Chapter 4
ALEXEI
He made it to the car before his hands stopped shaking.
The underground garage was cold and grey and smelled like concrete and exhaust, and the leather of the steering wheel was smooth under his palms, and he gripped it with both hands and didn't start the engine.
His lungs were still wrong. Uneven. Refusing to obey, which was a problem, because Alexei Almazov's body had always obeyed him.
It was the one machine in his empire that never malfunctioned.
Until her.
He had touched her. He had put his hands on her in his kitchen at seven in the morning with her dog sleeping three feet away and the Monaco sun pouring through the windows. He had touched her and she had come apart in his arms and the sound of his name in her mouth was never going to leave him.
A mistake.
He had stood there with the taste of her skin on his lips and the scent of her hair in his lungs and called it a mistake.
It wasn't a mistake. That was the problem.
A mistake was something you did by accident, something born of carelessness, and nothing about the last ten minutes had been careless.
He had felt her grab his wrist and his body had made the decision his mind had been refusing for two years, and he had turned around and touched her with a deliberateness that made the word mistake a lie.
He'd known exactly what he was doing. Every second of it.
His knuckles were white on the steering wheel.
Joshua Robertson had been forty-one when he died.
Brain tumour. Three months from diagnosis to funeral.
Mia was sixteen and had no one left, and Joshua had gripped Alexei's hand and asked him to take care of his daughter, and Alexei had given his word.
Not because of obligation. Because Joshua and Carol Robertson had done something for his father that no one else in the world had been willing to do, and their daughter deserved better than a system.
She deserved better than this, too.
A thirty-seven-year-old man with blood on his ledger and a dead rival in Saint Petersburg and an empire built on decisions that kept him awake at 3 AM. She deserved someone who hadn't spent twenty-two years turning himself into something cold.
She deserved someone whose hands didn't know the things his knew.
He started the engine.
The problem, the real problem, the one he'd been driving away from for two years, was that none of that mattered to her.
She didn't care about the age or the blood or the empire.
She cared about him. The actual him, the one who poured her orange juice before she asked and remembered her allergies and listened to her voicemails on the plane where no one could see his face.
She saw him. She'd always seen him.
And this morning, in his kitchen, with her back against the counter and her fingers in his shirt, she'd been right about every word.
His phone buzzed.
He shouldn't check it. He was driving. He was on the ramp between the garage and the motorway, and the Monaco traffic required attention, and he was a man who didn't check his phone while driving because discipline was the architecture of his entire life.
He checked it.
One message. From Mia.
Your hands were shaking. That wasn't a mistake and you know it.
His foot hit the brake. The car stopped in the middle of the ramp. A horn blared behind him. He didn't hear it.
He read it twice. Three times. The words were simple and merciless, because Mia Robertson had never learned to pull her punches, and the worst part, the part that made his chest crack open right there in a concrete ramp with a Fiat screaming past him, was that she was right.
His hands had been shaking. It wasn't a mistake. He knew it.
He sat there for ten seconds. Fifteen. He was typing before he could stop himself.
I know.
He hit Send. Pulled the car into gear. Drove.
Two words. The most dangerous two words he'd ever typed, because I know wasn't a denial. It wasn't a wall. It was a door left open, and Mia Robertson was a girl who walked through every door he failed to lock.
He tightened his grip on the wheel and drove to Ace Royale and didn't let himself think about what he'd just done.
It didn't work.
MIA
The clinic was nothing like she expected.
She had imagined something sterile. White walls, fluorescent lights, a reception desk with pamphlets about addiction and a woman who spoke in the soothing, practised tones of someone trained to handle fragile people.
Something clinical. Something that whispered: This is a place where broken things get fixed.
Instead, the space adjacent to Ace Royale was warm and wood-panelled and smelled like fresh coffee and old books.
The chairs in the waiting room were leather, not plastic.
The art on the walls was abstract but expensive, the sort you found in Monaco penthouses, not government offices.
And the woman behind the front desk, who introduced herself as Dr. Vasquez, was small and dark-haired and sharp-eyed and wore heels that Mia could never have walked in without injuring herself and at least two bystanders.
