time it felt like something closer to truth.

We worked through names I’d been quietly compiling for years, entertainment properties Graham used to launder both money and fighters, dates that might line up with whatever Mateo’s disappearance had actually looked like from the inside of that network. She asked sharp questions, the kind that told me exactly why her exposés had done as much damage as they had, and more than once I found myself answering more openly than I’d planned to, simply because the questions deserved better than a guarded response.

By the time the sky outside her window began creeping toward dawn, we’d created the outline of something neither of us could have imagined a week earlier—an alliance built on the wreckage of betrayal, fragile enough that either one of us could still shatter it with a single wrong move, and valuable enough that neither of us seemed inclined to be the one who did.

The woman who had nearly destroyed everything I’d built now sat poised to become the one person standing beside me in a war considerably larger than the one she’d started.

I found I didn’t mind the reversal one bit.

Chapter Fifteen