Chapter 3
MIA
She woke up to the sound of Biscuit snoring.
"Morning, baby," she murmured into his neck. He grunted without opening his eyes. Classic Biscuit.
She lay there for exactly four seconds before the previous night came back in full.
The kiss.
His hands on her face. Her fists in his coat. The sound he'd made, or was it her sound? She still wasn't sure. The taste of coffee and something darker and the pressure of his mouth and the six inches of muscle she'd felt through his shirt and...
Mia pressed her face into the pillow and made a sound that wasn't dignified.
He kissed me.
She rolled onto her back.
He kissed me and then he told me it shouldn't have happened and then he walked away and closed his bedroom door and I'm in his guest room and my dog is taking up seventy percent of this mattress and I kissed Alexei Almazov last night.
Biscuit opened one eye. Assessed her. Closed it again.
"You're right," she told him. "Panicking helps no one."
She sat up. The clock on the nightstand read 6:47 AM. Alexei would already be awake. Alexei was always awake before the sun, because sleeping in was a moral failing in his world, and she knew this because she'd lived in this penthouse for two years and had never once beaten him to the kitchen.
Which meant he was out there right now. On the other side of that door.
Drinking coffee from the matte black mug he used every morning, standing at the counter because he never sat down for breakfast, reading something on his phone with his sleeves rolled to the forearm and his face set in that expression he wore like armor.
She needed to stop.
She needed to stop, and she needed a plan.
Option one: walk out there, pretend last night didn't happen, be breezy and casual and adult about the whole thing.
Option two: walk out there, bring it up immediately, force him to deal with it.
Option three: stay in this room forever and let Biscuit bring her snacks.
Mia threw the covers off, jolted Biscuit into a grumble, and went to the bathroom.
She brushed her teeth twice. She washed her face.
She rehearsed three different opening lines in the mirror, all of which were terrible, and then she put on the sundress from yesterday because her suitcase was still in the hallway and there was no way she was walking past his bedroom door in a towel.
Actually.
No. Bad Mia. Focus.
She opened the guest room door. Biscuit heaved himself off the bed and followed her, his nails clicking on the marble like a very large, very loyal shadow.
The hallway was long and sun-soaked and silent. His bedroom door was closed. She walked past it without stopping, which she considered a personal victory, and turned the corner into the kitchen.
He was already there.
Not at the counter. At the dining table, which she'd never seen him use for breakfast, dressed in a charcoal suit with no tie, reading something on a tablet.
His coffee sat untouched. His posture was the posture of a man who had been awake for hours and had used every one of those hours to rebuild every wall she'd cracked last night.
His eyes never lifted when she entered.
Mia's heart did something painful and complicated.
Because the refusal to acknowledge her was deliberate.
Alexei noticed everything. He'd once caught her sneaking a stray cat into the penthouse from across the living room with his back turned, because he'd heard the difference in her footstep when she was carrying something.
The idea that he didn't hear her now, didn't register her bare feet on the marble, didn't feel the charge between them, the same electric hum it always carried when they shared a room.
He was pretending.
And the pretending was worse than the closed door. Because the closed door at least acknowledged that something had happened. This silence meant nothing happened. Nothing has changed. You are still my ward and I am still your guardian and this morning is like every other morning.
Fine. He wanted to erase last night. She'd make that impossible.
"Morning." She kept her voice light.
"Good morning."
Two words. Eyes still on the tablet. Voice perfectly level.
She went to the coffee machine. Biscuit padded after her and collapsed in his usual spot by the kitchen island, the one he'd claimed two years ago and apparently still considered his, and the solid thump of his body hitting the floor was the loudest sound in the room.
"He remembers his spot." She glanced at Biscuit. "That's sweet."
Nothing.
"I bet you didn't even move his bowl."
He swiped the tablet screen. "I had no reason to."
Four words. Progress.
She poured her coffee. Added too much milk, the same drowning ratio she'd used since she was sixteen, the same one that had made him shake his head once over his laptop and tell her, without glancing up: That isn't coffee anymore, Mia, that's a warm glass of milk that saw coffee from across the room.
