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My apartment was small enough that I could stand in the kitchen and touch both counters if I stretched my arms out, but it was mine, and it was quiet in a way the casino never was. I peeled off the dress, pulled on an old t-shirt of Mateo’s that had gone soft and thin with age, and sat cross-legged on my bed with my laptop balanced on a pillow.

I typed until my shoulders ached.

The article wasn’t finished—it might never feel finished the way I wanted it to—but I laid it out the way I’d taught myself over the years: facts first, sourced and dated, nothing that could be traced back to a name or a face on that casino floor. I hinted at financial irregularities in the Golovin books and at cash flows that didn’t match the numbers filed with the state gaming commission. I didn’t write about the fighter with the split lip or any of my other suspicions yet. Those stories needed more before I could risk it.

Before hitting send, I ran the file through the encryption program, routing it through a fake email account and watching the little confirmation icon spin until it disappeared. The editor would publish it under a byline that wasn’t mine, and Nikolai’s ‘castle’ would have one more small crack spread through its foundation.

I pulled up an old news clip out of habit, one I’d bookmarked months ago. It was about federal scrutiny tightening around Golovin-linked properties, the reporters using careful language like “alleged” and “under review,” the kind of language that meant someone was finally paying attention. I felt something loosen in my chest while reading it. I couldn’t call it a victory. It was just the satisfaction of watching a wall crack instead of just hoping it would.

The adrenaline abated, just as it always did once the file was sent, and the confidence drained out of me. I was once again just a tired woman in a small apartment, sitting with her knees pulled to her chest.

I reached under my bed for the shoebox.

I didn’t open it every night. Some nights I didn’t have the stomach for it. But tonight my hands went to it anyway, lifting the lid off a box that held everything I had left of my brother—a watch that didn’t work anymore, a movie ticket stub, and a folded letter I’d read so many times the creases had gone as soft as fabric. The photograph at the bottom.

Mateo’s arm was slung around my shoulders, both of us squinting against the sun outside our mother’s old apartment building. He was laughing at something out of frame. I couldn’t even remember what.

I traced the edge of the photo with my thumb the way I always did, like I could smooth away the years since he’d disappeared into the violence that had made him vanish from my life without so much as a goodbye. The police file had gone cold within a year, but my own digging had led me—slowly and carefully—to the Golovin name.

I didn’t have irrefutable proof. But I had years of notebooks, a growing file of financial irregularities, and a promise I made more nights than I wanted to admit.

“I’m getting closer,” I whispered. “I’m not going to stop. I’ll destroy him just like he destroyed our lives, Mateo.”

Outside my window, the Strip burned neon against a sky too polluted with light to show any stars. I put the photograph back in the box, closed the lid, and told myself Nikolai wouldn’t know what hit him. That I was the hunter.

I had no way of knowing yet how wrong I was.

Chapter Two

Nikolai

By 4 a.m., I was already standing at the window in my white vest, watching the parking structure lights blink off one by one as the timers caught up with the impending sunrise. I didn’t try to go back to sleep. There was no point. I hadn’t been able to since I was just a boy listening through a wall while my father and his brother shouted at men who wouldn’t dare shout back. I dressed instead, putting on my pressed white shirt and cufflinks.

Two hours later, I was at my desk with the blinds half-drawn and a coffee cooling at my elbow. On my computer screen, there were three separate spreadsheets open and cross-referenced against each other until the numbers lined up exactly the way I needed them to. I ran the same column through twice, checking it against a fourth document nobody else had access to. It was good. I closed the laptop lid, then opened it again and ran the column a third time anyway.

Yuri didn’t knock. He never did. I heard the door, his weight as he walked across the floor, and still didn’t look up until I’d finished the line in front of me.

“Good morning, boss,” he greeted.

“Morning, Yuri.” I blinked up at him, noting immediately that all was not well. He’d been my right-hand man for several years, and he looked exactly the way he looked when he had unpleasant news to share—especially if it could not be ended with violence.

He set the newspaper down on my table.

The front page carried a photograph I couldn’t care less about. Under it, however, in dense black type, was a breakdown of exactly which shell corporations had moved money through accounts over the last few months.

I picked it up and read it, then set it down. I picked it up and read it again, my thumb pressed flat against the paragraph that named a numbered account I’d personally opened under a dead man’s Social Security number four years ago.

“Two of the shells got flagged for audit yesterday,” Yuri said. He was pacing, three steps one way, three steps back, the way he did when he wanted to hit something and had nowhere to put the energy. “Guy at the Meridian says Kessler’s people are already circling. They think we’re weak enough to make a play for the fight circuit.”

I turned the page over to look at the byline. There wasn’t one.

“How many times has this paper run something on us?”

“Six pieces, though not all of them were primarily about us. Eight months. Same anonymous byline, same paper, every time.”

I set the newspaper flat on the desk and smoothed it with my palm the way I’d smooth a napkin before a meal I had no appetite for. Someone had done the math on exactly how much damage kept us reeling without killing us outright, and they’d done it correctly every single time. My jaw tightened.

“Find them,” I said.