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He stepped back first. That surprised me more than anything else.

“Get back to the floor,” he said, his tone quiet and final.

Then he turned toward the chair on the right like I’d already stopped existing.

I didn’t run. I made myself walk, tray still balanced, spine straight, until the door shut behind me and the hallway swallowed me whole. Only then did my hands start shaking again, and this time I let them.

*****

I sat on the edge of my bed still in my uniform, scrolling through the photographs my heart hadn’t caught up with yet. Names. Dates. Transfers. Everything except the one page that mattered—the account numbers themselves.

Not enough.

Four months, and it still wasn’t enough to publish.

I pressed my palms against my eyes and tried to breathe calmly. But my mind kept going over the way his hands had moved over me like I was a door he was checking for locks. The way I hadn’t wanted him to stop.

I hated him. But hatred had never made my pulse do that before. I just knew that it scared me more than any of the other men, with their scotch and money that bought silence.

He knew something was wrong now. I’d seen it in the way he’d looked at me before he let me go. He looked at me like I was a loose thread he wanted to pull. Of course, he didn’t believe what I said.

For the first time since I’d started this, I didn’t know if I was still the one in control of it.

Chapter Four

Nikolai

The fight ended the way I’d planned it—the underdog took it in the fourth round, the senator’s aide walked out three hundred thousand dollars richer and loud about it, and Yuri’s men swept the cash into duffel bags before the crowd had finished filing toward the elevators. Investors shook my hand on their way out, already talking about next month’s match, forgetting the blood on the canvas the second the doors closed behind them. By any measure that mattered on my ledgers, the night was a success.

It didn’t feel like one.

I stood at my window long after the last car pulled out of the private garage below, turning a pen over in my fingers, running the same ninety seconds through my head on a loop I couldn’t seem to switch off.

A waitress in my office. A lie delivered smoothly enough that I’d almost believed it. I set the pen down, picked it back up, then set it down again. The gesture had no purpose. I did it anyway, three more times, before I realized and stopped.

Most people, standing where she’d stood with my hand on her wrist, went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with courage. Their pulse spiked, their eyes dropped, and their whole body folded inward, waiting to be told how frightened to be. She had lifted her chin and dared me to call security.

That was something else entirely.

*****

I had Yuri look into her the next morning. A full workup—employment records, financials, known associates; everything. He brought the file to my desk himself instead of sending it through the usual channel, which told me before I’d read a single word that there was nothing in it worth noting.

“Cocktail waitress, two years in Las Vegas,” he said, dropping into the chair across from me without being asked. “Before that, a diner in Reno. No priors. Bank account’s thin—rent, groceries, the usual. Nothing that says reporter. Nothing that says Fed.”

I read it myself anyway. Her employment history was clean. Rent was paid on time, mostly. She had a gym membership she rarely used, judging by the charges. Friendships with three women from the casino floor, one of them close enough to warrant its own line in the file: Valentina Cruz Golovin.

I looked up. “Dmitri’s wife.”

“Yes, boss.” Yuri didn’t like where this was going any more than I did. “They’ve been close for a while. Val vouches for her, apparently. Not that we asked.”

“We will.”

*****

I joined Valentina in Dmitri’s living room two days later. She was curled into the corner of the couch with a mug of tea beside her and a laptop open to something she closed the second she saw me in the doorway. She smiled the way she always did when she saw me. I lifted my chin in response as I walked in.

A stack of baby name books sat on the side table, one of them dog-eared halfway through. I raised a brow at her, and she grinned.