She'd laughed so hard she'd spilled it on his desk, and he'd sighed, and she'd mopped it up with her sleeve, and his mouth had twitched, and she'd spent the next three hours replaying that twitch in her head.
She brought her mug to the dining table and sat down across from him.
His eyes lifted. Finally.
And there it was. The crack behind the composure. She'd been chasing that fracture since she was sixteen, that half-second where the mask slipped and the man underneath the control was visible, and he wasn't calm, and he wasn't indifferent, and the air between them wasn't the same air.
He killed it. He was Alexei Almazov, and killing feelings was his second language.
"I've arranged a meeting with Artem." His voice was clipped, professional. "Regarding the rehabilitation program. If you're serious about the gap year—"
"I'm serious about a lot of things."
She held his gaze. She hadn't meant it to come out loaded, pointed, a shot fired across the breakfast table, but her mouth had always been faster than her brain, and the tightening at the corners of his eyes told her the bullet had hit.
"The program operates out of a clinic adjacent to Ace Royale," he continued, treating her words like they hadn't been spoken. "You'd be working with addictions counselors. The hours are structured. You'd report to Dr. Vasquez."
"Great."
"Artem will explain the confidentiality requirements."
"Sounds good."
"And you'll need to sign a—"
"Alexei."
He stopped.
She set her mug down. Her hands weren't shaking, which surprised her, because her pulse was hammering so hard she could feel it in her wrists.
"Are we going to talk about it?"
His expression didn't change. "About what?"
And the about what hit her like a slap, because it was so perfectly delivered, so flawlessly calibrated to sound like genuine confusion, that if she hadn't been there last night, if she hadn't felt his mouth on hers and his hands in her hair and his heart hammering through his chest, she might have believed it.
"You know what."
"I don't."
"You kissed me."
The words dropped into the room like a grenade. Biscuit's ears perked up. The coffee machine hummed. Somewhere outside, a gull screamed.
His face was stone. "I think you're remembering incorrectly."
Mia's temper, which she'd been holding on a very short leash since she walked in, snapped.
"I'm remembering incorrectly?" She stood up.
The chair scraped the marble. "You had your hands on my face.
You put your fingers in my hair. You kissed me until neither of us could breathe, and then you told me it shouldn't have happened and you walked away, and now you're sitting here with your tablet and your suit telling me I'm remembering incorrectly? "
"Sit down, Mia."
"No."
"Sit. Down."
"Make me."
The air cracked.
He stood up. Not fast. Alexei never moved fast. He moved without hurry, and speed was irrelevant, and he was around the table and in front of her before she had time to take a full inhale.
Close enough that she could smell the cologne.
Close enough that the memory of last night slammed into her so hard her knees almost buckled.
"You are eighteen years old." His voice was a wound held together with wire. "I am your guardian. I have been responsible for you since you were sixteen. Your father asked me to protect you, and I gave him my word, and I won't—"
"My father asked you to take care of me," she corrected, and her voice was shaking now, because the anger had burned through the bravado and what was underneath was the raw thing, the real thing, the thing she'd carried for two years across a continent.
"He didn't ask you to pretend I don't exist. He didn't ask you to send me to a school I didn't choose so you could avoid me for two years.
And he didn't ask you to kiss me like that and then act like it was nothing. "
Something moved behind his eyes. Something that carried the weight of pain.
"It was nothing." His voice didn't waver.
And she knew he was lying. She knew it in her bones, knew it from the same instinct that had always told her things about Alexei he never voiced.
He poured her orange juice before she asked.
He remembered every allergy and every exam date and every stupid story about a stray cat.
His voice changed on the phone when she called, just a fraction, just enough.
"Liar," she whispered.
His eyes darkened.
"You're a liar, Alexei Almazov, and you can stand there in your perfect suit and tell me it was nothing and I won't believe you, because your hands were shaking when you kissed me. I felt them shake."
The silence that followed was the loudest she had ever heard.
His chest rose and fell. His hands were fists at his sides. And his eyes were doing the thing from last night again, where the want broke through the composure for just a second before he buried it.
He stepped back.
"I have a meeting at eight." His voice was mechanical. "Artem will be here at noon for you."
He turned away.