"Mia Robertson?" Dr. Vasquez's handshake was firm. "Artem briefed me. You're starting in intake."
"Yes. I think so. I mean, he told me I'd be doing intake, but if that's changed, that's totally fine, I can do whatever you need, I'm very flexible, I once volunteered at a dog shelter and they put me in the cat wing and I didn't even complain—"
Dr. Vasquez's mouth twitched. "Intake is fine."
"Great. Amazing. I'll stop talking now."
"Don't worry about it." Dr. Vasquez's expression softened, just a fraction. "Artem mentioned you talk when you're nervous."
Fantastic. So Artem had warned everyone.
"I talk when I'm calm, too," Mia offered. "It's a full-time condition."
Dr. Vasquez gave her what might have been a smile and led her through the clinic.
It was bigger than it appeared from the entrance.
A corridor opened into a series of consultation rooms, each one designed like a living room rather than an office.
There was a small kitchen with a coffee station that put Whitmore to shame.
A courtyard with a fountain that caught the sun.
And everywhere, the hum of the casino on the other side of the wall, distant and muffled but present, like a heartbeat.
"We see between ten and fifteen clients a day," Dr. Vasquez explained, walking fast enough that Mia had to half-jog to keep up.
"Most are self-referred. Some are brought in by family.
Your job in intake is paperwork, initial assessment, and making people feel like this isn't the worst decision they've ever made. Can you do that?"
"I'm very good at making people feel like things aren't as bad as they think."
"Even when they are?"
Mia considered this. "Especially when they are."
Dr. Vasquez glanced at her. Something in the expression read maybe this will work, and Mia's chest loosened by a fraction.
The morning passed in a blur of forms and systems and learning which consultation room had the sticky door handle and which coffee machine worked and which one made a sound like a dying animal when you pressed the espresso button.
She met two counsellors, both kind and overworked.
She filed nine intake forms. She spilled coffee on one of them, which she cleaned up before anyone noticed.
And she checked her phone eleven times.
I know.
That was it. That was all he'd given her. Two words, no punctuation, no follow-up, no indication of whether I know meant I know and I'm coming back or I know and it changes nothing or I know and I'm currently driving my car into the sea because you've broken my entire operating system.
Twelve times. She checked it twelve times.
On the thirteenth check, she put the phone in her desk drawer and closed it with more force than was strictly necessary.
Focus, Mia. You have a job. You have responsibilities. You are a professional adult who doesn't refresh her text messages like a fourteen-year-old waiting for a boy to—
She opened the drawer. Checked. Nothing.
She closed it again.
It was just after lunch when he walked in.
Not Alexei. Someone else. Someone she had never seen before.
He was tall and blond, with blue eyes and a face that belonged on a cologne advertisement.
His clothes were expensive in a manner that announced the money had been there long enough to stop being interesting.
He moved through the clinic entrance with the easy confidence of someone who was used to being welcome everywhere he went.
"Hi." He stopped at her desk. His smile was warm. Disarming. "I'm told this is where I come if the casino is becoming a problem."
Mia blinked. It was the most self-aware opening line any client had given her all morning, and she'd been doing this for approximately four hours.
"You're in the right place." She pulled an intake form toward her. "I'll need some details. First name?"
"Morgan."
"Last name?"
"Is that strictly necessary?" His smile widened, engineered to make you trust the person wearing it. Warm without being pushy. Open without being desperate. "I'd rather not have my family's name on a gambling addiction form. You understand."
She did understand. Monaco was a small place, and the people who came to Ace Royale were the sort whose surnames made headlines. "We can start with first name only. I'll need it eventually, but there's no rush."
"Morgan, then." He sat down across from her. His posture was relaxed. His hands rested on the arms of the chair, and his fingers were long and clean and perfectly still. "And you are?"
"Mia. I'm new. As of this morning. So if I do anything wrong, that's why, and I apologise in advance."
He laughed. It was an easy sound, natural and generous, and she found herself smiling back. "I doubt you'll do anything wrong, Mia."
"You don't know me yet. Give it time."